Those Times and These

“I’ll never forget the one I kissed!” broke in Doctor Lake. “With the exception of the ensuing four years, I’ve been kissing the same girl ever since. She hefts a little more than she did then – those times you could mighty near lock a gold bracelet round her waist, and many’s the time I spanned it with my two hands – and she’s considerably older; but her kisses still taste mighty sweet to me!”

“Go ‘way, Lew Lake!” protested Judge Priest gallantly. “Miss Mamie Ellen is jest ez young ez ever she was; and she’s sweeter, too, because there’s more of her to be sweet. I drink to her!”

Two tin cups rose in swinging circles; and I knew these old men were toasting a certain matron of my acquaintance who weighed two hundred and fifty if she weighed a pound, and had white hair and sizable grandchildren.

“And so then” – Judge Priest was resuming his narration – “and so then, after a spell, the epidemic of kissin’ began to sorter die down, though I reckin some of the boys would ‘a’ been willin’ to keep it up plumb till breakfast time. I mind how I was standin’ off to one side, fixin’ to make my farewells to Miss Sally Machen, when out of the tail of my off eye I seen little Herman Felsburg, over on the other side of the ballroom, lookin’ powerful forlorn and lonesome and neglected.

“Doubtless he’d been there all night, without a soul to dance with him, even ef he’d knowed how, or a soul to speak with him, even ef he could have understood whut they said to’ him. Doubtless he wasn’t exactly whut you’d call happy. Jest about then Miss Sally Machen must ‘a’ seen him too; and the same thought that had jest come to me must ‘a’ come to her too. “‘It’s a shame!’ she said – jest like that – under her voice. And in another minute she was walkin’ acrost the floor toward Herman.

“I remember jest how she looked. Why, ef I was an artist I could draw a picture of her right now! She was the handsomest girl in town, and the proudest and the stateliest – tall and slender and dark, with great big black eyes, and a skin like one of these here magnolia buds – and she was well off in her own name; and she belonged to a leadin’ family. Four or five boys were beauin’ her, and it was a question which one of ‘em she’d marry. Sometimes, Lew, I think they don’t raise very many girls like Miss Sally Machen any more.

“Well, she kept right on goin’ till she came to where Herman was scrouged up ag’inst the wall. She didn’t say a word to him, but she took him by the hand and led him right out into the middle of the floor, where everybody could see; and then she put those white arms of hers round his neck, with the gold bracelets on her wrists jinglin’, and she bent down to him – she had to bend down, bein’ a whole head taller than whut he was – and she kissed him on the lips; not a sweetheartin’ kiss, but the way his own mother might ‘a’ kissed him good-bye, ef he’d had a mother and she’d been there.

“Some few started in to laugh, but stopped off short; and some started to cheer, but didn’t do that, neither. We-all jest stood and watched them two. Herman’s face tum’t ez red ez blood; and he looked up at her sideways and started to smile that funny little smile of hisn – he had one front tooth missin’, and that made it funnier still. But then his face got serious, and frum clear halfway acrost the hall I could see his eyes were wet. He backed off frum her and bowed purty near to the ground before her. And frum the way he done it I knowed he was somethin’ more than jest a little, strange Jew pedlar in a strange land. You have to have the makin’s of a gentleman in you to bow like that. You mout learn it in time, with diligent practice, but it comes a sight easier ef you’re born with it in you.”

From his flat flask the old Judge toned up the contents of their julep cups. Then, with pauses, during which he took delicate but prolonged sips, he spoke on in the rambling, contemplative fashion that was as much a part of him as his trick of ungrammatical speech or his high bald forehead was, or his wagging white chin-beard:

“Well, purty soon after that we were all down yonder at old Camp Boone, and chiefly engaged, in our leisure hours – which we had blamed few leisure hours, at that – in figurin’ out the difference between talkin’ about soldierin’ and braggin’ about it, and actually doin’ of it. There wasn’t no more dancin’ of quadrilles with purty girls then. We done our grand right-and-left with knapsacks on our backs and blisters on our feet. Many and many a feller that had signed up to be a hero made the distressin’ discovery what he’d really j’ined on to.

“All this time little old Herman was doin’ his share like a major. Long before he could make out the words of command, he’d picked up the manual of arms, jest frum watchin’ the others in the same awkward squad with him. He was peart enough that-a-way. Where he was slow was learnin’ how to talk’ so ez you could make out whut he was aimin’ to say. It seemed like that was the only slow thing about him.

“Natchelly the boys poked a heap of fun at him. They kept prankin’ with him constantly. But he taken it all in good part and grinned back at ‘em, and never seemed to lose his holt on his temper. You jest couldn’t help likin’ him – only he did cut such funny mon-keyshines with the Queen’s English when he tried to talk!

“Because he was so good-natured, some of the boys took it into their heads, I reckin, that he didn’t have no real grit; or mebbe they thought he wasn’t spunky because he was a Jew. That’s a delusion which a good many suffer frum that don’t know his race.

“I remember one night, about three weeks or a month after we went into camp, Herman was put on post. The sergeant mighty near lost his mind, and did lose his disposition, drillin’ the countersign and the password into Herman’s skull. So a couple of boys out of the Calloway County company – they called themselves the Blood River Tigers, and were a purty wild and devilish lot of young colts ginerally – they took it into their heads that after it got good and dark they’d slip down to the lines and sneak up on Herman, unbeknownst to him, and give him a good skeer, and mebbe take his piece away from him – sort of play hoss with him, ginerally. So, ‘long about ‘leven o’clock they set out to do so.”

He paused and looked at Doctor Lake, grinning. I couldn’t hold in.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Oh, nothin’ much,” said Judge Priest – “exceptin’ that presently there was a loud report and consider’ble many loud cries; and when the corporal of the guard got there with a squad, one of them Calloway County boys was layin’ on the ground with a hole through his right shoulder, and the other was layin’ alongside of him right smartly clubbed up with the butt end of a rifle. And Herman was standin’ over ‘em, jabberin’ in German – he’d forgot whut little English he knowed. But you could tell frum the way he carried on that he was jest double-dog darin’ ‘em to move an inch. I don’t believe in my whole life I ever seen two fellers that looked so out of the notion of playin’ practical jokes as them two Blood River Tigers did. They were plumb sick of Herman, too – you could tell that frum a mere glance at ‘em ez we toted ‘em in and sent for the surgeon to patch ‘em up.

“So, after that, the desire to prank with Private Felsburg when he was on duty sort of languished away. Then, when Herman took down sick with camp measles, and laid there day after day in the hospital tent under an old ragged bedquilt, mighty sick, but never complainin’ – only jest grinnin’ his gratitude when anybody done a kind turn fur him – we knowed he was gritty in more ways than one. And there wasn’t a man in Company B but whut would have fit any feller that ever tried ag’in to impose on him.

“He was sick a good while. He was up and round ag’in, though, in time to do his sheer in the first fight we were in – which was at Belmont, over acrost the Mississippi River frum Columbus – in the fall o’ that year. I seem to recall that, ez we went into action and got into fire, a strange pair of laigs took to tremblin’ mightily inside the pair of pants I was wearin’ at the time; and most of my vital organs moved up into my throat and interfered some with my breathin’.

“In fact I made a number of very interestin’ discoveries in the openin’ stages of that there fight. One was that I wasn’t never goin’ to be entirely reconciled to the idea of bein’ killed on the field of battle; and another was that, though I loved my native land and would die fur her if necessary – only hopin’ it wouldn’t be necessary to go so fur ez all that – still, ef I lived to git out of this particular war I wasn’t goin’ to love another native land ez long ez I lived.”

“Shucks, William!” snorted Doctor Lake. “Try that on somebody else, but don’t try to come such stuff on me. Why, I was right alongside of you when we went into that charge, and you never faltered!”

“Lew,” stated Judge Priest, “you might ez well know the truth. I’ve been waitin’ fur nearly forty years to make this confession. The fact of the matter was, I was so skeered I didn’t dare to stop goin’ ahead. I knowed ef ever I did slow up, and give myself a chance to think, I’d never quit runnin’ the other way until I was out in the Gulf of Mexico, swimmin’.

“And yit another thing I found out that day was that the feller back home who told me one Southerner could whip five Yankees, single-handed, made a triflin’ error in his calculations; or else the Yankees he had in mind when he uttered the said remark was a different breed frum the bunch we tackled that day in the backskirts of the thrivin’ little community of Belmont, Missoury. But the most important thing of all the things I discovered was about Herman Felsburg – only that come later.

“In the early stages of that little battle the Federals sort of shoved us back a few pegs; but about three o’clock in the evenin’ the tide swung the other way, and shortly thereafter their commandin’ general remembered some pressin’ business back in Cairo, Illinois, that needed attendin’ to right away, and he started back there to do so, takin’ whut was left of his army along with him. So we claimed it ez a victory for us, which it was.

“Along toward dusk, when the fightin’ had died down, our company was layin’ alongside a country road jest outside the town, purty well tuckered out, and cut up some. We were all tellin’ each other how brave we’d been, when along down the road toward us come a file of prisoners, under guard, lookin’ mighty forlorn and low-sperrited. They was the first prisoners any of us had ever seen; so we jumped up from where we was stretched out and crowded up round ‘em, pokin’ fun at ‘em. The guards halted ‘em to let ‘em rest and we had a good chance to exchange the compliments of the season with ‘em. Eight in the front rank of the blue-bellies was one big furreign-lookin’ feller, with no hat on, and a head of light yaller hair. He ripped out somethin’ in German – a cuss word, I take it. Doubtless he was tellin’ us to go plum’ to hell. Well, suh, at that, Herman jumped like he’d been stung by one of these here yaller jackets. I reckin he was homesick, anyway, fur the sound of his own language.

“He walked over and begun jabberin’ in Dutch with the big sandy-haired Yank, and the Yank jabbered back; and they talked together mighty industrious until the prisoners moved on – about fifteen minutes, I should say, offhanded. And ez we went back to lay down ag’in I took notice that Herman had the funniest look on his face that ever I seen on almost any human face. And he kept scratchin’ his head, like there was somethin’ on his mind, troublin’ him, that he jest simply couldn’t make out noway. But he didn’t say nothin’ to nobody then – jest kept on scratchin’ and studyin’.

“In fact, he held in till nearly ten o’clock that night. We made camp right there on the edge of the battleground. I was fixin’ to turn in when Herman got up frum where he’d been squattin’, over by a log fire, lookin’ in the flames; and he come over to me and teched me on the shoulder.“‘Pilly Briest,’ he says in that curious way of hisn, ‘I should like to speak mit you. Please, you gecomin’ mit me.’

“So I got up and follered him. He led me off into a little thicket-like and we set down side by side on a log, same ez we three are set-tin’ here now. There was a full moon that night, ridin’ high, and no clouds in the sky; and even there in the shadders everythin’ was purty nigh ez bright ez day.

“‘Well, old hoss,’ I says, ‘whut seems to be on your mind?’

“I ain’t goin’ to try very hard to imitate his accent – you-all kin imagine it fur yourselves. ‘And he says to me he’s feared he’s made a big mistake.’

“‘Whut kind of a mistake?’ I says.

“‘Ven I j’ined dis army,’ he says – or words to that effect.

“‘How so?’ I says.

“And then he starts in to tell me, talkin’ ez fast ez his tongue kin wag, and makin’ gestures with both his hands, like a boy tryin’ to learn to swim dog-fashion. And after a little, by piecin’ together ez much of his talk ez I kin ketch, I begin to make out whut he’s drivin’ at; and the shock is so great I come mighty near failin’ right smack off that log backward.

“Here’s the way the thing stands with him: That night at the old market house, when the company is bein’ formed, he happens along and sees a crowd, and drops in to find out, ef he kin, whut’s afoot. Presently he makes out that there’s a war startin’ up ag’inst somebody or other, and, sence he’s made up his mind he’s goin’ to live in America always and make it his country, he decides it’s his bounden duty to fight fur his country. So he jest up and signs, along with the rest of us.

“Of course from that time on he hears a lot of talk about the Yankee invader and the Northern vandal; but he figgers it that the enemy comes frum somewhere ‘way up North – Canada or Greenland, or the Arctic regions, or the North Pole, or some of them other furreign districts up in that gineral vicinity. And not fur a minute – not till he talked with the big Dutch prisoner that day – had it ever dawned on him fur a single minute that a Yankee mout possibly be an American, too.

“When he stops I sets and looks at him a minute, takin’ it all in; and he looks back. Finally I says:

“‘And so you went and enlisted, thinkin’ you was goin’ to fight fur the United States of America, and you’re jest findin’ out now that all these weeks you’ve been organism’ yourself to fight ag’inst her? Is that it?’

“And he says, ‘Yes, that’s it.’ And I says: ‘Well, I wisht I might be dam’!’ And he says, well, he wishes he might be dam’ too, or in substance expresses sech a sentiment. And fur another spell we two merely continues to set there lookin’ one another in the face.

“After a little I asts him whut he’s aimin’ to do about it; and he says he ain’t decided yit in his own mind. And then I says:

“‘Well, Herman, it’s purty tough on you, anyway you take it. I don’t rightly know all the rules o’ this here war business yit, myself; but I reckin ef it was made clear to the higher authorities that you was sort of drug into this affair under false pretenses, ez it were, why, mebbe they mout muster you out and give you an honourable discharge – providin’, of course, you pledged yourself not to take up arms fur the other side, which, in a way of speakin’, would make you a deserter. We-all know you ain’t no coward, and we’ll all testify to it ef our testimony is needed. I reckon the rest of the boys’ll understand your position in the matter; in fact, I’ll undertake to make ‘em understand.’

“He asts me then: ‘Whut iss false pretenses?’”

And I explains to him the best I kin; and he thinks that p’int over fur a minute or two. Then he looks up at me sideways frum under the brim of his cap, and I kin see by the moonlight he’s blushin’ ez red ez a beet, and grinnin’ that shy little snaggle-teethed grin of hisn.

“‘Pilly,’ he says, ‘mebbe so you remember dot young lady vot put her arms round me dot night – de von vot gif to me a kiss fur kindness? She iss on de Deexie side – yes? – no?’

“And I says to him: ‘You kin bet your sweet life she is!’”

“‘All right!’ he says. ‘I am much lonesome dot night – and she kiss me! All right, den. I fights fur her! I sticks mit Deexie!’ And when he says that he makes a salute, and I notice he’s quit grinnin’.”

“And did he stick?” I asked.

Before he answered, the old Judge drained his tin cup to the bottom.

“Did he stick? Huh! Four long hard bitter years he stuck – that’s all! Boy, you mout not think it, to see old Herman waddlin’ acrost that Oak Hall Clothin’ Store to sell some young buck from the country a pair of twenty-five-cent galluses or a celluloid collar; but I’m here to tell you he’s one of the stickin’est white men that ever drawed the breath of life. Lew Lake, here, will tell you the same thing. Mebbe it’s because he is sech a good sticker that he’s one of the wealthiest men in this county to-day. I only wisht I had to spend on sweetenin’ drams whut he lays-’by every year. But I don’t begrudge it to him.”

Through the grove ran an especially loud outburst of cheering, and on top of it we heard the scuffling of many yeomen feet. Judge Priest slid off the log and stood up and stretched his pudgy legs.

“That must mean the speakin’s over and the rally’s breakin’ up,” he said. “Come along, son, and ride on back to town with us in my old buggy. I reckin there’s room fur you to scrouge in between me and Doctor Lake, ef you’ll make yourself small.”

The October sun, slanting low, made long stippled lanes between the tree trunks, so that we waded waist-deep in a golden haze as we made for the place where Judge Priest’s Mittie May was tethered to a sapling. The old white mare recognised her master from afar, and whinnied a greeting to him, and I was moved to ask another question. To me that tale stood uncompleted:

“Judge, what ever became of that young lady who kissed him that night at the Richland House?”

“Oh, her? She died a long, long time ago – before you was born. Her folks lost their money on account of the war, and she married a feller that wasn’t much account; they moved out to Arkansaw and the marriage turned out bad, and she died when her first baby was born. There ain’t none of her family livin’ here now – they’ve purty much all died out too. But they shipped her body back here, and she’s buried out in Ellum Grove Cemetery, in the old Machen lot.

“Some of these days, when you are out there in the cemetery foolin’ round, with nothin’ much else to do, you look for her grave – you kin find it. Bein’ a Christian woman, she had a Christian burial and she’s restin’ in a Christian buryin’ ground; but, in strict confidence, I’ll tell you this much more while we’re on the subject: It wasn’t no Christian that privately paid the bill fur the tombstone that marks the place where she’s sleepin’. I wonder ef you could figger out who it was that did pay fur it? I’ll give you two guesses.

“And say, listen, sonny: your first guess will be the right one.”

CHAPTER X. THE START OF A DREAM

For years it was the dream of our life – I should say our lives, since my wife shared this vision with me – to own an abandoned farm. The idea first came to us through reading articles that appeared in the various magazines and newspapers telling of the sudden growth of what I may call the aban-doned-farm industry.

It seemed that New England in general – and the state of Connecticut in particular – was thickly speckled with delightful old places which, through overcultivation or ill-treatment, had become for the time being sterile and non-productive; so that the original owners had moved away to the nearby manufacturing towns, leaving their ancestral homesteads empty and their ancestral acres idle. As a result there were great numbers of desirable places, any one of which might be had for a song. That was the term most commonly used by the writers of these articles – abandoned farms going for a song. Now, singing is not my forte; still, I made up my mind that if such indeed was the case I would sing a little, accompanying myself on my bank balance, and win me an abandoned farm.

The formula as laid down by the authorities was simple in the extreme: Taking almost any Connecticut town for a starting point, you merely meandered along an elm-lined road until you came to a desirable location, which you purchased for the price of the aforesaid song. This formality being completed, you spent a trivial sum in restoring the fences, and so on, and modernizing the interior of the house; after which it was a comparatively easy task to restore the land to productiveness by processes of intensive agriculture – details procurable from any standard book on the subject or through easy lessons by mail. And so presently, with scarcely any trouble or expense at all, you were the possessor of a delightful country estate upon which to spend your declining years. It made no difference whether you were one of those persons who had never to date declined anything of value; there was no telling when you might start in.

I could shut my eyes and see the whole delectable prospect: Upon a gentle eminence crowned with ancient trees stood the rambling old manse, filled with marvelous antique furniture, grandfather’s clocks dating back to the whaling days, spinning wheels, pottery that came over on the Mayflower, and all those sorts of things. Round about were the meadows, some under cultivation and some lying fallow, the latter being dotted at appropriate intervals with fallow deer.

At one side of the house was the orchard, the old gnarly trees crooking their bent limbs as though inviting one to come and pluck the sun-kissed fruit from the burdened bough; at the other side a purling brook wandering its way into a greenwood copse, where through all the golden day sang the feathered warblers indigenous to the climate, including the soft-billed Greenwich thrush, the Peabody bird the Pettingill bird, the red worsted pulse-warmer, and others of the commoner varieties too numerous to mention.

At the back were the abandoned cotes and byres, with an abandoned rooster crowing lustily upon a henhouse, and an abandoned bull calf disporting himself in the clover of the pasture. At the front was a rolling vista undulating gently away to where above the tree-tops there rose the spires of a typical New England village full of old line Republicans and characters suitable for putting into short stories. On beyond, past where a silver lake glinted in the sunshine, was a view either of the distant Sound or the distant mountains. Personally I intended that my establishment should be so placed as to command a view of the Sound from the east windows and of the mountains from the west windows. And all to be had for a song! Why, the mere thought of it was enough to make a man start taking vocal culture right away.

Besides, I had been waiting impatiently for a long time for an opportunity to work out several agricultural projects of my own. For example, there was my notion in regard to the mulberry. The mulberry, as all know, is one of our most abundant small fruits; but many have objected to it on account of its woolly appearance and slightly caterpillary taste. My idea was to cross the mulberry on the slippery elm – pronounced, where I came from, ellum – producing a fruit which I shall call the mulellum. This fruit would combine the health-giving qualities of the mulberry with the agreeable smoothness of the slippery elm; in fact, if my plans worked out I should have a berry that would go down so slick the consumer could not taste it at all unless he should eat too many of them and suffer from indigestion afterward.

Then there was my scheme for inducing the common chinch bug to make chintz curtains. If the silk worms can make silk why should not the chinch bug do something useful instead of wasting his energies in idle pursuits? This is what I wished to know. And why should this man Luther Burbank enjoy a practical monopoly of all these propositions? That was the way I looked at it; and I figured that an abandoned farm would make an ideal place for working out such experiments as might come to me from time to time.

The trouble was that, though everybody wrote of the abandoned farms in a broad, general, alluring way, nobody gave the exact location of any of them. I subscribed for one of the monthly publications devoted to country life along the Eastern seaboard and searched assiduously through its columns for mention of abandoned farms. The owners of most of the country places that were advertised for sale made mention of such things as fourteen master’s bedrooms and nine master’s baths – showing undoubtedly that the master would be expected to sleep oftener than he bathed – sunken gardens and private hunting preserves, private golf links and private yacht landings.