Chapter V

The home-life of Mr. Grady was peculiarly happy. He was blessed, in the first place, with a good mother, and he never grew away from her influence in the smallest particular. When his father was killed in the war, his mother devoted herself the more assiduously to the training of her children. She molded the mind and character of her brilliant son, and started him forth on a career that has no parallel in our history. To that mother his heart always turned most tenderly. She had made his boyhood bright and happy, and he was never tired of bringing up recollections of those wonderful days. On one occasion, the Christmas before he died, he visited his mother at the old home in Athens. He returned brimming over with happiness. To his associates in the _Constitution_ office he told the story of his visit, and what he said has been recorded by Mrs. Maude Andrews Ohl, a member of the editorial staff.

“Well do I remember,” says Mrs. Ohl, “how he spent his last year’s holiday season, and the little story he told me of it as I sat in his office one morning after New Year’s.

“He had visited his mother in Athens Christmas week, and he said: ‘I don’t think I ever felt happier than when I reached the little home of my boyhood. I got there at night. She had saved supper for me and she had remembered all the things I liked. She toasted me some cheese over the fire. Why, I hadn’t tasted anything like it since I put off my round jackets. And then she had some home-made candy, she knew I used to love and bless her heart! I just felt sixteen again as we sat and talked, and she told me how she prayed for me and thought of me always, and what a brightness I had been to her life, and how she heard me coming home in every boy that whistled along the street. When I went to bed she came and tucked the covers all around me in the dear old way that none but a mother’s hands know, and I felt so happy and so peaceful and so full of tender love and tender memories that I cried happy, grateful tears until I went to sleep.’

“When he finished his eyes were full of tears and so were mine. He brushed his hands across his brow swiftly and said, laughingly: ‘Why, what are you crying about? What do you know about all this sort of feeling!’

“He never seemed brighter than on that day. He had received an ovation of loving admiration from the friends of his boyhood at his old home, and these honors from the hearts that loved him as a friend were dearer than all others. It was for these friends, these countrymen of his own, that his honors were won and his life was sacrificed.”

From the home-life of his boyhood he stepped into the fuller and richer home-life that followed his marriage. He married the sweetheart of his early youth, Miss Julia King, of Athens, and she remained his sweetheart to the last. The first pseudonym that he used in his contributions to the _Constitution_, “King Hans,” was a fanciful union of Miss King’s name with his, and during his service in Florida, long after he was married, he signed his telegrams “Jule.” In the office not a day passed that he did not have something to say of his wife and children. They were never out of his thoughts, no matter what business occupied his mind. In his speeches there are constant allusions to his son, and in his conversation the gentle-eyed maiden, his daughter, was always tenderly figuring. His home-life was in all respects an ideal one; ideal in its surroundings, in its influences, and in its purposes. I think that the very fact of his own happiness gave him a certain restlessness in behalf of the happiness of others. His writings, his speeches, his lectures—his whole life, in fact—teem with references to home-happiness and home-content. Over and over again he recurs to these things—always with the same earnestness, always with the same enthusiasm. He never meets a man on the street, but he wonders if he has a happy home—if he is contented—if he has children that he loves. To him home was a shrine to be worshiped at—a temple to be happy in, no matter how humble, or how near to the brink of poverty.

One of his most successful lectures, and the one that he thought the most of, was entitled “A Patchwork Palace: The story of a Home.” The Patchwork Palace still exists in Atlanta, and the man who built it is living in it to-day. Mr. Grady never wrote out the lecture, and all that can be found of it is a few rough and faded notes scratched on little sheets of paper. On one occasion, however, he condensed the opening of his lecture for the purpose of making a newspaper sketch of the whole. It is unfinished, but the following has something of the flavor of the lecture. He called the builder of the Palace Mr. Mortimer Pitts, though that is not his name:

Mr. Mortimer Pitts was a rag-picker. After a patient study of
the responsibility that the statement carries, I do not hesitate
to say that he was the poorest man that ever existed. He lived
literally from hand to mouth. His breakfast was a crust; his
dinner a question; his supper a regret. His earthly wealth,
beyond the rags that covered him, was—a cow that I believe gave
both butter-milk and sweet-milk—a dog that gave neither—and a
hand-cart in which he wheeled his wares about. His wife had a
wash-tub that she held in her own title, a wash-board similarly
possessed, and two chairs that came to her as a dowry.

In opposition to this poverty, my poor hero had—first, a name
(Mortimer Pitts, Esq.) which his parents, whose noses were in
the air when they christened him, had saddled upon him
aspiringly, but which followed him through life, his condition
being put in contrast with its rich syllables, as a sort of
standing sarcasm. Second, a multitude of tow-headed children
with shallow-blue eyes. The rag-picker never looked above the
tow-heads of his brats, nor beyond the faded blue eyes of his
wife. His world was very small. The cricket that chirped beneath
the hearthstone of the hovel in which he might chance to live,
and the sunshine that crept through the cracks, filled it with
music and light. Trouble only strengthened the bonds of love and
sympathy that held the little brood together, and whenever the
Wolf showed his gaunt form at the door, the white faces, and the
blue eyes, and the tow-heads only huddled the closer to each
other, until, in very shame, the intruder would take himself
off.

Mr. Pitts had no home. With the restlessness of an Arab he
flitted from one part of the city to another. He was famous for
frightening the early market-maids by pushing his white round
face, usually set in a circle of smaller white round faces,
through the windows of long-deserted hovels. Wherever there was
a miserable shell of a house that whistled when the wind blew,
and wept when the rain fell, there you might be sure of finding
Mr. Pitts at one time or another. I do not care to state how
many times my hero, with an uncertain step and a pitifully
wandering look—his fertile wife, in remote or imminent process
of fruitage—his wan and sedate brood of young ones—his cow, a
thoroughly conscientious creature, who passed her scanty diet to
milk to the woeful neglect of tissue—and his dog, too honest for
any foolish pride, ambling along in an unpretending,
bench-legged sort of way,—I do not care to state, I say, how
many times this pale and melancholy procession passed through
the streets, seeking for a shelter in which it might hide its
wretchedness and ward off the storms.

During these periods of transition, Mr. Pitts was wonderfully
low-spirited. “Even a bird has its nest; and the poorest animal
has some sort of a hole in the ground, or a roost where it can
go when it is a-weary,” he said to me once, when I caught him
fluttering aimlessly out of a house which, under the influence
of a storm, had spit out its western wall, and dropped its upper
jaw dangerously near to the back of the cow. And from that time
forth, I fancied I noticed my poor friend’s face growing whiter,
and the blue in his eye deepening, and his lips becoming more
tremulous and uncertain. The shuffling figure, begirt with the
rag-picker’s bells, and dragging the wobbling cart, gradually
bended forward, and the look of childish content was gone from
his brow, and a great dark wrinkle had knotted itself there.

And now let me tell you about the starting of the Palace.

One day in the springtime, when the uprising sap ran through
every fibre of the forest, and made the trees as drunk as
lords—when the birds were full-throated, and the air was woven
thick with their songs of love and praise—when the brooks kissed
their uttermost banks, and the earth gave birth to flowers, and
all nature was elastic and alert, and thrilled to the core with
the ecstasy of the sun’s new courtship—a divine passion fell
like a spark into Mr. Mortimer Pitts’s heart. How it ever broke
through the hideous crust of poverty that cased the man about, I
do not know, nor shall we ever know ought but that God put it
there in his own gentle way. But there it was. It dropped into
the cold, dead heart like a spark—and there it flared and
trembled, and grew into a blaze, and swept through his soul, and
fed upon its bitterness until the scales fell off and the eyes
flashed and sparkled, and the old man was illumined with a
splendid glow like that which hurries youth to its love, or a
soldier to the charge. You would not have believed he was the
same man. You would have laughed had you been told that the old
fellow, sweltering in the dust, harnessed like a dog to a cart,
and plying his pick into the garbage heaps like a man worn down
to the stupidity of a machine, was burning and bursting with a
great ambition—that a passion as pure and as strong as ever
kindled blue blood, or steeled gentle nerves was tugging at his
heart-strings. And yet, so it was. The rag-picker was filled
with a consuming fire—and as he worked, and toiled, and starved,
his soul sobbed, and laughed, and cursed, and prayed.

Mr. Pitts wanted a home. A man named Napoleon once wanted
universal empire. Mr. Pitts was vastly the more daring dreamer
of the two.

I do not think he had ever had a home. Possibly, away back
beyond the years a dim, sweet memory of a hearthstone and a
gable roof with the rain pattering on it, and a cupboard and a
clock, and a deep, still well, came to him like an echo or a
dream. Be this as it may, our hero, crushed into the very mud
by poverty—upon knees and hands beneath his burden—fighting
like a beast for his daily food—shut out inexorably from all
suggestions of home—embittered by starvation—with his
faculties chained down apparently to the dreary problem of
to-day—nevertheless did lift his eyes into the gray future,
and set his soul upon a home.

This is a mere fragment—a bare synopsis of the opening of what was one of the most eloquent and pathetic lectures ever delivered from the platform. It was a beautiful idyll of home—an appeal, a eulogy—a glimpse, as it were, of the passionate devotion with which he regarded his own home. Here is another fragment of the lecture that follows closely after the foregoing:

After a month’s struggle, Mr. Pitts purchased the ground on
which his home was to be built. It was an indescribable
hillside, bordering on the precipitous. A friend of mine
remarked that “it was such an aggravating piece of profanity
that the owner gave Mr. Pitts five dollars to accept the land
and the deed to it.” This report I feel bound to correct. Mr.
Pitts purchased the land. He gave three dollars for it. The deed
having been properly recorded, Mr. Pitts went to work. He
borrowed a shovel, and, perching himself against his hillside,
began loosening the dirt in front of him, and spilling it out
between his legs, reminding me, as I passed daily, of a giant
dirt-dauber. At length (and not very long either, for his
remorseless desire made his arms fly like a madman’s) he
succeeded in scooping an apparently flat place out of the
hillside and was ready to lay the foundation of his house.

There was a lapse of a month, and I thought that my hero’s soul
had failed him—that the fire, with so little of hope to feed
upon, had faded and left his heart full of ashes. But at last
there was a pile of dirty second-hand lumber placed on the
ground. I learned on inquiry that it was the remains of a small
house of ignoble nature which had been left standing in a vacant
lot, and which had been given him by the owner. Shortly
afterwards there came some dry-goods boxes; then three or four
old sills; then a window-frame; then the wreck of another little
house; and then the planks of an abandoned show-bill board.
Finally the house began to grow. The sills were put together by
Mr. Pitts and his wife. A rafter shot up toward the sky and
stood there, like a lone sentinel, for some days, and then
another appeared, and then another, and then the fourth. Then
Mr. Pitts, with an agility born of desperation, swarmed up one
of them, and began to lay the cross-pieces. God must have
commissioned an angel especially to watch over the poor man and
save his bones, for nothing short of a miracle could have kept
him from falling while engaged in the perilous work. The frame
once up, he took the odds and ends of planks and began to fit
them. The house grew like a mosaic. No two planks were alike in
size, shape, or color. Here was a piece of a dry-goods box, with
its rich yellow color, and a mercantile legend still painted on
it, supplemented by a dozen pieces of plank; and there was an
old door nailed up bodily and fringed around with bits of board
picked up at random. It was a rare piece of patchwork, in which
none of the pieces were related to or even acquainted with each
other. A nose, an eye, an ear, a mouth, a chin picked up at
random from the ugliest people of a neighborhood, and put
together in a face, would not have been odder than was this
house. The window was ornamented with panes of three different
sizes, and some were left without any glass at all, as Mr. Pitts
afterwards remarked, “to see through.” The chimney was a piece
of old pipe that startled you by protruding unexpectedly through
the wall, and looked as if it were a wound. The entire absence
of smoke at the outer end of this chimney led to a suspicion,
justified by the facts, that there was no stove at the other
end. The roof, which Mrs. Pitts, with a recklessness beyond the
annals, mounted herself and attended to, was partially shingled
and partially planked, this diversity being in the nature of a
plan, as Mr. Pitts confidentially remarked, “to try which style
was the best.”

Such a pathetic travesty on house-building was never before
seen. It started a smile or a tear from every passer-by, as it
reared its homely head there, so patched, uncouth, and poor. And
yet the sun of Austerlitz never brought so much happiness to the
heart of Napoleon as came to Mr. Pitts, as he crept into this
hovel, and, having a blanket before the doorless door, dropped
on his knees and thanked God that at last he had found a home.

The house grew in a slow and tedious way. It ripened with the
seasons. It budded in the restless and rosy spring; unfolded and
developed in the long summer; took shape and fullness in the
brown autumn; and stood ready for the snows and frost when
winter had come. It represented a year of heroism, desperation,
and high resolve. It was the sum total of an ambition that,
planted in the breast of a king, would have shaken the world.

To say that Mr. Pitts enjoyed it would be to speak but a little
of the truth. I have a suspicion that the older children do not
appreciate it as they should. They have a way, when they see a
stranger examining their home with curious and inquiring eyes,
of dodging away from the door shamefacedly, and of reappearing
cautiously at the window. But Mr. Pitts is proud of it. There is
no foolishness about him. He sits on his front piazza, which, I
regret to say, is simply a plank resting on two barrels, and
smokes his pipe with the serenity of a king; and when a stroller
eyes his queer little home curiously, he puts on the air that
the Egyptian gentleman (now deceased) who built the pyramids
might have worn while exhibiting that stupendous work. I have
watched him hours at a time enjoying his house. I have seen him
walk around it slowly, tapping it critically with his knife, as
if to ascertain its state of ripeness, or pressing its corners
solemnly as if testing its muscular development.

Here ends this fragment—a delicious bit of description that only seems to be exaggerated because the hovel was seen through the eyes of a poet—of a poet who loved all his fellow men from the greatest to the smallest, and who was as much interested in the home-making of Mr. Pitts as he was in the making of Governors and Senators, a business in which he afterwards became an adept. From the fragments of one of his lectures, the title of which I am unable to give, I have pieced together another story as characteristic of Mr. Grady as the Patchwork Palace. It is curious to see how the idea of home and of home-happiness runs through it all:

One of the happiest men that I ever knew—one whose serenity was
unassailable, whose cheerfulness was constant, and from whose
heart a perennial spring of sympathy and love bubbled up—was a
man against whom all the powers of misfortune were centered. He
belonged to the tailors—those cross-legged candidates for
consumption. He was miserably poor. Fly as fast as it could
through the endless pieces of broadcloth, his hand could not
always win crusts for his children. But he walked on and on; his
thin white fingers faltered bravely through their tasks as the
hours slipped away, and his serene white face bended forward
over the tedious cloth into which, stitch after stitch, he was
working his life—and, with once in a while a wistful look at the
gleaming sunshine and the floating clouds, he breathed heavily
and painfully of the poisoned air of his work-room, from which a
score of stronger lungs had sucked all the oxygen. And when, at
night, he would go home, and find that there were just crusts
enough for the little ones to eat, the capricious old fellow
would dream that he was not hungry; and when pressed to eat of
the scanty store by his sad and patient wife, would with an air
of smartness pretend a sacred lie—that he had dined with a
friend—and then, with a heart that swelled almost to bursting,
turn away to hide his glistening eyes. Hungry? Of course he was,
time and again. As weak as his body was, as faltering as was the
little fountain that sent the life-blood from his heart—as
meagre as were his necessities, I doubt if there was a time in
all the long years when he was not hungry.

Did you ever think of how many people have died out of this
world through starvation. Thousands! Not recorded in the books
as having died of starvation,—ah, no? Sometimes it is a thin and
watery sort of apoplexy—sometimes it is dyspepsia, and often
consumption. These terms read better. But there are thousands of
them, sensitive, shy gentlemen—too proud to beg and too honest
to steal—too straightforward to scheme or maneuver—too refined
to fill the public with their griefs—too heroic to whine—that
lock their sorrows up in their own hearts, and go on starving in
silence, weakening day after day from the lack of proper
food—the blood running slower and slower through their
veins—their pulse faltering as they pass through the various
stages of inanition, until at last, worn out, apathetic,
exhausted, they are struck by some casual illness, and lose
their hold upon life as easily and as naturally as the autumn
leaf, juiceless, withered and dry, parts from the bough to which
it has clung, and floats down the vast silence of the forest.

But my tailor was cheerful. Nothing could disturb his serenity.
His thin white face was always lit with a smile, and his eyes
shone with a peace that passed my understanding. Hour after hour
he would sing an asthmatic little song that came in wheezes from
his starved lungs—a song that was pitiful and cracked, but that
came from his heart so freighted with love and praise that it
found the ears of Him who softens all distress and sweetens all
harmonies. I wondered where all this happiness came from. How
gushed this abundant stream from this broken reed—how sprung
this luxuriant flower of peace from the scant soil of poverty?
From these hard conditions, how came this ever-fresh felicity?

After he had been turned out of his home, the tailor was taken
sick. His little song gave way to a hectic cough. His place at
the work-room was vacant, and a scanty bed in wretched lodgings
held his frail and fevered frame. The thin fingers clutched the
cover uneasily, as if they were restless of being idle while the
little ones were crying for bread. The tired man tossed to and
fro, racked by pain,—but still his face was full of content, and
no word of bitterness escaped him. And the little song, though
the poor lungs could not carry it to the lips, and the trembling
lips could not syllable its music, still lived in his heart and
shone through his happy eyes. “I will be happy soon,” he said in
a faltering way; “I will be better soon—strong enough to go to
work like a man again, for Bessie and the babies.” And he did
get better—better until his face had worn so thin that you could
count his heart-beats by the flush of blood that came and died
in his cheeks—better until his face had sharpened and his smiles
had worn their deep lines about his mouth—better until the poor
fingers lay helpless at his side, and his eyes had lost their
brightness. And one day, as his wife sat by his side, and the
sun streamed in the windows, and the air was full of the
fragrance of spring—he turned his face toward her and said: “I
am better now, my dear.” And, noting a rapturous smile playing
about his mouth, and a strange light kindling in his eyes, she
bended her head forward to lay her wifely kiss upon his face.
Ah! a last kiss, good wife, for thy husband! Thy kiss caught his
soul as it fluttered from his pale lips, and the flickering
pulse had died in his patient wrist, and the little song had
faded from his heart and gone to swell a divine chorus,—and at
last, after years of waiting, the old man was well!

There was nothing strained or artificial in the sentiment that led him to dwell so constantly on the theme of home and home happiness. The extracts I have given are merely the rough lecture notes which he wrote down in order to confirm and congeal his ideas. On the platform, while following the current of these notes, he injected into them the quality of his rare and inimitable humor, the contrast serving to give greater strength and coherence to the pathos that underlay it all. I do not know that I have dwelt with sufficient emphasis on his humor. He could be witty enough on occasion, but the sting of it seemed to leave a bad taste in his mouth. The quality of his humor was not greatly different from that of Charles Lamb. It was gentle and perennial—a perpetual wonder and delight to his friends—irrepressible and unbounded—as antic and as tricksy as that of a boy, as genial and as sweet as the smile of a beautiful woman. Mr. Grady depended less on anecdote than any of our great talkers and speakers, though the anecdote, apt, pat, and pointed, was always ready at the proper moment. He depended rather on the originality of his own point of view—on the results of his own individuality. The charm of his personal presence was indescribable. In every crowd and on every occasion he was a marked man. Quite independently of his own intentions, he made his presence and his influence felt. What he said, no matter how light and frivolous, no matter how trivial, never failed to attract attention. He warmed the hearts of the old and fired the minds of the young. He managed, in some way, to impart something of the charm of his personality to his written words, so that he carried light, and hope, and courage to many hearts, and when he passed away, people who had never seen him fell to weeping when they heard of his untimely death.