"It wasn't so much of an incident, only it was the last. After he left I began to shiver and sob, and I crept to the window and closed it. I thought he had killed him, but of course he hadn't. It was winter, and the snow was deep in the area. He dragged the man up the steps, held him by the collar against the railing, and brushed him and laughed. Then he took him away, holding him up by the arm. It was characteristic, for he never bore any person a grudge for any harm he may have done that person. Most people do. He doesn't bear me any grudge. I came back to Hamilton then.
"Forgive me for telling you my poor story. I thought when I began there might be something in it to tell you particularly, but I see there wasn't. And really it isn't much of a story, only a quantity of details.
"I suppose," she continued, slowly, after another pause, "that your uncle would class Jack with the half civilized, or belonging really to a past time, when everything was unsettled and everybody was adventurous. He calls Morgan Map a primary, or aboriginal. I suppose he would call Jack a secondary, or nomadic, and perhaps," with a little laugh, "he calls himself a tertiary. I wonder if there are any more degrees."
Helen sat very quietly, drooping her head, and did not smile. Without understanding, she felt as if a hand in the darkness had struck her, as if a vista had opened, and all along it were crouching melancholy shapes and strange fears with faces hidden.
When Thaddeus came back he stood a moment in the doorway, and smiled with wrinkled cheeks.
"You look," he said, "like Israel by the waters of Babylon."
Chapter X
Of Spring in Hamilton—Of Thaddeus's Opportunity
to be Candid
In the open country the seasons are free, and work their will with spacious confidence. There is room between heaven and earth. Spring runs down the back of the mountain forest, and races the river; the heat of summer has reason, leisure, and is motherly of green things; autumn has its cornfields, leagues of yellow landscape, and the progress in cool order of harvest and death; winter its distances and long-drawn breath from the pole. Their functions there are customary, familiar, old. They can swing at large. They need not hesitate. But in city streets they go timidly, as if they fancied something in man and his civil doings not in the original regulations. They are conservative. An innovation was made, not so long ago, in their ancient memories; a creature containing an unknown chemical was developed and introduced. They seem to remember that objections were made at the time. It was said, "You never can tell what will come of it." And you never could. They never became used to or at ease with it. The innovation was even dissatisfied with nature, the ground-plan and mother of them all. He laid out cities to contradict her. He questioned, too, the wisdom of his creation, noted his own discordance, and went on to call his discontent divine.
And spring entered Hamilton. One felt something moist, warm, and sticky in the air, and knew what she was about, trying to make civil kisses out of her fructifying young enthusiasm, her tidal tenderness, and feeling embarrassed so that she made something moist, warm, and sticky. Baby green leaves were on the maples of Shannon Street and on the elms of the Common; rain was on the roofs at dawn, and the gutters flowed all day; busy citizen birds were notable on lawns, strayed songsters gurgling with happiness, or voicing spring longing in plaintive "pee-wees."
And Hamilton cared little about it. The Third Volunteers and a troop of militia cavalry were camped in the Fair grounds by the end of May, and people sat in the grand stands to see them drill. There were rows of neat, new tents, lines of men trying to keep step to a drum, bugle calls, cavalry charges, and turf cut to mud or dust. A blue sky was overhead whose peace was too deep and distant to be known, but one could infer it from the nearer peace of the white, drifting clouds. There was Lieutenant Map, with straps, visored cap, and sword, which Thaddeus thought should have been a club or javelin. "He'll not be suitably dressed till he's tattooed." Thaddeus even pursued and caught happiness in the situation, the changing pulse of the times. There were advantages to society in this panoply and thrill of war, which filled the eye and ear, entertained the thoughts, stirred the feelings to an interested activity. Society became more united, the units more sympathetic with each other. It was not good for banking; but for society, really, to sit in a grand-stand and watch extraordinary affairs go on in which society had such share and interest, was for society in the highest degree, in point of fact, inspiring. How brutal, how degrading, how primitive the Roman arenas! But here the higher feelings were enlisted. One saw battle-grounds imaginatively—their blood and dust idealized, made symbolic.
Rachel and Helen agreed with him without difficulty. It seemed to Helen quite splendid and natural for Morgan to go to the war. And both thought the cavalry and the bugles made everything real. It was not so long before that one heard there was such a place as Sumter, and even yet the objections made to anybody's firing at it seemed a little difficult to grasp with sympathy. Was not a fort made to be fired at? A little while before they had been told to dislike abolitionists, and had done so. Now they were told to dislike secessionists, and did so; but both were abstract. But here, on the familiar Fair grounds, were visible men in earnest, who were to be shot at and possibly hit by individuals. It was another matter than abstract secessionists shooting at a fort that was not interesting in itself. So that Rachel and Helen waved their handkerchiefs, and Thaddeus rapped with his cane, while the dark-blue lines broke and reformed, the bugles sounded, drums beat, troops of horsemen swept by, and overhead the sky possessed another blue and the drifting clouds a different movement.
They came home by Philip's road. The maples on Philip's road spread leaves that had passed from babyhood into youth in the sunlight and soft, damp air. They found Gard sitting disconsolately on Mrs. Mavering's steps, in blue uniform. Thaddeus said, "There's another patriot whose clothes don't fit."
"I was afraid I'd have to leave before you came," Gard explained. "I've had a rapid day. Decided at one o'clock to enlist; enlisted at two; told the rector at three I wouldn't play his old organ a day longer; drew this outfit at four. It's five now. But the rector was game. He said if he was twenty years younger he wouldn't preach in his old pulpit any more. May I come in half an hour, Mrs. Mavering?"
Thaddeus settled his glasses. "Young man. I should have said you were too wise for a warrior. Are you aware that cold lead, taken suddenly in any quantity, is injurious to the system?"
"What system?"
"The physical system of the—a—person taking it."
"Is it?" said Gard. "But it might be a mental tonic."
They all went in except Thaddeus, who walked down the street, scenting the air with delicate nostril.
"I don't—that one—I don't seem to make him out."
"You see, Mrs. Mavering," said Gard, "there are only a few people I want to tell about anything I do—you and Helen, and Fritz Moselle, and some of the brothers. Now, Fritz Moselle will say, 'Vat for a fool of a musician! Aber, you nefer get so fat as me if you don' be contented.' Brother Francis will quote the Anabasis, and Andrew will give it up, and the Superior act like the Apocalypse. Now, what do you say?"
"I don't know. Every one else is thinking about one thing now. I should have said you would think about something different."
Gard kindled with the eagerness peculiar to him when on the track of an idea, or trying to state one that was clear to him but seemed to struggle against statement—a kind of tension and nervous thrill, like that of a hunting dog when the trail is hot.
"But going with the crowd is all right if it's going the way you want to go. And the more undistinguished from the mass you appear to be, the more you can keep a unit to yourself. I shouldn't like to be an officer, for then I'd be responsible for other men. But a private marches where he's ordered, and shoots according to prescription. So he can watch the big phenomenon all around him and feel it racing through his blood. Can't he? I can feel it already. Can't you? Of course. But I want to look it in the face. If a man had a chance to be a crusader in his time he'd be foolish to miss it. He'd miss the flavor of his time. I'd sooner decline the acquaintance of a Shakespeare."
He looked at Helen eagerly. She stood among the potted plants in the bay window, looking out. He had thought she would seem more interested. She must be interested. Any one who had seen her eyes light up suddenly and often would know that. He wondered what clue to some unexpected significance she was following now, that she seemed absent-minded among the potted plants. Every one had his or her personal solitary adventure. Helen, of course, had hers. One had to remember that.
"I play to-night the last time. Will you be under the gallery?"
Then he went away. And Helen, among the potted plants, followed a clue to this unexpected significance, that it did not seem to her splendid and natural for Gard, too, to go to the war. It seemed like the hand in the darkness from Rachel's story, the vista where melancholy shapes and fears crouched and hid their faces. She watched him go down Queen Mary Street towards the Common. Morgan Map, striding down from Philip's road, saw him come out, said to himself, referring to the uniform. "It's that organ player! Who next?"—looked up and saw Helen's profile above the plants in the window, and stopped. A moment later he turned and walked back.
In Saint Mary's, that night, the music did not seem to Helen to come down from choir loft as usual, and talk to her familiarly. She could not make it say anything. It stayed up among the organ-pipes; and below, among the pillars and aisles instead, the wind of a coming storm blowing in through the vestibule doors, half open—for the night was heavy and close—took its place, whispered, moaned, and wailed: "You've no idea how black it's growing. Shut the doors and hide." At least, she was only able to make the music say something about going away, and that "if people never meet again, never is a long, long time." She was glad when it was over, and Gard came around and under the gallery. They walked across the yard silently. The night had grown black, the branches tossed, and the leaves fluttered audibly in the darkness over them. They found Morgan walking to and fro in the edge of the light from Mrs. Mavering's window.
"Why, Morgan!"
And Gard saluted, "Lieutenant."
"I want to see you, Nellie. Are you going home?" Then to Gard and his uniform. "Isn't that rather sudden?"
"It's the latest fashion. I report at nine, they say. Good-night."
And Mrs. Mavering, mounting her steps, turned to watch Morgan and Helen, and noted that they, too, walked quite silently still, till they turned the corner in front of Thaddeus's house and disappeared.
Thaddeus sat in the little room behind the drawing-room. At the sound of the rising wind he went to the window, looked out uneasily, and listened. The wind was too loud for him to hear the organ, even if it still were going. But he heard the hall-door open, and so went back contentedly to his newspaper, in which it was stated that a certain officer, in bringing a Confederate flag from a hotel roof in Alexandria, was shot by the hotel-keeper, who in turn was shot by a person accompanying the said officer. Really, people acted with singular earnestness and energy nowadays. He laid down the paper. On the wall opposite, in the gilded oval frame, was the picture of Mrs. Thaddeus Bourn, not in reality a mythical person at all, and yet there was a certain indistinctness in Thaddeus's memory of her—a certain absence of salient points. She had not, perhaps, been characterized by earnestness and energy. But nowadays—
"Don't bother me, Morgan," said Helen, impatiently. They were in the drawing-room, not far from the curtained door.
"But we start next week—"
"That," murmured Thaddeus, "is not, in point of fact, such a bad idea."
"And now, Nellie, I think it would be better if every one knew what you are to me before I left. I'll tell you why I didn't want it before—"
"It's funny, but you never take the trouble to ask what you are to me."
There was a silence that suggested threats. As far as Thaddeus could make out she had seemed to speak quite coolly. "She won't lose her head. God bless her!" he thought; "but—a—I think I'll step into this."
"If you're going to be subtle," said Morgan, at last, with a new harshness and blare in his voice, "I sha'n't understand it. It's perfectly simple. I want you to tell your uncle—Well, then, I will."
Thaddeus pulled the curtain and went through.
"I beg pardon. I seem to be referred to."
Morgan turned where he stood. Helen sat in a low chair before the sea-coal fire, and did not look up or turn her head.
"I should have—if I had supposed the conversation was to be of such a private nature—I should have—a—signified my presence before. As it is, I take the opportunity to observe that your—a—importunity appears to be unpleasant to Helen, to request that you—a—leave her alone, and to state that—a—no engagement between you will ever exist with my consent or her mother's."
"It does exist."
"I doubt it. Have you, then, ever promised to marry him, Helen?"
"I don't remember I was ever asked to."
Something like a flame went across Morgan's face, left red spots on it, and a glare in his eyes.
"Helen!" The chandelier shook with his voice and step. Helen did not move or look at him. Thaddeus raised a deprecating hand. "I must beg you not to shout in my house." Morgan paused and concentrated. The natural thing to do, the simple instinct, would be, with one hand to crumple up this grinning old idiot—tall stock and curled hair and all—stuff him away somewhere, and carry off Helen into the windy night, with her white dress and blue ribbon around the throat. It seemed impossible, even in an artificial age, that slim creatures should dare to balk him. She stood up quickly, and he caught her closely about the shoulders with his arm.
"It's absolute nonsense—"
"Please let me go, Morgan. I don't want to fight."
"Tell your uncle you belong to me."
"No!"
"Helen, do as I say!"
"No!"
Thaddeus pointed at Morgan's arm.
"Will you kindly—thank you."
Helen fled, through hall and up the stairs, a shimmer of white skirts past the hall lamp; and in her room she leaned from the window and let the rain drive against her face. Mrs. Mavering's window threw a great bar into the night. Morgan's voice below seemed to fill the drawing-room, the hall, and came rolling up the stair after her, in muttering pursuit. She gave a half sob, listened a moment, and began to laugh.
"I'm glad Uncle Tad has that row."
"I remember," said Thaddeus, amiably, "I remember being—a—rejected once myself. It was unpleasant, very unpleasant."
"Do you think a thing of seven years is going to be thrown out like this? Do you think I'm a man to put up with this kind of business? Do you think I don't know Helen?"
"I think," said Thaddeus, "that you don't. My dear fellow, you have made a curious mistake, and yet—and yet quite logical. I am charmed to say, quite such as I should have predicted. You have treated a woman with a certain contempt. You couldn't help it. It expressed, if I may say so, the degree of your culture. Nevertheless, a mistake. Deference, deference—they like it. It belongs to them. It is—a—their accumulated inheritance. Seven years—at thirteen—but, my dear fellow, a child! You announce your intention to a growing girl, by whose—a—admiring worship it is received with awe. You suppose she continues to worship you in the same primitive manner. You suppose your ownership and property established, that it merely remains to dictate and receive. How simple, how—pardon me—characteristic! By the way, your father. I recollect, had a singular opinion of you. I am candid, you see. It appears to be your faculty—remarkably so—to invite candor. If I recollect, he thought, supposing you were in some way blown up or ground up into small fragments—some accident, some catastrophe—and then fitted together carefully—supposing, if I understood him, this process repeated sufficiently—you might—but I doubt it—a—paternal weakness. But as to the situation at present, I cannot conceal my—a—satisfaction."
Morgan glowered under reddish-yellow brows, and Thaddeus talked on with persistent amiability. So grim and forcible looked Morgan, so likely to be summary or primitive inaction, that it seemed to argue for Thaddeus a fine trust in the strength of social restraint, his continuing that airy, provocative speech.
"A distinction arises—a child, a woman. It arose in Helen, no doubt, during her sickness. You observed the distinction, I presume, but only from its effect on you. But, really, you know, it must have affected her. I have, in my time, studied the sex—a subject of delightful interest."
"I don't pretend to take interest in your delights." Morgan had grown cool.
"Quite so," murmured Thaddeus.
"Go ahead, and enjoy them. I suggest you don't interfere with me. I want Helen and will have her. There is a bond—"
"Allow me. Has been, perhaps, an understanding assumed."
"I'm not going to quibble with words."
"Exactly. Whatever there has been, or been assumed to be, quite clear, no longer is—is no longer assumed. I believe I speak with authority."
"I'm not going to quibble about your authority, either. You can flutter it as much as you please. I'll see Helen alone."
"Not to-night. A—a little flutter of authority. You leave next week? I shall not, perhaps, take the trouble to prevent your seeing Helen. I shall take the trouble to see that nothing comes of it. My dear boy, I'm extremely sorry. I don't like you. Your invitation to candor is irresistible."
Morgan laughed shortly, turned, and went into the hall. Thaddeus followed.
"Really, it's raining. Let me lend you—but a soldier, of course—what a blessing is youth! Exit!"—to the now closed outer door—"exit the primitive."
And so spring came to an end, with a warm rain murmuring on the roofs all night, soaking down the roots of the maples, driving part of the Third Regiment to sleep in the grand-stands. As in sleeping Hamilton no one knew another's dream, so almost as little by lamp-light or at dawn did any watcher truly imagine another's thought. Who shall escape the dungeon of himself? The policeman on the corner of Shannon Street and Philip's road, when Morgan rushed by him, sympathized with an apparent hurry to get out of the comfortless rain. Thaddeus, before his sea-coal fire, plotted such happy paths for Helen to walk in as an enlightened egoism showed would be best for Thaddeus. Helen let the rain drive in her face, and thought that, "if people never meet again, never will be a long, long time." Gard stood in the middle of his study, looked around him, whistled "The Campbells Are Coming," and called it clearing up. Books, music, piano, chairs, and memories of meditations—he thought he did not care much what became of them. There was a new time coming, and time it came. "This is no world to play with mammets and to tilt with lips. We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns." "The Campbells are coming—trala! trala!" Mrs. Mavering drew the rope of her long black hair over her shoulder, smoothed it on her knee, and thought of the terms "commission" and "estates in happiness." The braid was thick and glossy. It seemed hard if her own play were quite ended and story told. What, nothing more! Restlessness must come from overbrooding, or the new stir of the times. A woman's story ended too soon. What a melancholy noise the rain made!
Who shall escape the dungeon of himself, or look from its clouded windows through the clouded windows even of that one which lies nearest, where another prisoner strains to see?
Chapter XI
The Whirlpool.—Mr. Paulus's Reminiscences of Women.
The Third Regiment went its way. Visibly, it resembled swarms of bees when last seen clinging to the freight cars, or an excited picnic with ornamental bayonets, but to a larger contemplation rather a stream of sea-drift drawn into the suck and roar of a growing whirlpool. Men are noisy and cheerful, and seldom know their own pathos. But the streets of Hamilton seemed empty, though hardly fewer people went to and fro; in the faces of women here and there, there was a certain premonitory desolation.
Helen felt the emptiness to be extraordinary—unexpected; an emptiness between her and the sky; rooms mysteriously disfurnished; things that people said sounding hollow, as if the meaning of words had fallen away from beneath them; Saint Mary's at night became silent and dark, except for now and then a droning service without palaces or towers of sound.
"To what end," reflected Thaddeus, "am I a student of human nature in the subtle sex? If she doesn't miss that antediluvian brute. I'm an addled egg."
"We're dreadfully dull, Lady Rachel, aren't we?" said Helen. "Let's be Knights Hospitallers."
"What do you mean?"
"All the rest do is to scrape lint and read newspapers and potter. Why couldn't we enlist and be nurses?"
"I dare say we could."
"With white caps and big cuffs? Could we?"
Mrs. Mavering wondered at Helen's influence over her. She had watched it grow, with a half-amused curiosity. She had thought to be the girl's guide and helper, and that this new interest would be her reward upon Thaddeus's theory of commissions. But she had seemed more and more to be following, not leading; as if, in the actual onward game of life, experience, instead of a lamp before, were a lamp behind, darkening the path with the shadow of ourselves. To remember only made one irresolute. It was necessary to be young, or else to forget—at any rate, to be valiant. But had she not had enough of excitement, adventure, the ragged seams of things, variety and burlesque, and been soul-sick through it all, and fled at last from its noise and passions? She shook her head, not so much at Helen as at the other side of her own inner argument.
"Collars and cuffs, Lady Rachel! But you'd look beautiful!"
"That isn't what people want in nurses."
"It isn't? But it is! Why, if I were a man, and had you around looking like a remorseful queen who had just hung up her robe and crown on the hat-rack, and was trying to be humble with collars and cuffs, and all that, I'd get well if I were shot criss-cross. I'd say, 'This world is too fine to leave.'"
"How should you know what you would do?"
"Oh!" She hesitated, and drooped a little. "I think it was Gard said that." Then, with returned animation: "He was so funny, Lady Rachel. I asked him if he didn't think you were all that, and he only said, 'This world is too fine to leave; I think I'll stay quite a while.'"
It did not all seem to Mrs. Mavering a direct argument to go hospitalling; only it seemed to fall in line with other questionings about the fallen curtain, and whether it might not again be raised. One might be content with a minor part.
They went up to Hagar at the end of June, and spent the blue-and-green summer together in the widow's house behind the militant church. Thaddeus came every Saturday, invented new paradoxes, to watch them fall helplessly on the widow's comprehension, and went down the hill after tea in the wide sunset—an immaculate gentleman, with eye-glass, cane, and smooth-shouldered coat—to talk with Mr. Paulus.
"Ain't goin' to get married again, are ye?"
"To whom, Peter? To whom?"
"Mrs. M—Mav—the one that looks like she cost a dollar an inch."
"Mrs. Mavering is, unfortunately, not as yet a widow."
"He gone to the war? 'Tain't any more'n reasonable she might get to be. Fine-lookin' woman—looks expensive. Well, I done it three times, an' then guessed I'd quit. I got too fat—don't figure as well at weddin's as I once did. But—Well, I don' no'—the women's got in the habit of marryin' me."
"Pete," said Thaddeus, softly, "was not the first time, in fact, the best? When one is young!"
"Umm—She was—well, I'll tell ye. Old Parson Gerry was here then, an' the candidest man in Hamilton County, an' I went to him. 'Who is she?' says he. I says, 'Hilda Armitage.' 'Shucks!' says he, 'she won't have you.' 'She will, too,' says I, pretty mad. 'Well, well, I'll marry you, but she ought've done a sight better'n that.' But by-and-by the parson and me was both widowers, an' I went to him again. 'Who is she?' says he. 'Esther Allen.' 'Good land alive!' says he, 'I was going to ask her myself next week!' An' he appeared to think Essie's bad luck was odd—remarkable odd."
"I was asking, Peter, for reminiscences of your young romance, tending on to your—a—doctrine of practical matrimony, and so to your theory of—of woman. We were at the point of young romance. May I suggest—the clergyman appears to take up too much room. Hilda Armitage—"
"Well, she was roomy, too. She began to lay on flesh after we was married on credit of a hundred acres of Wyantenaug Valley land, came to her from Patton Armitage, till she took a six-by-four coffin, she did, by—"
"Pass on, Pete, pass on. Esther Allen—a—the minister's preference would seem to have argued in her a certain superior attractiveness, a certain—"
"Jus' so. She argued it that way. She'd never believe but what I knew the week the parson had his eye on, an' sort of hurried up and got in underhand. 'Twan't so," said Mr. Paulus, earnestly. "'Twan't so. Didn't know a thing about it till he—"
Thaddeus raised a white hand.
"I beg of you, no more."
In the matter of light on the "subtle sex," what opportunities for study had not Pete Paulus thrown away! Mr. Paulus's drooping left eyelid drooped lower. He heaved with a rumbling chuckle.
It would be not so evil a fate to come to Hagar for the first time, bringing inward wounds to its peculiar balsams. The blue flowers on the green, the lilacs in Widow Bourn's garden. Windless Mountain, that eclectic philosopher, the deep wood avenues, the league length of the Cattle Ridge, the eastern hills where the church spire of Salem village might be seen—one runs easily into cataloguing details, but how convince the inexperienced of their significance, their speech, their daily conversations? Could the children of Hagar tell a stranger the meaning of the mill stream, or ever really explain the moral of the Four Roads? They were not mere objects. They were tangled with living years. One must have seen visions and heard messages. One must have dropped a salt tear by the road-side and sailed that stream to the Celestial City.
And yet it was Mrs. Mavering who seemed to hear the conversations, the meanings, the messages, and not Thaddeus or Helen. Thaddeus was never an instance in point, and Helen was restless. Thaddeus speculated and commented on that restlessness to Mrs. Mavering, who offered few opinions. The impulse and daring which Mrs. Mavering knew as characteristic of Helen's speech seemed to have turned from mental to physical energy, to climbing cliffs instead of merely precipitous ideas. It was as if speech were no longer expressive of facts; as if both were learning an unsyllabled language which the other knew before—Mrs. Mavering learning the language of the rocks and the soil, of growing and flowing things, and Helen the language of human living at a point in its syntax which deals with the more searching idioms, the peculiar question at which point is not merely, "What does this obscure passage mean?" but, "What does it mean to me?" The summer days went like water-drops from the eaves after a rain, that gather and shine and fall swiftly, incessantly. September came, where the green garment of the season runs into embroidery of purple and gold.
The wood-path that runs west from the Cattle Ridge road beyond Job Mather's mill goes by a damp hollow where spotted fungi grow, climbs past bramble patches, clearings, and a bold strip or two of cliff, turns south around a lonely pine-tree, the last of its fellows, down through woods noted for lady-slippers in June, and comes out on the hill meadows along the Red Rock road. You can look south from this wood's edge past the west shoulder of Windless down the Wyantenaug, and to the east see the range of the Great South woods, and near by the spire of the militant church. But Helen and Rachel came there, as a rule, for the sake of the dominance and conversations of Windless.
Helen lay on her back, with her hands under her head and knees in the air. Mrs. Mavering's book was thrown aside.
"Do you really want to go?"
"Yes."
"I don't know but I do. What will your mother say?"
"'Why, Helen!'"
"And Mr. Bourn?"
"Oh, he'll sputter some. I don't mind."
Windless lay in the sunlight, genial, wise, sincere, with the girth of high living and the forehead of high thought. One did not have to specify in the presence of Windless. Everything was understood. Yet Mrs. Mavering asked. "I suppose it isn't Morgan Map at all?"
Helen answered "No," promptly enough, and fell into sombre silence. The eastern slope of Windless darkened in the shadow of the lessening afternoon, while the western only seemed to glimmer the more genially; there was that advantage in being large. "You see," she went on, "it suits Morgan, fighting and ordering and doing things. Nothing ever hurts him. I don't see why I should bother about him when he's having a good time."
"It's enough if you don't."
"Well, Lady Rachel, then that's it. I don't."
"Then we won't say what it is?"
"No, please."
"But I suppose we can know?"
Helen rolled over with a laugh, and hid her mouth a moment in the stubby grass.
"Let's go home."
Widow Bourn said, "Why, Helen!" immediately. Thaddeus went with Rachel into the garden, and walked beside her up and down the path between the porch and the lilac gate.
"It isn't Morgan Map. She doesn't bother about him at all."
"She doesn't? Dear me!"
"But I think it might be better, after all."
"What is it, then? Why can't she be contented? My dear lady, my poor intelligence struggles with the subject, but you and Helen—hospitals, drudgery, dirt, pah! vermin. I knew she had the notion. I labelled it properly, 'Notion.' I was aware the Helen estate was not returning the—a—interest it should. I admit my commission from it has in consequence this summer been very meagre—most irregular. I believe I appreciate, I strive to understand, your difficult sex—my lifelong endeavor—but at present, so to speak, if I may say so, it 'gets me.'"
"Helen has perhaps more nervous energy than is common."
"Nervous! But might we not almost say, of late, feverish?"
"Perhaps we might."
"Then what—or rather, why?"
"If Helen had her secrets it would not follow that she would confess them to me, and surely you would know as quickly as I if she had any. But if I have any intimation you must let me keep it, and only say that, perhaps, it would be good for her."
Thaddeus shrugged his shoulders, and went down, immaculately, to the post-office to consult.
"Pete, the opportunities you've lost to study women! But you might, possibly, say something at random. What's all this for?"
Mr. Paulus's face was like the Sphinx's for extent massiveness and lack of expression, but his left eyelid was variable. He pondered some moments. "What did you an' me steal pigs for? Did we want the pigs? No. Did we want to see Starr Atherton in his nightshirt? Some—not much. Well, it was a way we had of puttin' what was in our minds. What's in will out. That girl'd bust out somewhere. If it ain't measles, it's boils. That's what I say. What's in will out."
Whatsoever supplication or remonstrance Thaddeus may have sent up by himself, he took council of some inward monitor, and did not "sputter." He had his reward from Helen, who fell into a mood of tentative caressing.
In October they went to Washington. Thaddeus sniffed a few weeks about the streets of the capital, and returned to Hamilton, his bank and club and lonely house, in a state of mind to be expressed by a shrug and the lifting of a white hand in deprecation. In his pursuit of happiness the scent seemed to be lost, the hunt all astray. He realized more than ever how much of his fortune in that commodity he had staked on one issue. He doubted, after all, the wisdom of it, but could not find a way, nor in himself any impulse, to draw back. "The new generation, these new times! They are strenuous, and one grows old." The air was full of the war; the suck of the whirlpool was felt in every corner.
Part II
Chapter XII
Antietam.
A big gun boomed far away in the dark. From nearer came the snip-snap of picket-shooting, which increased to a rattle and settled into volleying. On the hill to the right some one climbed on a gun-carriage and stood vaguely against the sky.
Shadows came running from the door of a barn into the grass. A sleeper cried out and sat up at their feet, rubbing his trodden hand.
"What do you make it?"
"We have no troops over there. They're shooting each other."
"Shooting their midnight dreams."
"Midnight! It's past three."
"How should I know? I was king of the Pleiades five minutes ago."
"Time for trouble to begin?"
"It won't be light for an hour."
"No. Turn in, gentlemen."
Shadows sat upright in the grass and muttered to each other.
"What's the Pleiades, Jimmie?"
"Do' know. Wa'n't any at home as I know of."
"Stars, you galoop."
"That's what the Johnnies were shooting at."
"Hey! He must 'a' been jokin'," from the shadow called Jimmie.
"Who?"
"The cap'n said he was king of 'em, he did."
"Oh, go to—"
"Can't see any stars to-night."
The distant volleying died down to a rattle—to the crack of a single rifle far away, lonely in the immense night, the encircling silence.
The woods went around behind the hill on the right. On the left a grassy field stretched off in the dark. One knew by remembrance that it sloped down a gradual mile, till it came somewhere to a slow creek with a mud bottom. Outposts lay forward in a thin line of woods. Some one said that the pickets were in an open field beyond, and that some of them belonged to the other side. In that tense, visionary hour one did not conceive of an enemy as of separate men, watchful in fields, sleeping in distant woods, but of a creature, a thing of folded miles, crouching, sinister, hostile, with red tongue and bitter fangs, waiting for the dawn.
Some of the dark lumps in the grass were motionless, some stirred and muttered. Through the open door of the barn a group of men could be seen around a lantern and leaning forward. One of them marked and pointed with his finger. A horse kicked and squealed on the hill among the guns. A dog howled in some indefinite distance and direction. The birds began to twitter in the trees of the beetling woods. A creeping wind chilled the dew on the faces of sleepers and watchers in the open. The blackness grew conscious—dimly gray.
Two or three came out of the barn and ran behind it. In a moment there was a cluttered thudding of horses' feet, which died away down the field. Pickets began shooting in front. Little things whimpered and whined overhead. An officer, by the glimmer of his straps, went forward and shouted in the woods. The near firing stopped, or most of it, but the things overhead continued to whimper and whine. The lumps on the grass began to sit up and strip off blankets.
"What's he stopping 'em for?"
"Nothing in it."
"The Johnnies keep it up."
"They're firing high."
Fires of gathered dead-wood sprang up on the woods' edge—a score in sight, then a hundred, smoking and crackling. A low murmur, a sense of multitude, grew as the darkness lifted its oppression. Men sipped and munched by the fires. Some one shouted, "Get ready, men!" A cannon belched and bellowed on the hill to the right, then another and another, to a passionate, throbbing roar.
"Company B, forward! Halt here!"
Men poured around in crowds and formed in triple lines. A shell dropped through the roof of the empty barn and splintered some of the boards outward with its burst.
The misty sky was breaking for a clear day. Red clouds of sunrise streamed like pennants in the southwest. A man in the front line pitched forward and lay still.
"Who's that?"
"I do' know."
"Aiken, I guess."
"There, now! You jabbed me twice. Hold up your bayonet."
Men panted as if they had already been running, and shifted their feet nervously.
"To-day's my birthday."
"Going to celebrate it all right."
Several laughed in high, strained cackles.
"What we waiting for, cap'n?"
"Don't know. Here. Where's your cartridge-belt? Stay where you are. Who's that down? Hand up his belt."
A shout came up the line, like the ripple of a shaken rope. They were suddenly in the woods. Men jumped from the ground and joined. They were in another field of grass. One heard nothing more but the thump of his own feet and the singing blood in his ears; not the throb of the artillery; not the cry of the man who threw up his arms and fell against him; not the discharge of his own rifle, though he saw the smoke, and with the next stride his face went through the smoke.
It was easy running in the grass, the long, level fields, a fence now and then, a stone wall; but then came a slope and ploughed ground, where one stumbled and fell with his face in the brown dirt, and fancied himself hit in the pit of the stomach—only, why not dead?—saw the lines gone on; got up, and ran after to the edge of a field of standing corn. A fenced road was beyond, a white building with a central, squat chimney, overhung by heavy woods full of smoke. The lower part of the smoke bellied forward, jumped, and trembled at the edge.
There seemed to be singularly few in the running line now. One seemed, in fact, to be running back unaccountably, down the slope and the ploughed ground, into another triple line, a surf of guns, caps, hot faces, and innumerable legs. One seemed to be caught up and rushed back, ploughed ground and slope, and lined up at the top, there loading and firing across the corn. Comparatively it was restful, mechanical. To find one's cartridge-belt empty at last was a disappointment. It seemed to imply the need of doing something else, something new and untried. The smoke in the woods ahead was thinner.
"I guess Johnnie's belt's empty, too."
"I guess we're going in to see. Here we go!"
They ran into the corn. One did not feel military—rather, happy-go-lucky. The enemy behind the fence and in the road all ran away to the woods, where there seemed nothing much going on. It looked like a gaping mouth, the tree-trunks like black teeth, and the smoke from the blacker throat drifted between the teeth. It seemed to have sucked in its hot breath and red tongue—to be waiting. The fence was nearly reached when it let go a thousand red tongues, a voice that crashed, a breath that was hot and smoky, that jumped and trembled. One dropped behind the fence and felt for cartridges.
"Hi, Jimmie! Going to get out o' this."
"Close up, men. Steady there."
"That's the colonel."
"Yep."
"Draw them off, now. Steady. Close up."
"Belts, boys—look for belts."
They went back slowly, stripping the cartridge-belts from men fallen between the corn-hills, and firing at the smoke; into the grass, at length, and at length to a halt in cover of broken fence and line of weeds, hard by the woods they had left at dawn. The enemy spread over the cornfield. One seemed to resent it on account of owning that cornfield with a more than ancestral heritage. There were fresh columns coming up on the right. The broken brigades in the grass watched them pass. Their line mounted and stood still on the ridge, outlined against the woods and volleying evenly. Gaps opened and closed. Some one said, "They're old troops." They went into the corn with a rush. Whatever happened, it sounded like an explosion of a half-hour's length, and after it the cornfield and ploughed land were empty, except for the smoke, and the wounded and dead, some hidden in the corn, some seen against the brown fallow.
The mouth of the black woods gaped; there were its black teeth and drifting breath. Fragments of the columns were drawing off to the covert of a bulge of woods on the right. That part of the battle stood still. The sun was half-way up the sky.
"I fought, cap'n! I wasn't afraid!"
He had red, downy cheeks, an indistinct nose, and white eyelashes.
"Terrible warrior you are, Jimmie. Your fingers are dripping."
Jimmie looked at his hand. A little red brook ran down the palm. He turned white and sick.
"Scratched, Jimmie. Tie it up for him."
"I never seen it," in an awed voice.
The officer went on.
"Get your breath. See your guns are all right. What's that?"
The man sat staring at his wrecked and twisted rifle. Another man laughed hoarsely.
"Scrap-iron he picked up."
"'Tain't, either"—angrily. "It's my rifle. Been holding it all day. What's gone with it? Something hit it."
It had been shattered in his hands by a flying missile.
Some one rode up whom the captain saluted.
"How many left here?"
"About forty."
"Colonel Morley?"
"In the cornfield."
"Major Cutting?"
"All right, sir, over there."
"How are your men?"
"Pretty fair, sir. They'll go in again."
A mile down the valley the fight was growing hotter; a ravine was full of smoke, a jam around a bridge, a line of blue hills beyond; up nearer, columns were massing by a sunken road, under batteries playing from opposite hills across the creek; a village lay to the west. The sun made another jump up the sky. The fields around were empty, except for the lines in covert behind the fences, and here and there a horseman galloping, here and there a horse but no horseman. The enemy were in the corn again, shooting intermittently. Smoke drifted up and turned white against the glistening blue. The batteries beyond the woods on the right broke out again. New clouds of smoke floated overhead and dimmed the sun. In the grass-fields still the crouched lines waited in covert of weeds and fences. Hours that had shot past in the charge, the struggle and retreat, now stretched like sleepless nights. Company B muttered and swore.
"What's the use of waiting?"
"Le's go in!"
The captain and lieutenant lay at a distance on the grass. Neither of them answered. Jimmie felt around his belt.
"I got fifteen cartridges."
"How's your scratch, Jimmie?"
"Ho, I don' care for that. Why don' we fight some more?"
The captain said, "Do you hear those minie-balls?"
The lieutenant, "What of them?"
"The pitch, of course; they go from E flat to F, and then drop to D. That's a very pretty interval."
"You've got an ear! They do sort of go up and down."
"Le's fight some more."
"Oh, Jimmie, dry up!"
High noon over the corn, and the woods, and the white building with the squat chimney.
Jimmie again. "Le's fight so—Oh!"
He leaped, flung up his hands and fell—his rifle clattering behind—his head rolled over once and lay still. The man next him lifted Jimmie's head, laid it down gently and turned away. Some one farther along said, "Pshaw!" One still farther, "Who's that?"—"Jimmie"—"Oh!"
The captain took the rifle and belt with fifteen counted cartridges and walked down the line to the man with the shattered rifle.
"Here you are."
Company B was silent, and crouched more closely. The sun slipped down perceptibly and burned red in the smoke. The throb of the unseen guns grew Quicker. From woods' edge and cornfield, from covered lines in the weeds by zigzag fences, the smoke was living and leaping, Company B busy and interested. A horseman clattered by. "Get ready!"
"Bayonets?"
"All right. Get into it now!"
Grass-fields, fences, and ploughed ground; all voices of the battle-field awake; yelling and cheering, crash of musketry, crack of rifles, roar of guns, shells that whooped in flight and burst into a score of individual screams. Beneath all, an undertone, a rumbling, grinding, splintering sound, the organ bass of the field; into the corn, that rustled as before, that brushed in turn against Northern and Southern faces, that sheltered alike from the slant sun all still faces in the furrows, pale and ghastly and grimed, thick together, piled dead over dead. Then came the fence, the road, the squat-chimneyed building, the gaping woods with black teeth and white breath; and Company B. Reg. Third, went into the wished-for woods at last, with empty belts and point-on bayonets; went through them, and saw the sun beyond, and broken lines running across open fields. Some thirty of them came back and sat down by the white building gloomily. The captain looked them over and hummed. "The Campbells are coming—trala, trala." The sun dropped low. The throb of the guns down the valley grew slower, duller, fainter. Sanitary men with stretchers pushed to and fro in the corn. The woods grew dark, the fields dusky. Campfires crackled beside the road, Company B's by the white building. Tin cups were poked into the coals. Conversation was grumbling, fragmentary.
"Jimmie's shut down on pretty sudden."
"Jimmie! There's fifty better men out of this company dropped in their tracks! I don't see why you're so cut on Jimmie."
"I wished it was some one else." The speaker's voice broke. "He was such a damn fool."
"Oh, I see."
"Know the name of that creek?"
"No."
"It's the Antietam."
"What of it? It ain't the Wyantenaug, that's all I care."
"And this thing's a Dunker church."
"You got more useless information 'n would set up a college."
"Pennsylvania fellow told me over there Dunkers are sort of Dutch Baptists."
"Oh, go get some wood!"
The captain was in the road. He walked over and leaned on the splintered fence and watched the red lights of a hundred little fires play ghostly games with black shadows in the foliage of the woods. Men were pushing about in the corn, rustling the blades. The stars were out, the young moon setting slim and lovely with the old moon on her arm. The distant crackle of rifles, belated fragments of the battle, seemed futile, isolated, mistaken and sad in the light of the drooping, withdrawing moon.
Fifty feet away was a large camp-fire of fence rails. Of the men about it, one had lean, long limbs and face, wore a long black coat and black slouched hat, and talked continuously in solemn, flowing bass. The rest listened, absorbed. Now and then one of them laughed.
The captain drew near. The lean talker unfolded his legs and rose.
"Gods! The anchorite? Gentlemen, who might this be?"
"Cap'n Windham, Company B," said some one.
"He hath grown a beard! In complete steel, revisits the glimpses of the moon! A Hotspur of the North, will kill him six or seven dozen Confederates before breakfast and say, 'Fie on this quiet life!' Will tootle a reed no more! Will dive into the bottom of the deep, pluck up drowned honor by the locks, and call it vanity! Vat for a fool of a musician!"
"How are you, Jack?"
"A war correspondent I, John Roland Mavering, who will celebrate you, a Homer to Achilles, who wants to know for his invocation how you happen not to be dead."
They locked arms and sauntered along the road in leisurely pursuit of the moon.
Chapter XIII
In Which Appears a General of Division, and One of
"the Brethren."
If Gard entered the war, as he claimed, in the theory of a spiritual adventure, it must be hinted that he had sometimes lost sight of his theory. Outside events had shown a tendency to usurp and absorb in the process of the happening. It was not so noticeable during the first nine months. He marched, drilled, felt the rain and the cold wind at night in the open, heard the enemy's guns, saw bleeding men carried by from the distant field, and shared in what was called "the defence of Washington," a matter that did not seem difficult or exciting beyond reason. He was made a sergeant—a purely outside event. There was leisure to watch the scene, to keep one's poise, to experiment with existence. If at times his old sense of separateness, of isolation among objects, scenes, and persons whose importance to him was only in their inner effect upon him —if this sense at times seemed less vivid than before, and the movements of men in masses, the common enthusiasms, made him feel that his solitary journeying was in some mystical way accompanied by watching myriads with the same forward step and shadowy goal, it was rather a passing, a recurrent sensation.
But with the middle of spring came three months of storm and stress in the Virginia peninsula. He came out of the ranks by reason of some inscrutable opinion of him conceived and reported to authorities—something connected with an expedition through a swamp—was promoted because there were no other officers to speak of in the company when the army reached its new base at last on the James River.
He looked back curiously now to the tumult of those weeks, a period when he could not remember to have remembered himself, a long night of irrelevant dreams, the sense of identity lost in the dull confusion, himself going and coming, ordering and obeying, seeing difficulties and finding solutions with a set of surface faculties, the soul within him torpid, at least taciturn. The experience had left him with a sense of distaste and humiliation, with a certain troubled doubt. Was a man captain of himself, if he could be seized, stunned, drowned in circumstance, lost like a drop of water in a flood, rendered indistinct to his own consciousness from the flowing, pouring mass around him?
Gard did not suppose himself to be unique. He supposed other men had similar paths to walk in, pilgrim fashion; that every man owned merely himself and his destiny, his issue in the nature of things his own; that to every man there was but one great distinction, it lying between himself and what was not himself. In his own age, at least, he supposed it a growing tendency for men to look within their own souls for the infinite which they could not find without.
There was no doubt the peninsular campaign had been an experience affecting him profoundly. It had shown him what a pit of danger lay on the side of such absorption; that to plunge into affairs so intense, so physical, so powerful in their sweep and pull, was for the individualist numbing, miasmic, clouding the eye whose function should be to see one path clearly. It had given him a new sense and a certain dread of the strength of what lay on the other side of that distinction between himself and the not himself. It had left in him, he fancied, a kind of sediment, an element in respect to which it became illustrated that what a man has experienced is a part of him. It had made him perhaps more consciously watchful of his poise, his mental erectness and control. But the main result so far had been that sense of uncertainty and troubled doubt, as if he had lost the trail, as if much had grown dim that was once definite and guiding. Mavering's appearance seemed to suggest something, a clew or an omen. Jack, at least, was individual, nomadic, and distinct. He never let his surroundings grow into him.
Thursday, the day after the battle, the hills, woods, and fields were quiet except for stray picket shooting. The two armies could feel each other. Why they lay all day so near, so quiet, was no business of either's subordinate atoms. Gard felt that he but barely cared, if no more was asked of him and his remnant of thirty than to stay where they were. No doubt they also serve who wait. He could stretch in the sunlight, listen to Mavering's home despatches, choice, flowing, vehement, and supply him with technical language.
Farmers drove in on the road during the day, and distributed apples from their wagons, or peddled home-made bread. A number of them wore singular, broad-brimmed hats, smooth hair, long, and parted in the middle, shaven lips and long beards below, and some spoke broken English with an odd, German dialect. They were said to be the Dunkers of the squat-chimneyed church, now spotted with bullet-holes, one casement blown in. To Gard they seemed to illustrate grimly the shaping power of externals, these men whose mouths were set to the line of their wide hats, hair plastered smoothly to mark the even tenor of their peace. They called themselves "The Brethren." There was something in their faces at once a reminder of and a contrast to the faces he remembered in the Brotherhood of Consolation.
The camp-fires flickered once more at night against the black foliage.
Company B, in a new manner, admired its captain and the extraordinary correspondent, while they recited Brutus and Cassius with mellow mouthings, and after gave impromptu dialogues between a Dunker advocating the use of apples with Biblical extracts, and the general of division, explosive, impatient, dropping oaths like solid round shot. Other men left their own camp-fires and crowded the road. Some officers sat on the fence and applauded. The distant crack of the pickets' rifles was sometimes heard, stabbing blindly at the night. The stars were brilliant and the slim moon was in the south.
Friday morning it was rumored that the enemy had slipped away in the night, and gone across the Potomac again; that the general of division had been heard putting violent terms to the name of his chief for committing all the sins of omission which man could commit, seeing his aides' enjoyment of which language he had reddened and set his grim mouth. The fields beyond the wood, at least, were empty, and the village among the hills. One could walk abroad without being shot at from the bushes where those scarlet berries grew.
The crippled Third, with its odds and ends of companies, moved as far as the village, now turned a bustling hospital, and heard big guns booming again south of the Potomac. There it was that Mavering wrote that sketch of red death and amputation which his paper expurgated before publishing, to Mavering's disgust. "As fine a bit of realism as was ever done! And look at it, butchered to make a civilian holiday!" He read the first draft to Gard.
"I'll trade my job for yours, Jack."
"Quite the contrary"—Mavering altered an adjective in his copy—"you will not."
A messenger rode into the camp of the crippled Third with a led horse.
"Captain Windham?"
"Here."
"Order of ——; relieved indefinitely. Will take this horse—report at division headquarters," and the messenger clattered away. Mavering jumped to his feet.
"I'll trade you."
"Quite the contrary, you will not."
Mavering grumbled and went back to his copy.
"It's that elegant comedy last night. Poor boy! Ruined! Ruined!"
Gard rode down the road that led from the village to the creek. The centre of Wednesday's fight had been here, but the fighting must have been mainly on the wings. There were signs of heavy artillery work, but little else. Beyond the bridge was a large house on the hill, with a white picket fence around it. From the hill he could look up the winding creek, and see the bluffs, the sloped fields and ploughed ground of Wednesday's charges and retreats, the Dunker church against the woods. Some men in front of the house directed him to take the right fork of the road. The sun was low, the day-moon like a white scallop of cloud. He found the headquarters a half-mile beyond, a small brick house, distinguished by the number of saddled horses fastened at the fence, and within the general, a familiar figure enough, with his red face and white whiskers, a hot-tempered man and well beloved, now puffing a cigar and quite self-controlled.
"Captain Windham."
"Gentlemen!" cried the general, "will you allow me—I want to see this man," and they were presently alone.
The general leaned back and looked at Gard critically. He began:
"Captain Windham—mm—these theatrical performances by officers for the entertainment of privates—umm—this disgraceful mimicry of—mm—myself—this disrespect leading to insubordination—"
"I beg your pardon, sir. It was not intended—"
"I was about to say," thundered the general, "when you interrupted me, that I don't believe the commander-in-chief would approve. Personally. I'd have given something to be there. I have about me, I believe, another cigar. Sit down."
He spoke in a jerky way, coming down on selected words with emphasis.
"I have need of a particular kind of a man. It occurs to me you may be that kind—mm—a certain variety, perhaps, of talent. It's a bit of secret service. Well, now look here. It is this. The War Department wants private information about the actual effective numbers—if possible—and condition, of the enemy—at present. I will tell you more. The estimates that come to it from the commander-in-chief are—I quote the word—'contradictory.' It is suspected that those estimates depend—I still quote—'on the impression that gentleman wishes to make on the department or the public.' The suspicion may be wrong; or it may be that a change is going to be made in commanders; or, at any rate, 'before issuing a definite order to the present commander'—it needs information independent of the regular source. Do you understand?"
"So far as you've gone, sir."
"Oh—mm—exactly. That's right. No doubt it is procuring other sources. That's no business of ours. I've been asked—confidentially—to furnish one source—mm—The impersonation of Dunker elders and generals of divisions implies—mm—also I know your record—mm—Captain Windham, I am at the present moment guilty of insubordination and treachery to my superior officer. I am also giving away what amounts perhaps to a state secret. I am doing so—for the reason—that your discretion must be relied on, anyway, and you cannot understand too clearly the point to be gained. This information must reach either me, or the department directly—preferably the latter—and no one else. You see the point?"
"Yes, sir."
"Preferably the latter. I needn't be connected with it hereafter—would rather not be."
"I see."
"Very good. This information should be had as soon as possible. In case you have to send a message, this paper contains a code, simple enough. The meaning depends on the position of the words. You can apparently mean anything you choose. Learn, and destroy paper. So much for that. Your name will be known at the department. You are at your own disposition till the thing is done. There are no directions. Now—one moment—this map. Lee and Longstreet are probably here. Somebody is, anyway. Jackson is God knows where—possibly there. If so, he'll be somewhere else to-morrow. Here's your pass. Any questions?"
"No, sir."
"That's all, then. You may go—mm—Captain Windham—some time I should like to see the impersonation of a general of division in a state of excitement. Hem! hem! Good-day, sir."
Gard galloped through the little village in the dusk, looking for Mavering, and found the fields beyond empty. The brigade was gone, the Third gone with it.
"I can't chase after him all night," he thought, impatiently. "Why doesn't he stay where he'd be useful?"
He caught sight of a horse fastened to a maple-tree up the road.
Mavering lay on his back under the maple, smoking.
"Get up. Come along."
"This cigar is the worst—"
"Get on your horse. I want you."
"What do I care what you want? I was about to say, this cigar is the—"
"Throw it away, then."
Mavering unfolded his legs and mounted, grumbling.
"You're the blankedest, most egotistic anchorite that ever petted his soul, not to say dosed it allopathically with wars and red rebellions. One question: Is there any copy in this?"