Chapter V (2)

She put out her hands blindly before her as she reached the head table and heard them cheering her husband’s name—and her own. She felt her way into her place. She glanced down into her husband’s surprised face and gave a terrified semblance of a smile. Then the whole room seemed to fuse before her. She has never been able to recollect connectedly the events of that evening.

The dinner began, progressed, and, after the manner of all dinners, at last ended. Sam Hod arose. He clinked on a water-glass with his knife. The hallful saw him and gradually grew quiet.

It was a beautiful speech that the editor made. He began with the part Vermont has played in every war in which America has ever engaged. He told the story of the boys who marched away in ’61 behind John Farrington. He recounted the story of Captain Farrington’s death; the succession of “Jack Fuller the First” to the place of honor in the Company, the brilliant war-record of the regiment. He told of the home-coming; of the banquet fifty-two years before. He told smoothly of the events leading up to America’s entry into the war. His quotation of the President’s famous indictments against Germany brought ovation after ovation from the home-folks, who were worked up to hysterical pitch. And when it was over the editor said:

“To-night, before sitting down to this farewell banquet to our sons, many of whom are going away from us never to return—to-night I was the recipient of a strange request. It came from the last survivor of that famous Company of Sixty-two who fifty-two years ago saw Dashing Captain Jack Fuller of glorious memory, raise aloft this receptacle of rare vintage and propose a dramatic thing.

“This was the request: By some strange fate the evening when the last toast was to be given to the illustrious dead comes at the terrifically tragic moment when the sons of many of these men are going forward to offer their lives in a new democracy. It has been suggested that nothing could have more approval from Dashing Captain Jack himself—or from all of those one hundred and six brave men who have crossed from the battlefields of earthly life into a blessed reward for their altruism—than that this toast should be given after all—if not by the two survivors, then by the leader of the local heroes who have volunteered to go “Over There” and by their sacrifice make the earth a finer, fairer, better place in which to dwell. “The Toast to Forty-five,” famous for fifty-two years, will be given at last amid this assembly of another quota of the Union’s soldiers about to go forth to preserve the same great principle for which their fathers laid their all upon the altar.”

There was silence for a time. Then came another attempt at another ovation. But it died in the excitement of the thing transpiring at that speaker’s table.

Sam Hod was opening the famous vintage.

The seal was broken. Out of that glass retainer came costly sparkling liquor, fifty-two years the prize relic of Farrington Post. Sam reached over. The two glasses of Uncle Joe Fodder and Captain Jack he filled to the brim. He stepped back—back from between Uncle Joe and Captain Jack—that they might click the rims of their slender goblets together.

“Gentlemen,” cried Uncle Joe in that breathless moment—“The Toast—to—Forty-five!”

Every military man in that room arose to his feet.

Uncle Joe’s withered old lips moved in the sunken face. The skinny hand holding the wine-glass trembled so that the beverage spilled over the edge and splashed on the white table-cloth like a clot of blood.

“Here’s to the gallant Forty-five,” he cried in a high-pitched, crackly voice. “Here’s to Captain John Farrington. And here’s to the men of Company Sixty-two and their posterity. Here’s to—here’s to Captain Jack Fuller and _his_ posterity—”

It was an unfortunate sentence at an unfortunate time.

_Jack Fuller’s posterity!_

Through the lad’s brain must have flashed a picture of a scene in his sitting-room months before when he had paid a fearful price for—something! He had promised— He had promised— He looked around the room. Hundreds of eyes were upon him as he stood there, splendid and erect in olive drab. He glanced around his own table, too. And in that instant he saw—the pale, wan features of his wife!

His arm still holding awkwardly aloft the glass, Jack looked into the faces of that crowd flanking the tables and walls of that great hall.

Something came to him—the scenes, the associations—reincarnation, perhaps—the blood of his forefathers—heredity—in that great instant he was prompted to do a great and dramatic thing for the joy of the spectacular, the call of the dramatic.

Out of Joe Fodder’s toothless mouth came voiceless words—

“I’ve—gone and forgot my speech! You say something, Jack. You say it!”

Sam Hod racked his brain for words to save the situation. All Paris waited. And then—in the silence—came a rich, strong, boyish voice:

“I’ll give a toast—to Forty-five!”

It was Captain Jack. Two hundred pairs of eyes were fixed upon him. He knew perfectly that two hundred pairs of eyes were fixed upon him.

This is the thing that he did:

Deliberately into his dirty coffee-cup he poured the blood-red liquid. As his grandfather would have done, with the same exaggerated flourish the boy took from his pocket a snow-white handkerchief. With that napkin he wiped flawlessly the delicate receptacle which had held the liquor. Then he leaned over. From a glass pitcher he poured into that cleansed wine-glass its fill of pure cold sparkling water. In an instant he held it aloft.

“Fellows!” he cried. “A toast! a toast not with wine—for wine with its blood-color belongs to the times which are going—which we hope are passing forever—I’m drinking a toast with crystal water—emblematic of the clean white civilization which is coming—for which we’re going ‘Over There’ to fight and die.

“Here’s to every man who ever did a noble thing; volunteering his strength to help protect the weak! Here’s to every lad who ever fought out the terrible question in his heart and put the Greater Good above his life-hopes and ambitions. Here’s to every soul that ever laid in the dark, thinking of those at home, knowing that in the charge of dawn he might become to them but a bitter-sweet memory of days when every hour was a golden moment and time but a thing to pass away. Here’s to the dead—the illustrious dead—those who fell in battle, those of Forty-five, the men of Sixty-two, the men of every age and every land who fought the good fight nobly, to the best that was in them—for the things they believed to be right—and have gone to take finer and better orders under a Greater General, the Commander of Commanders, the Prince of—Peace!”

He paused. He drew a long breath. He looked down the table. And he continued: “But along with our toast for the soldiers of the dead, boys—while the opportunity is ours—why not give also a toast—another kind of toast—to the soldiers of the living? Not ourselves, boys—but the ones—we’re leaving behind. It is little enough we can do for them!”

His gaze wandered up to his glass. In a strange, inspired voice, he cried softly:

“A toast!—a toast, also, to the truest and best soldiers of all—the mothers, the wives, and the girls we are leaving behind!

“Here’s to the toil-hardened hands who cared for us when as helpless little kids, we were unable to care for ourselves. Here’s to the tears they have shed over our little torn clothes; the pillows that have been wet in the midnight with anxiety, longing, and heartache that we might be spared to do our duty as men. Here’s to the anguish they have suffered, the prayers they have prayed, the sacrifices they have made, the toil they have borne—all to be laid on the altar of war, all to be wiped out in a moment, perhaps, by a splinter of shrapnel or the thrust of a bayonet. Here’s to the nobility of their anguish when they come to learn we are no more; and the beauty of their faces when the divinity in their hearts tells the story upon their care-lined foreheads that they would climb the same weary Golgotha again—go through the same Gethsemane—bear the same cross—though they knew all along the end which it meant.

“Here’s to the wives we loved in the days before War came upon us. Here’s to the promises they made us—to be ours until death came between us. Here’s to the suffering they have borne for our thoughtlessness; the hours when they have looked into the future and wondered if the love that we promised was worth the price they were paying. Here’s to the hopes and the fears, the joys and the sorrows that have come to them—that are coming to them now—that are coming to them in the years on ahead with ever greater portion. Here’s to their courage and noble endeavor, given so pathetically to us chaps who sometimes—forget. May we die as faithfully in the cause to which we have pledged ourselves as they will live in the memory of what-might-have-been in the lean years when there are forms sitting in fantasy beside them in the firelight and our voices are heard in the homes we made with them—no more.

“And here’s to the girls we are leaving behind! Here’s to the kisses they have given us under the stars of many summers—the memory of their hands and their lips and their eyes! Here’s to the weight in their souls and the pain that will hallow the memories that will haunt them through the years. Here’s to the sighs and the shadows, the heart-hopes and the longing! God grant in His goodness their fidelity is rewarded!

“These are the things to which we drink—the men of yesterday—and the memory of their heroism which has been—and the women of to-day and whose heroism is to be. With the great incentive of these two in our hearts, boys—let us drink and go away to fight like men—to honor the first—to sanctify the second.”

He clinked his glass against that of speechless Uncle Joe Fodder’s—and they drank—Uncle Joe drinking his wine with a hand which trembled so that the liquid stained his withered claw like a scarlet wound.

The hall was strangely silent.

Sam turned to his wife. “That boy never composed that beautiful speech alone, Mary,” he said—“not impromptu like that!”

Down the hall an old lady whispered to her daughter:

“Alice! Alice!—His grandaddy made just such a speech—almost word for word—the night John Farrington’s company bade us women-folks good-by.”

As the hall was being cleared for the big farewell dance, Sam came to the boy.

“Laddie,” he demanded, “where did you learn that speech?”

“What speech?” asked the boy.

“You know _what_ speech—the toast!”

“I don’t know, Mr. Hod. I just looked at the faces—and the wine—and—and—Betty!—and it just came out.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Sure, it’s the truth. What was it I said that was so awful wonderful?”

“Don’t you remember what you said?”

The boy laughed ashamedly. “—I couldn’t repeat it if it cost me my life,” he replied. “It—just—came—out!”

Late that night the old editor lay in his bed thinking of many things.

“The things in life are far stranger than the things in story books,” he said. Then in the velvet dark he whispered: “Strange! Strange!”

――――

Dashing Captain Jack Fuller, true to his blood and his birthright, went away on the following day at the head of his sturdy volunteers. They entrained at ten o’clock for Fort Ethan Allen.

Truly the boy did not remember the words of that toast which he gave that memorable evening. But one thing he does remember. He remembers the words of the girl he had married as he took her in his arms in those last few sweet moments following the final breakfast in the little home:

“It was the Nieson in me that didn’t want you to go, Jack,” she choked brokenly. “Up to last night I didn’t want you to go. But when you wouldn’t drink the wine—when you had the courage to do what you did in front of all those people—I was ashamed of my selfishness. Jackie dear—I’m the proudest, happiest, miserablest woman in all this town!”

He pressed her to him. He kissed her—an embrace that left her weak and limp.

“And you can count on me, Jack,” she said, “I’ll—do—my—duty—too! Even—if you should never come back; remember I said—I was sorry for the way I’ve acted; I’ll—do—my—duty—too!”

“Good-by, Betty!” he choked.

“Good-by—my soldier!” she lisped—bravely—piteously.

But she sent him away—with a smile!

She’s working now at her old place in Amos Wheeler’s box-shop. She closed down the little home on Pleasant Street partly because she could not keep up the expense, partly because she could not endure—the memories. She’s living out in her father’s old place at the far end of Cedar Street.

Poor little, dear little, brave little woman!

We know from his letters to our local paper, that Jack Fuller has reached France. The girl is alone, earning five dollars a week in the box-factory to support herself. The lad is “Over There” in the Whirlpool and the Nightmare—and where the fighting is thickest, there we believe Jack Fuller will be found.

But somehow, we feel that Jack Fuller will not fall. We feel there is coming a great and a glorious day for our little town of Paris up here in these mountains. In fancy we can see a morning when a great crowd is going to mill around and through the platforms and the railroad yards of our station. The hour is coming when a train whistle will sound far down the Greene River valley. The minutes will pass. The whistle will sound nearer. Finally in the lower end of the yards we will see a great furl of seething smoke from an oncoming locomotive. Another and a third whistle will shriek as a great high-breasted mogul comes bearing down upon us, seeming to cry out to us from the decreasing distance: “I’ve got them! I’ve got them! I’m bringing them back! Every mother’s son of them! They’re in these coaches I’m pulling behind me now!” And the train will come to a grinding stop, and amid cheer after cheer and the gyrations of the Paris band seeking to blow itself inside out, down from that train will come the soldiers of Uncle Sam—the boys who never have been and never can be whipped—great bronzed men with lean jaws, faces the hue of copper and muscles as hard as billets of steel. Car after car will disgorge them—men who met the Great Problem, offered themselves, ran the risk, fought the fight, gave their last full measure of devotion, and have come back home to women who cannot trust themselves to speak—only hold out their arms mutely.

And we feel certain that in that great day, after the Nightmare is over and the world is a fairer, better world, that one of those great bronzed heroes will gather up in his war-hardened arms a slender little girl in the plainest of white shirt-waists and black skirts, with the paste dried on the poor little workaday clothes and the worn shoes turning her step over cruelly. He will gather her up while the tears fall clumsily, for men do not know how to weep. And there will be no more weariness in her homeward walk in that twilight. After all, not all the boys are going to die. Many are coming back, hundreds of thousands of them. There will be other toasts to Forty-five pledged by the living. It must be so, for God still rules in His heaven and will make all right with the world.

Yet just now—for Betty Fuller—the way is lonesome and her pillow is wet with her tears in the midnight. But—

She sent her man away with a smile.
Poor little, dear little, brave little woman!
All over America her name is legion!

EXTRA MEN

_By_ HARRISON RHODES From _Harper’s Magazine_ _Copyright, 1918, by Harper and Brothers._ _Copyright, 1919, by Harrison Rhodes._

The pretty, peaceful Jersey farm-land slopes gently up from the Delaware River to the little hill which Princeton crowns. It is uneventful country. The railway does not cross it, nor any of the great motor trunk roads. On the river itself there is no town of considerable size, though on the map you read the quaint name of Washington Crossing for a little hamlet of a few houses. This will remind you of the great days when on these sleepy fields great history was made. But the fields have lain quiet in the sun now for more than a century, and even the legends of Revolutionary days are for the most part forgotten along these country roads.

As for modern legends, the very phrase seems proof of their impossibility. And in spite of her spacious and resounding past, New Jersey’s name now seems to mean incorporations and mosquitoes and sea-bathing and popcorn-crisp rather than either legend or romance. But with the coming of the Great War strange things are stirring in the world, and in the farthest corners of the land the earth is shaken by the tramp of new armies. In the skies by day and night there is a sign. And the things one does not believe can happen may be happening, even in New Jersey.

The small events on the Burridge Road which are here set down cannot even be authenticated. There are people down by the river who say they saw a single horseman go through the village at dusk, but not one seems to know which way he came. There is no ferry at Washington Crossing and the bridge at Lambertville had, since three that afternoon, been closed for repairs. What facts are set down here—and indeed they are scarcely facts—were acquired because a chauffeur missed the road and a motor then broke down. What story there is—and indeed there is perhaps not much story—has been pieced together from fragments collected that afternoon and evening. And if the chronicle as now written is vague, it can be urged that, though it all happened so recently as last year, it is already as indeterminate and misty as a legend.

We may, however, begin with undisputed facts. When her grandson enlisted for the war old Mrs. Buchan became very genuinely dependent on the little farm that surrounded the lovely old Colonial house on the Burridge Road. (Meadows, and horses, and hay and the quality and price of it, have much to do with our story—as, indeed, befits a rural chronicle.) The farm had been larger once, and the hospitality which the old house could dispense more lavish. Indeed, the chief anecdote in its history had been the stopping there once of Washington, to dine and rest on his way to join the army in New York. Old Mrs. Buchan, who, for all her gentleness, was incurably proud, laid special stress on the fact that on _that_ night the great man had not been at an inn—which was in the twentieth century to cheapen his memory by a sign-board appeal to automobile parties—but at a gentleman’s house. A gentleman’s house it still was; somehow the Buchans had always managed to live like gentlemen. But if George, the gay, agreeable last one of them, could also live that way, it was because his grandmother practised rigid heart-breaking economy. The stories of her shifts and expedients were almost fables of the countryside. When George came home—he had a small position in a New York broker’s office—there was gaiety and plenty. He might well have been deceived into thinking that the little he sent home from New York was ample for her needs. But when he went back his grandmother lived on nothing, or less than that. She dressed for dinner, so they said, in black silk and old lace, had the table laid with Lowestoft china and the Buchan silver, and ate a dish of corn-meal mush, or something cheaper if that could be found!

George Buchan’s enlistment—it was in the aviation service—had been early. And very early he was ordered to France to finish his training there. Two days before he expected his ship to sail the boy got a few hours’ furlough and came to the Burridge Road to say good-by to his grandmother.

What was said we must imagine. He was all the old lady had left in the world. But no one ever doubted that she had kissed him and told him to go, and to hold his head high as suited an American and a Buchan. Georgie would perhaps have had no very famous career in Wall Street, but no one doubted that he would make a good soldier. There had always been a Buchan in the armies of the Republic, his grandmother must have reminded him. And very likely Georgie, kissing her, had reminded her that there had always been a Buchan woman at home to wish the men God speed as they marched away, and told her too to hold her old head high.

There must have been some talk about the money that there wouldn’t be now; without his little weekly check she was indeed almost penniless. It is quite likely that they spoke of selling the house and decided against it. Part of the boy’s pay was of course to come to his grandmother, but, as she explained, there were so many war charities needing that, and then the wool for her knitting— She must manage mostly with the farm. There was always the vegetable-garden, and a few chickens, and the green meadow, which might be expected to yield a record crop of hay.

We may imagine that the two—old lady and boy—stepped out for a moment into the moonlit night to look at the poor little domain of Buchan that was left. Under the little breeze that drifted up from the Delaware the grass bent in long waves like those of the summer seas that Georgie was to cross to France. As the Buchans looked at it they might have felt some wonder at the century-old fertility of the soil. Back in the days of the Revolution Washington’s horse had pastured there one night. Then, and in 1812, and during the great battle of the States, the grass had grown green and the hay been fragrant, and the fat Jersey earth had out of its depths brought forth something to help the nation at war. Such a field as that by the old white house can scarcely be thought of as a wild, primeval thing; it has lived too long under the hand of man. This was a Buchan field, George’s meadow, and by moonlight it seemed to wave good-by to him.

“You aren’t dependent on me now, dear,” he may have said, with his arm around his grandmother. “I just leave you to our little garden patch and our chickens and the green meadow.”

“You mustn’t worry, dear. They’ll take care of me,” she must have answered.

So George went away; and the night after, the night before he sailed, the horseman and his company came.

――――

It was at dusk, and a gossamer silvery mist had drifted up from the Delaware. He had hitched his horse by the gate. He was in riding-breeches and gaiters and a rather old-fashioned riding-coat. And in the band of his hat he had stuck a small American flag which looked oddly enough almost like a cockade. He knocked at the door, quite ignoring the new electric bell which George had installed one idle Sunday morning when his grandmother had felt he should have been at church. As it happened, old Mrs. Buchan had been standing by the window, watching the mist creep up and the twilight come, thinking of Georgie so soon to be upon the water. As the horseman knocked she, quite suddenly and quite contrary to her usual custom, went herself to the door.

His hat was immediately off, swept through a nobler circle than the modern bow demands, and he spoke with the elaboration of courtesy which suited his age; for, though his stride was vigorous, he was no longer young. It was a severe, careworn face of a stern, almost hard, nobility of expression. Yet the smile when it came was engaging, and old Mrs. Buchan, as she smiled in return, found herself saying to herself that no Southerner, however stern, could fail to have this graceful lighter side. For his question had been put in the softer accents of Virginia and of the states farther south.

“I’ve lost my way,” he began, with the very slightest, small, gay laugh. But he was instantly serious. “It is so many, many years since I was here.”

Mrs. Buchan pointed up the road.

“That is the way to Princeton.”

“Princeton, of course. That’s where we fought the British and beat them. It seems strange, does it not, that we now fight with them?”

“We must forget the Revolution now, must we not?” This from Mrs. Buchan.

“Forget the Revolution!” he flashed back at her, almost angrily. Then more gently: “Perhaps. If we remember liberty!” He glanced an instant up the road to Princeton hill and then went on. “They fought well then, madam. As a soldier I am glad to have such good allies. But I was forgetting. Yonder lies Princeton, and from there there is the post-road to New York, is there not? I must be in New York by morning.”

Mrs. Buchan was old-fashioned, but she found herself murmuring amazedly something about railroads and motor-cars. But he did not seem to hear her.

“Yes,” he continued, “I must be in New York by morning. The first transport with our troops sails for France.”

“I know,” she said, proudly. “My grandson, George Buchan, sails for France.”

“George Buchan? There was a George Buchan fought at Princeton, I remember.”

“There was. And another George Buchan in the War of Eighteen-twelve. And a John in the Mexican War. And a William in eighteen sixty-three. There was no one in the Spanish War—my son was dead and my grandson was too young. But now he is ready.”

“Every American is ready,” her visitor answered. “I am ready.”

“You?” she broke out. And for the first time she seemed to see that his hair was white. “Are you going?”

“Every one who has ever fought for America is going. There is a company of them behind me. Listen.”

Down the road there was faintly to be heard the clatter of hoofs.

“Some joined me in Virginia, some as we crossed the Potomac by Arlington, where there is a house which once belonged to a relative of mine. And there were others, old friends, who met me as we came through Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. You would not now know Valley Forge,” he finished, half to himself.

The river mist had crept farther up and was a little thicker now. The moon had risen and the mist shimmered and shone almost as if by its own light. The world was indeed of the very substance of a dream. The hoofbeats on the road grew nearer, and at last, while old Mrs. Buchan stood in a kind of amazed silence, they came into sight, even then mere shadowy, dim, wavering figures behind the gossamer silver veil which had drifted there from the lovely Delaware. The horses looked lean and weary, though perhaps this was a trick of the moonlight. Yet they dropped their heads and began eagerly to crop the short, dusty grass by the roadside. The moonlight seemed to play tricks with their riders, too. For in the fog some of them seemed to have almost grotesquely old-fashioned clothes, though all had a sort of military cut to them. Some few, indeed, were trim and modern. But the greater part were, or seemed to Mrs. Buchan to be, in shabby blue or worn gray. The chance combination of the colors struck her. She was an old woman and she could remember unhappy far-off days when blue and gray had stood for the fight of brother against brother. Into her eyes the tears came, yet she suddenly smiled through them—a pair of quite young men lounged toward the fence, and then stood at ease there, the blue-clad arm of one affectionately and boyishly thrown around the other’s gray shoulder.

“These go with you?” asked old Mrs. Buchan, still held by her memories.

“Yes. They are of all kinds and all ages, and some of them were not always friends. But you see—” He smiled and pointed to the lads by the fence. “One of them is from Virginia and the other from Ohio. Virginia and Ohio fought once. But I only say that I can remember that Ohio was part of Virginia once long ago. And is not Virginia part of Ohio and Ohio part of Virginia again now? I should be pushing on, however, not talking. It is the horses that are tired, not the men.”

“And hungry?” suggested Mrs. Buchan.

“The horses, yes, poor beasts!” he answered. “For the men it does not matter. Yet we must reach New York by morning. And it is a matter of some five-and-fifty miles.”

“Rest a half-hour and let the horses graze. You can make it by sunrise.”

Mrs. Buchan went a little way down the path. It was lined with pink and white clove-pinks and their fragrance was sweet in the night.

“Open the gate there to the left, men,” she called out, and her voice rang, to her, unexpectedly strong and clear. “Let the horses graze in my green meadow if they will.”

They gave an answering cheer from out the mist. She saw the meadow gate swing open and the lean horses pass through, a long, long file of them.

“But they will spoil your hay crop,” objected the horseman. “And it should be worth a fair sum to you.”

Mrs. Buchan drew herself up. “It is of no consequence,” she answered.

He bowed again.

“But I don’t understand,” she almost pleaded, staring again at his white hair and the little flag in his hatband that looked so oddly like a cockade. “You say you sail to-morrow with my boy?”

“I think you understand as well as any one.”

“Do I?” she whispered. And the night suddenly seemed cold and she drew her little shawl of Shetland wool more tightly about her shoulders. Yet she was not afraid.

Her guest stooped and, rising, put one of her sweet-smelling clove-pinks in his button-hole.

“If you permit, I will carry it for your boy to France. We are extra men, supercargo,” he went on. “We shall cross with every boat-load of boys who sail for France—we who fought once as they must fight now. They said of me, only too flatteringly, that I was first in peace. Now I must be first in war again. I must be on the first troop-ship that goes. And I shall find friends in France. We have always had friends in France, I imagine, since those first days. Of course, madam, you are too young to remember the Marquis de la Fayette.”

“Yes, I am too young,” answered old Mrs. Buchan. And she smiled through her tears at the thought of her eighty years.

“You’re a mere chit of a girl, of course,” he laughed—one of the few times his gravity was relaxed. “Shall I know your boy, I wonder?” Then, without waiting for her answer, “The George Buchan who fought at the battle of Princeton was about twenty-two, slim and straight, with blue eyes and brown hair and an honest, gallant way with him, and a smile that one remembered.”

“You will know my boy,” she told him. “And I think he will know you, General.”

Even now she swears she does not quite know what she meant by this. The magic of the June night had for the moment made everything possible. Yet she will not to this day say who she thinks the horseman may have been. Only that George would know him, as she had.

“I want them all to know that I am there,” he had replied. “They will know. They will remember their country’s history even as we remember. And when the shells scream in the French sky they will not forget the many times America has fought for liberty. They will not forget those early soldiers. And they will not forget Grant and Lee and Lincoln. The American eagle, madam, has a very shrill note. I think it can be heard above the whistle of German shrapnel.”

――――

He drank a glass of sherry before he went, and ate a slice of sponge-cake. Perhaps altogether he delayed a scant quarter of an hour. The lean horses came streaming forth from the green meadow, a long, long file; and while the moon and the river mist still made it a world of wonder, the company, larger somehow than she had thought it at first, clattered off up the Princeton road toward New York and salt water and the ships.

The mist cleared for a moment and the great green meadow was seen, so trampled that it seemed that a thousand horses must have trampled it. Al Fenton, dignified by Mrs. Buchan as “the farmer,” had now belatedly roused and dressed himself. He stood by the old lady’s side and dejectedly surveyed the ruin of the hay crop. He is a sober, stupid, serious witness of what had happened. And this is important; for when the sun rose, and Mrs. Buchan opened her window, the breeze from the river rippled in long green waves over a great green meadow where the grass still pointed heavenward, untrampled, undisturbed. The Buchan meadow could still, as George had believed it would, take care of his grandmother.

This is the story, to be believed, or not, as you like. They do as they like about it in Jersey. But old Mrs. Buchan believes that with each American troop-ship there will sail supercargo, extra men. And she believes that with these extra men we cannot lose the fight. George, too, writes home to her that we shall win.

SOLITAIRE

_By_ FLETA CAMPBELL SPRINGER From _Harper’s Magazine_ _Copyright, 1918, by Harper and Brothers._ _Copyright, 1919, by Fleta Campbell Springer._

We were sitting—three Frenchmen, a young American named Homan, and I—in the café of one of those small Paris hotels much frequented, even then, by officers on leave. It was the winter of 1912, when the Balkans were playing out their colorful little curtain-raiser to the great drama which followed—playing it, as they say in the theater, “in one,” using only the very smallest part of the stage, and failing even in their most climactic moments to completely conceal the ominous sounds from behind the curtain where the stage was being set for the real business of the play.

At the tables a sprinkling of English and Americans of the usual transient type mingled with French from the provinces, and here and there a swarthy Balkan in uniform accented the room.

It was the presence of those other Americans—two or three, I should say, besides Homan and myself, though I hadn’t noticed particularly—that gave the special significance to Homan’s exclamation when he discovered Corey.

I saw him pause with his glass half raised—he was gazing straight past me over my shoulder—and a smile, meant for me, came into his eyes.

“Look!” he said, “at the American!”

I turned, because his manner indicated clearly enough that I might, squarely round in my chair, and immediately it was clear to me why he had said just that. Any one would have said it—any other American, I mean—which makes it more striking—and said it involuntarily, too. You couldn’t have helped it. And yet you would encounter a dozen perfectly unmistakable Americans every day in Paris without feeling the necessity for any remark. It was simply that Corey was so typically the kind of American you _wouldn’t_ encounter in Paris, or any other place, you felt, outside his own country. The curious thing about him was that instantly on seeing him, almost before you thought of America, you thought of a particular and localized section of America. You thought of the Middle West. There was something wholesome and provincial and colloquial about him. He was like a boy you’d gone to grammar school with—the kind of fellow to succeed to his father’s business and marry and settle down in his home town, with New York City his farthest dream of venture and romance.

Yet there he sat across the table from a dark-visaged Balkan officer who was carrying on the conversation in careful English—it would have been unimaginable that he should speak in anything _but_ English to him—and it may have been the brilliance of this man’s uniform which kept one, just at first, from seeing that he, too, our American, was wearing some sort of uniform, khaki color, very workman-like and shipshape, which might, if there had been the least chance of throwing us off, have thrown us. But his round, good-natured, uncomplicated face, his light brown hair and the way it was brushed—the very way it grew, like a school-boy’s—the comfortable set of his broad shoulders, his kind of energetic inclination to stoutness, and even the way he sat at the table, were pure American Middle West and nothing else, no matter what his uniform proclaimed. He was as American as the flag, as the opening bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” as American as Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa.

And when, at young Homan’s exclamation, I had turned and found him looking straight toward me, the twinkle of his eyes had the effect of a friendly wave of his hand. He had, of course, as he said afterward, “spotted us,” too. Then he had seen—and it amused him—the little play of our discovery.

I was just turning back to applaud to Homan the obviousness of his designation, and to wonder, with him, what the uniform meant, when my eye was caught by a thin, brilliantly colored line drawn, it seemed, just above the left breast pocket of his coat, and about the same length.

My first impression of the man, of the familiarity of his type, had, I suppose, been so strong as to dull for a moment my reaction to this discovery. I had seen that vari-colored line often enough before, on the uniforms of British officers or French; I had perhaps seen it on an American, but certainly I had never seen it on an American like this. No wonder the connection was slow to establish itself. It was a decoration bar, and there must have been six ribbons at least, if not more.

For sheer incongruous association, I doubt if you’d find a more pat example in a lifetime than the man I had, on sight, conceived this one to be—the man I may as well say now he actually _was_—and that bar of ribbons pinned on his khaki-colored coat.

Young Homan had caught it, too, and was sending past me his deliberate stare of amazement.

It was not exactly as if we thought he hadn’t come by them honestly, but more as if we suggested to each other that he couldn’t surely have got them in the way decorations were usually got; it seemed somehow impossible that he understood their importance. And there was still something of that in our attitude when, later on, after dinner, we had drifted into the _salon_ with the rest for our coffee, and by a kind of natural gravitation had found ourselves in conversation with our compatriot, whose jocose friendliness led young Homan to ask, half in fun to be sure, where he had got all the decorations. He showed certainly no very proper appreciation of their importance by his answer:

“Bought ’em, at the Galleries Lafayette. Get any kind you want there, y’ know.”

We laughed, all of us, for everybody had seen the cases of medals and decorations at the Galleries. I believe for an instant the youngster was half inclined to think he _had_ bought them. I know _I_ was. As some kind of outlandish practical joke, of course. It seemed, absurd as the idea was, so much likelier than that he could have been through the kind of experiences which result in being decorated by foreign governments. And such an imposing array! The scarlet ribbon of the Legion of Honor, the green of the Japanese “Rising Sun,” the brilliant stripes of Russian and English decorations, and strange ones I had never seen before!

You see, he had turned out much more Middle West than we had imagined. In the first ten minutes of our conversation he had spoken of “home,” and mentioned the name of the town—Dubuque, Iowa! And a few minutes later he gave us, by the merest chance phrase or two, involving the fact that his married sister lived “a block and a half down the street” from his mother’s house, a perfectly complete picture of that street—broad and shady and quiet, of his mother’s yellow frame house, and the other, white with a green lawn round it, where his sister lived. And the point was that he was making no effort toward such an effect. He was only being himself.

His dinner companion, the Balkan officer, came in presently and addressed Corey as “Doctor” (I adjusted myself to _that_, still with the Dubuque setting, however), and it was in the conversation following upon the new introduction that the object of his being in Paris came out. He told us, quite by the way, though not in the least depreciating the importance of his mission—that he was in Paris for a few days looking up anesthetics for the Serbian army. He had been working, he said, down in the Balkans since shortly after the outbreak of the war, in charge of a sanitary section. They’d been out of anesthetics for some time now—impossible to get them in—and they’d been operating, amputating the poor devils’ legs and arms, _without_ anesthetics; and now at last he’d left things long enough to come up to Paris himself and see what could be done. He was starting back the next day or the day after that.

Corey, from Dubuque! In a makeshift Serbian field hospital, in that terrible cold, performing delicate and difficult operations—wholesale, as they must have been performed—on wounded Balkan soldiers; probing for bullets in raw wounds—_that_ was a picture to set up beside the one we had of him in Dubuque!

And yet—it wasn’t at all a question of doubt (we’d read it all in the papers day after day); it wasn’t that we didn’t believe Corey was telling the truth; his evidence was too obvious for that—the picture didn’t somehow succeed in painting itself—I can’t to this day say why. Surely the Balkans just then—operations without anesthetics, the pageantry and blood-red color of war—surely there was pigment of more brilliant hue than any contained in the mere statement that his married sister lived a block and a half down the street from his mother’s. But the picture wasn’t painted. Corey wasn’t the artist to do it. Not, mind you, that he tried; he was as far from trying to impress one, from affectation, as a boy of fourteen.

I do remember my imagination taking me far enough to think that if I were a soldier, and wounded, and had to have a leg or an arm off, I couldn’t think of a man I’d rather have do it than Corey. Oh yes, I believed him; I knew he’d been down there in the Balkans, as he said, and was going back again to-morrow—but I went right on seeing him in Dubuque, practising his quiet, prosperous profession in the same suite of offices his father had used before him.

He himself lent, by the things he said, force and reality to the illusion. He’d like nothing better, he declared, than settling down in Dubuque for the rest of his life, and enjoying a home of his own. He intended, in fact, to do just that when he had finished the Balkan business. “I’m that type,” he said. “I never was meant to knock around the world like this.”

And he _was_ that type, so much the type that it seemed hardly credible he shouldn’t turn out the exception to prove the rule. He had already, one would think, made a sufficient divergence.

And that, I suppose—the feeling that no personality _could_ follow so undeviating a line, so obviously its own path—was responsible for my impression, when I came later to hear how completely he _had_ followed it, of his being because of it much more unique than he could ever have made himself by turning aside. True enough, there are people who, if they heard the tale, might maintain that he could hardly have accomplished a more striking divergence from type. I’ll have to confess I thought so myself—at the first; certainly I thought so all the while I listened, long afterward, to the quiet, though somewhat nasal, and thoroughly puzzled voice of the gentle old man from Dubuque, who seemed, as he recounted the story, to be seeking in me some solution of Corey’s phenomenon.

I thought it even afterward, until, sitting there where he had left me, I began slowly to orient the facts in relation to Corey’s character. And then, all at once, it came to me that it was exactly because Corey _hadn’t_ diverged that he did what he did. He went straight through everything to his predestined end. Any other man would have had stages, subtleties, degrees of divergence. But Corey knew none of those things.

It was from old Mr. Ewing of Dubuque that I had my first news of Corey after that night in the Paris hotel.

He must have gone back to his army in the Balkans the next day, for we were to have seen him that night again in case he had to stay over, and when I asked I was told that Monsieur had gone.

Things kept reminding me of him. The names of streets and places in Paris recalled his flat American mispronunciation of them—mispronunciations which sounded half as if he were in fun and half as if he didn’t know any better, or hadn’t paid enough attention to learn them correctly. I believe he saw, or was subconsciously aware of, his own incongruity. Still, one would think he’d have become, so to speak, accustomed to himself in the strange rôle by then.

I think I must have spoken of him rather often to people, so long as I remained in Paris; and it was, if not exactly curious, at least a little less than one would expect, that I never came in contact with any one else who knew him, until that day, a little while ago, when I met, in the smoking-car of a west-bound train out of Chicago, the man who told me all there was, or ever will be, for any man to tell about Corey.

He may have been sitting there near me all the time; I don’t know. But then he was not the kind of man one notices in a smoking-car, or any other place, for that matter. Certainly you would never suspect that so gray and uninteresting an envelope could inclose the manuscript of a story like Corey’s. You had seen hundreds like him before, and you knew what they contained—stereotyped circular letters full of dull, indisputable facts, nothing you wanted or cared to know. And it was precisely because I wished later on one of those very dull facts that I came to speak to my man.

The train coming to a sudden stop brought me out of my oblivion, and, looking idly out of the window to see what place it might be, I was seized by one of those fits of petty annoyance incident to such interruptions, for the train had run so far past the platform that I found it impossible to see the name of the station. I got myself out of my comfortable position, and tried, by turning completely about, to see back to the station. But we had gone too far. And then—I haven’t an idea why, for it was of absolutely no importance to me—I looked about for some one to ask. And nearest me, sitting rather uncomfortably upright in his big leather chair, the little rack at his elbow guiltless of any glass, and holding listlessly in his hand the latest popular magazine, sat a gray-haired, gray-suited old gentleman, looking lonesomely out of his window.

“I beg pardon,” I said. “Can you tell me what place this is?”

He turned gratefully at the sound of my voice. “It’s ——,” he told me. I’ve never been able to recall what name he said, because, I suppose, of what came after.

It was certainly not surprising that he should think, from my manner, that I had some interest in the place, and he went on, after a moment’s hesitating silence, to say, in his unobtrusive but unmistakable Middle-West voice, that the town was a milling center—flour and meal, and that kind of thing.

I saw that I had committed myself to something more in the way of conversation than my laconic word of thanks for his information and a lapse into silence. I wondered what I could say. He was such a nice, kindly old gentleman, and he would never in the world have addressed any one first. I hit upon the most obvious sequence, and asked if, then, he was familiar with that part of the country. He said, oh yes, he was “a native of Iowa.”

“Indeed?” I said, for lack of anything else to say, and his statement not having been a particularly provocative one.

“Yes,” he said. “My home is Dubuque.”

Dubuque! Dubuque! What was it I knew about Dubuque? The name struck me instantly with a sense of importance, as if it had rung the bell of a target concealed out of sight. I sought about in my mind for a full minute before I recalled, with a kind of start—Corey.

So many things had come in between—bigger things than any one man—and overlaid all the pictures that had gone before. Overlaid them with pigment so crude, so roughly applied, that one neither saw nor remembered anything else. All the nations of Europe loosed in the Great War, and America straining hard at her worn leash of neutrality. Small wonder that Corey, of Dubuque, along with countless other memories of that pale time, had faded into a dim, far perspective.

And yet, the sound of that name had brought him—as clearly as I had seen him that night in Paris—before me. I heard his voice, felt the vigor of his personality, saw him throw back his head and laugh. And here, in the chair next my own, and ready to talk, sat a man who, by every rule of probability and chance, would be able to tell me about him.

“I know a townsman of yours,” I said, and he evinced at once a kind of mild and flattered surprise.

“From Dubuque?” he said. “Well, well! What’s his name?”

“Corey,” I said. “Doctor Corey.”

It had upon him a most unexpected effect; very much, it seemed, the same effect his announcement had had upon me the moment before. He leaned forward no more than an inch, but his mild gray eyes kindled with a kind of excited intensity.

“You knew Jim Corey! Not here—not in Dubuque?”

“I met him in Paris,” I said, “quite a long while ago.”

“In _Paris_! Well, well—think of that!”

He shook his head, and regarded me suddenly with a stronger and new kind of interest. I was, apparently, the first person he had ever encountered who had really known Corey abroad, and I could see that the fact had established me immediately in his mind as an intimate friend of Corey’s. I suppose I should have told him that I had only seen Corey once; that I couldn’t, as a matter of fact, claim more than a passing acquaintance. But if I had, I should never have heard what I heard. And, anyway, it wouldn’t have been, in the sense in which such things count, exactly true—for it had never been, for me at least, a one night’s acquaintance. I had seemed to know Corey better in that one night than one knows most men in a month of companionship. Yes, it was something more than the curiosity of a passing acquaintance that caused me to let the old fellow keep his impression.

“It’s queer,” he said, suddenly, throwing up his head, and pressing open the pages of his popular magazine as if he were about to begin to read, “he was a kind of relative of mine. His father and I—third cousins on our mothers’ side.” He broke off and regarded me again silently, and I believe now that he was trying to persuade himself not to go on, not to say anything more. But the temptation, the maximum, I might say, of temptation, combined with the minimum of danger that he should ever see me again, overcame his natural shyness and discretion. He seemed to decide, upon my ejaculation, to go on.

“His house is just ’round the corner from mine. His wife lives there now.”