Chapter II

Colonel Dugald Forth, my grandfather, fought very bravely through the war, from first Manassas to Appomattox. He saw two sons and a brother slain, and many kinsmen and many friends. He was five times wounded, and the last hurt, at Cold Harbor, made him limp through life. He had put all the money he could raise into Confederate bonds. "The government must be supported, sir!" He had seen his government go down into the Swire Deep of lost governments. The bonds were worthless. When he came home, after the Surrender, to Restwell, it was to find the house standing, and that was better fare than had many of his neighbors and friends. But the negroes were free, and were gone, most of them, to the four winds. Those that stayed were the inwardly attached, and that, in a case like this, meant chiefly the elderly. And, staying, they must henceforth not only be clothed, housed, and fed, but paid. He did not see whence the money was to come with which to do it. It was springtime when he came home. The fields lay unplowed, unplanted, unkempt, desolate. The fences had disappeared. The cattle, the horses, were gone from the meadow-land. Where was stock to come from--implements--seeds even? Who would labor the fields? The earth of the plantation stood, and the old pillared, brick house. Behind, at the foot of Lone Tree Hill, were the quarters, three-fourths deserted. Over by the big oak rose the overseer's house. But his old overseer was dead, killed at Sharpsburg. He could not get, nor did he need, a new one. Down by the creek he saw a ruin where had been his mill. He could not rebuild.

The bridge was gone from over the river. He had to find and cross by the old ford. Restwell, at that time, stood eight miles from a railway. He rode these miles over a highway, unmended for so long that it must have forgotten the very look of road-menders. The railroad--the railroads--by which he had traveled from Richmond were painful, decrepit things. The fields to either side lay fenceless, turned out, dead. The villages, the wayside houses, had a beaten look. Gaunt chimneys stood up, all that was left of burned homes. All the South was broken down. My grandfather loved the South. Before him and his region, to be traveled, perforce, ran the painful bitter road of the years after the war. Generosity is a great virtue and is slow of acquisition. It hung over North and South, it descended here and there, but in these years there was little common, public attempt to bring it down and mix it with the daily bread.

Colonel Dugald Forth came home. My grandmother met him with ejaculations of thankfulness and welcome. His unmarried daughter, my aunt Sarah, clung about him. My mother, his widowed daughter-in-law, came with the genial look behind the tears in her eyes. I was set upon his knee. Mammy came and Uncle Plutus and Aunt Esther.

"We'll begin again, Dugald!"

"Father, they're here still--around and with us--a cloud of sharers! And here's Michael to grow up and help you!"

Courage in any form insures a possible courage elsewhere. My grandfather, at fifty-five, took up an altered life and walked with it bravely. The year after the war my grandmother died. I can remember her--a small, active, gallant woman. My mother and I lived on at Restwell. The man to whom my aunt Sarah had been betrothed had died in the third year of the war, a prisoner at Camp Chase. Her life was at this time almost wholly subjective, a dreamy intercourse with the past and with the future across the grave. My grandmother, feeling herself going, had turned to my mother. "Cary, you take the housekeeping. You make them comfortable!" Later, when they were all around her, in the dead of night, she opened her eyes and said, "My key-basket to Cary!" Then she took her husband's hand and held it, and with her odd, inscrutable smile, died.

So my mother took the reins that she dropped. My mother had a strong power of liking and loving. And as she gave she drew. My grandfather, my aunt Sarah, the servants, the place, took light and warmth from her, and gave her from their own store, great or small. She was a flame-kindler, a beneficent ferment. Kindred and acquaintance differed from her at many points, would sometimes hotly argue with her. But the level lifted where she was.

Uncle Gilchrist was the youngest of my grandfather's children. Nineteen when he fought in the battle to be seen from Lone Tree Hill, he was presently transferred to the Army of Tennessee and henceforth fought out of Virginia. When the end came he was artillery captain, somewhere far south. Thence he wrote that as soon as might be he would go to Mexico. He went, and Restwell heard of him as fighting with Juarez. At very long intervals came a letter to his father.

My father was dead, and my uncle Robert. Uncle Gilchrist was in Mexico. Aunt Sarah lived at Restwell. There were left my aunts Harriet and Kate--Mrs. Warringer, Mrs. Dallas. Aunt Harriet lived in Richmond, Aunt Kate at Flowerfield, in the next county. The husbands of both were living--General Warringer, Major Dallas, the latter with an empty sleeve--but both men were impoverished, involved, like the rest of our world, in the huge debacle. They could not help Colonel Forth.

My grandfather took up his burden. Trouble of the past and of the present, a cloudy day overspreading, to him, the future, made it somewhat grim and heavy. Men like him--like Warringer, like Dallas--must somehow hold the time until children like me, like Warringer's five and Dallas's four, grew up to improve it. The present work was to keep the South--Virginia--the heritage's head above water. That must be done despite very complete poverty, despite disfranchisement, despite a stinging cloud of daily defeats, despite a veritable upas-tree of memory, perpetually waving a welcome, perpetually murmuring, "Come, sleep under me!"

My grandfather assumed his task, but it bent him like the stony masses that they bear in the first round of the Mountain of Purgatory.

He must find an inner way to make it lighter, since there was no outer way. He first tried blind, proud endurance, an exoteric Stoicism. After a time this broke down. He began to be a reader, a ponderer. Restwell owned a very fair number of books. The Forths possessed a good many, and my mother had brought with her from her old home in eastern Virginia her inherited portion of a considerable and well-chosen library. My grandfather turned from book to book. At last, in two or three quartos, he came upon Swedenborg.

Despite Scotch blood and name, the Restwell Forths were Episcopalians. Every Sunday, in the old time, the old, roomy, high-swung carriage, the two sleek, strong chestnuts, and Mingo or Daniel on the box, had taken the women of the family to St. Matthew's, in the oak-grove, in the middle of Whitechurch. Colonel Forth and his sons had ridden there. In the new time, in fine weather, my mother and Aunt Sarah walked the two miles. In bad weather the two farm-horses were put to the old carriage, rusty now and shaken, and Uncle Plutus, rusty too, drove them to St. Matthew's. My grandfather, alone, rode upon Selim, brought somehow through the war, but old now and with a trick of stumbling.

The Rev. Thomas Millwood belonged to St. Matthew's and St. Matthew's to him. He also belonged to Whitechurch and Whitechurch to him. And to the county at large and the county to him. And likewise to Virginia and Virginia to him. When the war clanged down upon us he became a fighting chaplain. Then the army belonged to him and he to the army. After the Surrender all the one-time comrades-in-arms belonged to him and he to them. Later in history, I do not think that he missed a single Confederate reunion. A younger man than my grandfather, the two had been at the university in the same half-decade. They had an affection for each other. There was Mrs. Millwood, but she moved like a cool, pale moon around the orb in activity that was her husband. The pair had no children, but relatives, temporarily stranded, were always more or less permanently at home in the pleasant, large-gardened, brick parsonage around the corner from St. Matthew's.

During and after the war, the Millwoods, too, must cut the cloth of life after altered patterns. Old, pleasant, easy living and giving had to be relinquished. The toll-gate bar swung decisively across the road of expenditure. They gave up much, but kept their dogmas.

Mr. Millwood always spoke of himself as an active Christian. He preached good orotund sermons, and he practised a thousand brotherly charities and kindlinesses. He had, though always within his own frontiers, a strong social gift. I think that he was an active Christian, though perhaps not as active as he considered himself.

His marked impatiences were with religious doubts: "How _can_ you doubt, sir? Here--and here! Isn't it plain?" And with tokens of a changing mind where social and political theories were in question: "Change, sir! Look at the French Revolution! Look at the French character to-day! Look at this tragic country! What has brought about all these horrors? Old ways not good enough! Unrest! Minds bitten by tarantulas! What has been the result--is it lovely and of good report? Look at the Northern character!"

Mr. Millwood came often to Restwell. All there, white and black, had an old fondness for him, for all could remember many a goodness. He was a large man, with a broad, fresh-colored face and a manner at once bluff and cordial. He came one afternoon and stayed to supper, the moon being full and the night fitted for a ride back to Whitechurch on his most venerable gray Dobbin. After supper, upon the porch, while they smoked, my grandfather opened upon his inner preoccupations.

"I read more than I used to, you know, Millwood--turn things over more in my mind. Origins and destinies, and so forth, you know. I happened, a while ago, upon Swedenborg."

"Ah yes! Swedenborg! I tried to read him once and couldn't," said Mr. Millwood. "'Origins and destinies!' Stick to Moses, Colonel, and to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and to Paul!"

"Swedenborg says that he is only giving the spiritual sense of the Scriptures."

"Haven't you all your life heard given the spiritual sense of the Scriptures? What is the pulpit for?"

"Yes, I know. But somehow.... We take help where we are lucky enough to find it, Millwood!"

"Don't you go wandering after nightshade thinking you're getting strawberries! Swedenborg!"

"If God is Total and Divine Man--"

"God is God, and man is man! I must say that you surprise me, Forth--"

"As a commentary--"

"Heterodoxy always begins as a commentary! You stick to the plain letter of the Bible! Look where the age is being led! Emerson and Beecher--this man Darwin in England--wild theories of communism--women forgetting their nature! For God's sake, Forth, don't you be running after strange idols! Don't you become a betrayer!"

Now loyalty stood very high in my grandfather's scale of virtues. For some days after this conversation he read no more Swedenborg. Indeed, he read nothing. It happened to be a depressing week. Poverty bore hard upon the South; unmagnanimous political measures were abroad. There fell a chill rain. The crops at Restwell proved small, and yet, such as they were, it was hard to get them gathered. The interest was due on the mortgage he had had to place. Colonel Forth's shoulders were beginning to be bowed.

One day, when it rained too much to be out in the fields, he took from his desk the small Testament which he had carried through the war. He had read in it not infrequently during those four years. But the reading had been more or less perfunctory, blind, unintelligent. What the book had chiefly given him was a sense of protection, of lightness in having it upon his person. It had been something very like an amulet, a fetish. It had turned no bullets, averted no saber strokes, but the feel of it under his gray vest had been a help to strength. Once he had missed it. There had been a desperate charge, a hand-to-hand fight. At the first possible instant he returned to the scene of this, and, at risk of death or capture, picked the book out of a bloodstained, trampled hollow.

Now he sat down before the long window, with the sobbing day outside, and opened the Testament. It opened at the Letter to the Romans. The Colonel read, and now he touched idea where before had been uncomprehended sound. He held the book in his hand and sat gazing out at mist and rain. "I see," he thought. "But Swedenborg helped me to see. Where is the harm, then, in Swedenborg?" He kept on thinking. "Paul explained, interpreted.... Why should interpretation stop when everything here was bound together? ... _It has never stopped. It is going on now._"

My grandfather began now to read both the Bible and Swedenborg. It was a comfort to him when he dug from the latter that members of all churches might apprehend the Church above--the New Church--and yet still sit among old congregations. He did not want to cease to go to St. Matthew's. He did not want to break with Millwood, or his neighbors, or kin. He did not want the county to talk about Colonel Forth and his defections. He only wanted all helps toward finding a shore above his wasted world. Presently he began to read other mystics besides Swedenborg. And now the Bible was often in his hands. He acquired a habit of shaking or of nodding his head in church, at first only at points in the sermon. Fortunately, St. Matthew's construed this as a slight palsy, creeping upon the colonel and manifesting itself at inconvenient seasons.

Now I begin to remember my grandfather as he appeared to a small boy. He was a tall, bent man, with a beard, with dreamy blue eyes and lines of care above them. He had a deep voice, somewhat drawling and caressing--what is called "a Southern voice." I used to follow him about--field or orchard or barn--wherever he was going. And often I rode behind him on Selim.

I was very fond of him. His long silences did not trouble me. There was always so much to see or to think about while he was saying nothing. When he did speak his voice wrapped me like a deep, old wood, half melancholy, slow, and always kind. He answered my questions, too, with a satisfying open door in the answer. In that he and my mother were alike. When, by the next day, I had found another closed door to which the open door had led, he did his best, with a simple seriousness, with this one also.

Dear grandfather! Dear old movements about the old Restwell place! Dear childhood! I go there now at will. I move or sit or stand at will in the bright and tender world of Memory. I alter there where I see that alteration is needed. I condense or expand, strengthen or disintegrate. I hasten or linger, I heighten, widen, and deepen. I recognize form within form. The "irrecoverable Past"--there is no such thing! I treat my past as an artist should. It is mine and I visit my vineyard when I will. I prune and tend the vineyard. I make wine from the grapes, and in one chalice, in deep moments, know my past's essence. "My" past! These pronouns are the bane of existence. "My" past is the past--all the past. And where has the past gone to? It is very sufficiently here! Open the gate and go into it at your will. There is not even a gate; there is no barrier.