Kitabı oku: «Those Times and These», sayfa 12
Obediently Red Hoss offered his features for renovation. From his pocket Jeff hauled out a handkerchief; hauled something else out, too – only Red Hoss didn’t see that. He made pretense of wrapping a forefinger in the handkerchief; but it was not a finger tip that carefully encircled both of Red Hoss’ blinking eyes, pressing firmly against the moist black flesh, and then outlined his nose and passed in rings round his mouth, above the upper lip and below the lower one.
“Hole up!” protested Red Hoss. “You’s rubbin’ too hard. Yore finger nail hurts me.”
“Stay still!” urged Jeff. “I’s ‘most th’ough.” Craftily, with a fresh match, he touched the outer and the inner corners of Red Hoss’ eyes and the lobes of his ears; and then he drew off, almost appalled himself by the ghastliness of his own handicraft, as revealed in the dark.
“Come along, Red Hoss. An’ don’t furgit whut you’s goin’ to say w’en I opens de hall do’ fur you.”
“Ain’t furgittin’ nothin’,” promised Red Hoss.
Their two figures, closely interwoven – one steering and supporting; the other being steered and being supported – passed in the murk round the back corner of Odd Fellows’ Hall, to bring up at the foot of a flight of rough wooden stairs, built on against the wall for added protection and as an added means of exit from the upper floor in case of fire, fight or flight. Here the hardest part of Jeff’s job began. He had to boost Red Hoss up, step by step.
Above, the most successful watch party ever conducted under the auspices of the Supreme Kings of the Universe had progressed almost to its apogee. It was now six minutes before the hour when, according to no less an authority than the late Bard of Avon, churchyards yawn and graves give up their sheeted dead. The principal orator, with his high collar quite wilted down and his face, behind his spectacles, slick and shiny with sweat, reached his conclusion, following a burst of eloquence so powerful that his hearers almost could hear the Tophet fires crackling beneath their tingling feet.
“An’ now, my dearly beloved sistern an’ brethem,” he proclaimed, in a short peroration to his longer one – “an’ now I commands you to think on the fix this pore transgressor must be in at this very minute, cut off ez he wuz in the midst of his sins an’ his shortcomin’ses. Think on yore own sins an’ yore own shortcomin’ses. Think, an’ think hard! Think, an’ think copious!”
His voice swung downward to the more subdued cadence of the semiconversational tone: “The hour of midnight is ‘most at hand. In acco’dance wid the programme I shell now turn off the lights, an’ this gatherin’ will set in the solemn communion of darkness fur five minutes, till the New Yeah comes.”
He stepped three paces backward and turned a plug set in the wall close to the door jam. All over the hall the bulbs winked out. Nothing was to be seen, and for a few seconds nothing was heard except the sound of the minister’s shuffling movements as he felt his way back to his place at the front of the platform, and, below him, in the body of the hall, the nervous rustle of many swaying bodies and of twice as many scuffling feet.
On the far side of the closed rear door crouched Jeff, breathless from his recent exertions, panting whispered admonitions in the ear of his co-conspirator. Red Hoss was impatient to lunge forward. He wanted to surge in right now. But Jeff held fast to him. Jeff could sense a psychological moment, even if he could not pronounce one.
“Wait jes’ one secont mo’ – please, Red Hoss!” he entreated. “Wait twell I opens dis yere do’ fur you. Den you bulge right in an’ speak up de words ‘Here I is!’ loud an’ clear. You won’t furgit’dat part, will you?”
“‘On’t furgit nothin’!” muttered Red Hoss. “Jes’ watch my smoke – dat’s all!”
With his ear against a thin panel, Jeff listened; listened – and smiled. Through the barrier he heard the preacher’s voice saying:
“All present will now unite in singin’ the hymn w’ich begins: Hark! From the Tombs a Doleful Soun’!”
Softly, oh, so softly, Jeff’s fingers turned the doorknob; gently, very gently, he drew the door itself half open; with the whispered admonition “Now, boy, now!” he swiftly but silently propelled Red Hoss, face forward, through the opening.
The Reverend Grasty stood waiting for the first words of the hymn to uprise from below him in a mighty swing. But from that unseen gathering down in front a very different sound came – a sound that was part a gasp of stupefaction, part a groan of abject distress. For the rest saw what the minister, as yet, did not see, by reason of his back being to the wall, where-as they faced it. They saw, floating against a background of black nothingness, a face limned in wavering pulsing lines of a most ghastly witch fire – nose and brow and chin and ears, wide mouth and glaring eyes, all wreathed about by that unearthly graveyard glow.
In that same flash of space Jeff Poindexter’s hand had found the switch, set in the wall hard by the door casing, and had flipped the lights on. And now before them they beheld the form of the late Red Hoss Shackleford, his face seamed with livid greyish streaks, his garments all adrip, his arms outspread, his eyes like balls of flame, and his lips agleam with a palish blush, as though he had hither come direct from feasting on the hot coals of Perdition, without stopping to wipe his mouth. And then he opened that fearsome scupper of a mouth, and in a voice thickened and muddy – the proper voice for one who had lain for days in river ooze – he spoke the words:
“Here I is!” That was all he said. But that was enough.
It is believed that the Reverend Grasty was the first to move. Naturally he would be among the first, anyhow, he being the nearest of all to the risen form of the dead. He spread himself like an eagle and soared away from there; and when he lit, he lit a-running. Indeed, so high did he jump and so far outward that, though he started with a handicap, few there were who beat him in the race to the door.
Smooth Crumbaugh was one who beat him. Smooth feared neither man nor beast nor devil; but ha’nts were something else! He took a flying start, spuming the floor as he rose up over chairs and their recent occupants. Without checking speed, he clove a path straight through the centre of Sister Eldora Menifee’s refreshment department; and on the stairway, going down, he passed the Most High Grand Outer Guardian as though the Most High Grand Outer Guardian had been standing still.
It was after he struck the sidewalk, though, and felt the solid bricks beneath his winged feet, that Smooth really started to move along. For some ten furlongs he had strong competition, but he was leading by several lengths when he crossed Yazoo Street, eight blocks away, with the field tailing out behind him for a matter of half a mile or so.
I might add that Sister Rosalie Shackleford, hampered though she was by skirts and the trappings of woe, nevertheless finished inside the money herself.
Jefferson Poindexter, calm, smiling and debonair, picked his way daintily among overthrown chairs and through a litter of hats, helmets, umbrellas and swords across the hall to Ophelia, who, helpless with shock, was plastered, prone and flat on the floor, close up against the side wall, where Smooth had flung her as he launched himself in flight.
Right gallantly Jeff raised her to her feet and supported her; and right mainfully she clung to him, inclosing herself, all distracted and aquiver, within the circle of his comforting arms. Already they were almost alone and within a space of moments would be entirely so, except for one fat auntie, lying in a dead faint under the wrecked snack stand.
Also there still remained Red Hoss Shackleford, who wavered to and fro upon the platform, with a hand to his bewildered brow, trying foggily to figure out just how he had been thwarted of his just retribution upon the persons of those vanished arch-detractors of him. He had had his revenge – had it sugar-sweet and brimming over – only he didn’t know it yet.
“Oh, Jeffy,” gasped Ophelia, “wuzn’t you skeered too?”
“Who – me?” proclaimed Jeff. “Me skeered of a wet nigger, full of stick gin? Fair lady, mebbe I don’t keer so much fur gittin’ my clothes all mussed up fightin’ wid bully niggers, but I ain’t never run frum no ghostes yit; an’ I don’t never aim to, neither – not ‘thout waitin’ round long ‘nuff to find out fust w’ether hit’s a real ghost or not. Dat’s me!”
“Oh, Jeffy, you suttinly is de bravest man I knows!” she answered back in muffled tones, with her head on his white waistcoat.
At this moment precisely the town clock sounded the first stroke of twelve, and all the steam whistles in town let go, blasting out shrilly; and all the giant firecrackers in town began bursting in loud acclaim of the New Year. But what the triumphant, proud, conquering Jeff heard was his Ophelia, speaking to him soul to soul.
CHAPTER VIII. CINNAMON SEED AND SANDY BOTTOM
MAJOR putnam stone is dead, but his soul goes marching on. Mainly it does its marching on at Midsylvania University. Every fall, down yonder, on the night of the day of the last game of the season, when the squad has broken training and many of the statutes touching on the peace and quiet of the community, there is a dinner. At the end of this dinner the captain of the team stands up at one end of the table and chants out: “Cinnamon Seed and Sandy Bottom!” – just like that. Whereupon there are loud cheers. And then, at the far end of the table from him, the chairman of the athletic community stands up in his place and lifts his mug and says, in the midst of a little silence: “To the memory of Major Putnam Stone!” Then everybody rises and drinks; and there are no heel-taps.
This ceremony is never omitted. It is a tradition; and they go in rather strongly for traditions at Midsylvania, and always have since the days when there was not much else to Midsylvania except its traditions. The team may have won that afternoon, or it may have lost. The boys may be jubilating for the biggest victory of the whole year, or, over the trenches and the tankards, consoling themselves and one another for an honourable defeat at the hands of their classic rival, Vanderbeck. It makes no difference. Win or lose, they toast the shade and the name of Major Stone.
So there is no danger that the Major will be forgotten at the University, any more than there is danger of such a thing coming to pass in the Evening Press shop where the Major used to work. Most of the old hands who worked there with him once upon a time are gone elsewhere now. One or two or three are dead and the rest of us, with few exceptions, have scattered over the country. But among the men who are our successors on the staff the spirit of the old man walks, and there is a tale of him to be told to each beginner who comes on the paper. It is as much a part of the history of the city room as the great stories that Ike Webb, who was our star man, wrote back in those latter nineties; as much a part as the sayings and the doings of little Pinky Gilfoil, who passed out last year, serving with the American ambulance corps over in France.
The last time I was down that way I stopped over between trains and went around on Jefferson Street to look the old place over. It was late in the afternoon, after press time for the final edition, and the day force had all departed; but out of the press-room to greet me came limping old Henry, the black night watchman, who, according to belief, had been a fixture of the Evening Press since the corner stone of the building was laid.
“Yassuh,” said Henry to me after this and that and the other thing had been discussed back and forth between us; “we still talks a mighty much about ole Majah. Dis yere new issue crop of young w’ite genelmens we got workin’ ‘round yere now’days gits a chanc’t to hear tell about him frequent an’ of’en. They’s a picture of him hangin’ upstairs in de big boss’ room on de thud flo’. Big boss, he sets a heap of store by ‘at air picture. An’ they tells me ‘at de mate to it is hangin’ up in ‘at air new structure w’ich they calls de Forbes Memorial, out at de Univussity.”
If my recollection serves me aright I have once or twice before touched on sundry chapters in the life and works of the old Major, telling how, for him, nothing of real consequence happened in this world between the surrender of Lee at Appomattox and the day, nearly forty years later, when all his tidy property was wiped out in an unfortunate investment, and he moved out of his suite at the old Gault House and abandoned his armchair in a front window at the Shawnee Club, and, at the age of sixty-four and a salary of twelve dollars a week, took a job as cub reporter on the Evening Press; how because he would persist in gnawing at the rinds of old yesterdays instead of nosing into the things of the current day he was a most utter and complete failure at the job; how once through chance, purely, he uncovered the whoppingest scoop that a real reporter could crave for and then chucked it away again to save a woman who by the standards of all proper people wasn’t worth saving in the first place; how by compassion of the owner of the paper and against the judgment of everybody else, he hung on all through the summer, a drag upon the organization and a clog on the ankle of City Editor Wilford Devore; how on the opening day of the famous Lyric Hall convention he finally rose to an emergency that was of his liking and with the persuasive aid of a brace of long-barrelled, ivory-handled cavalry revolvers stampeded the Stickney gang, when they tried by force to seize the party machinery, having first put that official bad man and deputy subheader of the opposition, Mink Satterlee, out of business, by love-tapping Mink upon his low and retreating forehead with the butt end of one of his shooting irons; and how then as a reward therefor, he was made war-editor of the sheet, thereafter fitting comfortably and snugly into a congenial berth especially devised and created for his occupancy. All this has elsewhere been told.
This present tale, which has to do in part with the Major and in part with the student body of Midsylvania, dates from sometime after the day when he became our war editor, and was writing those long and tiresome special articles of his, dealing favourably with Jackson’s Campaign in the Valley, and unfavourably with Sherman’s March to the Sea.
Midsylvania, those days, was a university with a long vista of historic associations behind it and a puny line of endowments to go forward on; so it went forward very slowly indeed. To get the most favourable perspective on Midsylvania you must needs look backward into a distinguished but mouldy past, and consider the list of dead-and-gone warriors and statesmen and educators and clergymen who had been graduated in the class of ‘49 or the class of ‘54, or some other class. Chief among its physical glories were a beech tree, under which Daniel Boone was said to have camped overnight once; an ancient chapel building of red brick, with a row of fat composition pillars, like broken legs in plaster casts, stretching across its front to uphold its squatty portico; and in the centre of the campus, a noseless statue of Henry Clay.
Sons of Old Families in the state attended it, principally, I suppose, because their fathers before them had attended it; sons of new families mostly went elsewhere for their education. With justice, you might speak of Midsylvania as being conservative, which was true; but when you said that, you said it all, and it let you out. There was nothing more to be said.
If poor shabby old Midsylvania lagged behind sundry of her sister schools in the matter of equipment, most certainly and most woefully did she lag behind them in the matter of athletics. In that regard, and perhaps other regards, she was an Old Ladies’ Home. Eight governors of American commonwealths, six of them dead and two yet living, might be listed on the roster of her alumni – and were; but you sought in vain there for the name of a great pitcher or of a consistent winner of track events, or of a champion pole vaulter. If anybody mentioned Midsylvania in connection with college sports, it was to laugh. So there was a good deal of laughing one fall when, for the first time, she went in for football. The laughter continued, practically without abatement, through that season; but early the following season it died away altogether, to be succeeded by a wave of astonishment and of reluctantly conceded admiration, which ran from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic Seaboard to the Mississippi River. Other football teams began to respect Midsylvania’s football team. They had to; she mauled it into their respective consciousness.
The worm had turned – and turned something besides the other cheek, at that; for in that second year she won her first game, which was her game with Exstein Normal. Now Exstein Normal came up proudly, like an army glorious with banners, and went down abruptly, like a scuttled ship: Score, thirty-one to nothing. Following on this, she beat Holy Mount’s team of fiery Louisiana Creoles, with a red-headed demon of a New Orleans Irish boy for their captain; and, in succession, she took on and overcame Cherokee Tech., and Alabama State, and Bayless.
She held to a tie what was conceded to be the best team that Old Dominion had ever mustered; and Vanderbeck, the largest and, athletically considered, the strongest of them all, bested her only by the narrowest and closest of margins on Vanderbeck’s own gridiron. It was one of the upsetting things that never can happen, but occasionally do, that Midsylvania should go straight through to Thanksgiving Day with a miraculous record of five victories, one tie and one defeat out of seven games played, and with not a man in the regular lineup seriously damaged. And yet not so miraculous either when you came to cast up causes to find results. Her men had steam and had speed and had strategy, which meant team-work; in fact, they had everything. Heaven alone knew where, within the space of one year they had got it, but they had it: that was the main point, the incontrovertible detail.
You know the old saying: Home folks are always the last ones to appreciate us. More or less I think this must have been true of us as regards our own University’s football outfit. Undoubtedly a lot had been written and said in cities farther south about it, before the Evening Press and the other papers in town began fully to realise that Midsylvania was putting the town on the football map. But when we did realise it we gave her and her team front page space and sporting page space, and plenty of both. Before we had been content to bestow upon her a weekly column which one of the undergraduates turned in at space rates, and pretty poor space rates at that – departmental stuff, mostly dealing with faculty changes, and Greek letter society doings and campus gossip and such-like. Now though almost anything that anybody on the staff or off of it chose to grind out about the boys who wore the M on their sweater breasts found a warm welcome after it landed on the City Editor’s desk. Local pride in local achievement had been roused and if anybody knows of anything stronger than local pride in a city of approximately a hundred and fifty thousand population, please tell me what it is. We covered the games that were played at home that year as fully as the limitations of a somewhat scanty staff permitted, and Ike Webb was detailed to travel with the squad when it played away from home. He sent back by telegraph, regardless of expense, stories on the games abroad, which were smeared all over the sheet under spread heads and signed as being “By Our Special Staff Correspondent.” They were good stories – Ike was not addicted to writing bad ones, ever – and they made circulation.
There is no telling how many letters from subscribers came to the chief commending him for his journalistic enterprise. He ran a good many of them. The paper rode with the team on the crest of the popularity wave. Trust Devore for that. He had a sense for news-values which compensated and more than compensated for certain temperamental shortcomings as exhibited inside the plant.
One day in the tail end of November the old Major came stumping down the stairs from his sanctum – anyhow, he always called it his sanctum – upon the top floor in a little partitioned-off space adjoining the chief’s office, where he had a desk of his own and where he did his work. He had a wad of copy paper in his hand. In dress and in manner he was the same old Major that he had been in the flush times two years back, when he used to come in daily, ostensibly to get some exchanges but really to sit and sit, and bore everybody who would listen with tiresome long accounts of things that happened between 1861 and 1865 – not the shabby forlorn figure he became that first summer after he got his twelve-dollar-a-week job – but his former self, recreated all over again. His fullbreasted shirt of fine linen jutted out above the unbuttoned top of his low waistcoat in pleaty, white billows and his loose black sailor’s tie made a big clump at his throat where the ends of his Lord Byron collar came together. His cuffs almost covered his hands and his longish white hair was like silk floss lying on his coat collar behind. That little white goatee of his jutted out under his lower lip like a tab of carded wool. Altogether he was the Major of yore, rejoicing sartorially in his present state of comparative prosperity. The boys around the shop always said that if the Major had only ten dollars and fifty cents in the world he would spend five dollars of it for his club dues and five of it on his wardrobe and give the remaining fifty cents to some beggar. I guess he would have, too.
He came downstairs this day and walked up to Devore, and laid down his sheaf of pages at Devore’s elbow. “A special contribution, sir,” he said very ceremoniously.
Devore ran through the first page, which was covered with pencil marks – the Major always wrote his stuff out in long hand – and glanced up, a little bit astonished.
“Kind of out of your usual line, isn’t it, Major Stone?” he asked.
“In a measure, sir – yes,” stated the old man; and he rocked on his high heels as though he might be nervous regarding the reception his contribution would have in this quarter. “Under the circumstances I feel justified in a departure from the material I customarily indite. But if you feel – ”
“Oh, that’s all right!” said Devore, divining what the Major meant to say before the Major finished saying it. “There’s always room for good stuff.”
He laid the first sheet aside and shuffled through the sheets under it, picking out lines and appraising the full purport of the manuscript, as any skilled craftsman of a newspaper copy desk can do in half the length of time an outsider would be needing to make out the sense of it.
“About young Morehead, eh? I didn’t know you knew him, Major?”
“Personally I do not. But, in his lifetime, I knew his gallant father well; in fact, intimately. For some months we served together on the staff of General Leonidas Polk. Accordingly I felt qualified by my personal acquaintance with his family to treat of the subject as I have treated it.”
“Oh, I see!” Devore gave an involuntary smile quick burial in the palm of his cupped hand. “And so you’ve caught the fever too?”
“Fever, sir? What fever?”
“I mean you’ve got yourself all worked up about football, the same as everybody else in town?”
“Not at all, sir. Of the game of football I know little or nothing. In my college days we concerned ourselves in our sportive hours with very different pursuits and recreations.”
The Major, as we knew from hearing him tell about it a hundred times, had left the University of Virginia in his second year to enlist in the army. And we knew his views on the subject of sports. If a young person of the masculine gender could waltz with the ladies, and ride a horse well enough to follow the hounds without falling off at the jumps, and with a shotgun could kill half the birds he fired at – these, from the Major’s standpoint, were accomplishments enough for any Southern gentleman, now that the use of duelling pistols had died out. We had heard him say so, often.
“Football, considered as a game, does not interest me,” he went on now. “I have never seen it played. But on account of Mr. James Payne Morehead, Junior, I am interested. Being of the strain of blood that he is, I am constrained to believe he will acquit himself in a manner worthy of his ancestry, wheresoever he may be placed. In the article you have there before you I have said as much.”
“So I notice,” said Devore, keeping most of the irony out of his tone. “Thank you, Major – we’ll stick the yarn in to-morrow.” And then, as the old man started out: “By the way, Major Stone, if you’ve never seen a game you might enjoy seeing the one next Saturday – against Sangamon. It’ll be your last chance this season. I’ll save you out a press ticket – if you don’t mind sitting in the newspaper box with the boys that I’ll have out there covering the story?”
“I am obliged to you, sir,” said Major Stone. “I shall be pleased to avail myself of the courtesy, and nothing could afford me more pleasure than to have the company of my youthful compatriots in the field of journalistic endeavour on that occasion.”
He talked like that. Talking, he made you think of the way some people write in their letters, not of the way anybody else on earth spoke in ordinary conversation.
Out he went then, all reared back and Devore read the copy through, chuckling to himself. It wasn’t a malicious chuckle, though. Devore was not likely to forget what the Major did for him that day eighteen months before at the Lyric Hall convention when Bad Mink Satterlee tried to cave in Devore’s skull with a set of brass knuckles and doubtlessly would have carried the undertaking through successfully if Major Stone hadn’t been so swiftly deft with the ivory butt of one of his pair of cavalry pistols, nor to forget how nasty he, as City Editor, had been before that, during all the months of the Major’s apprenticeship as a sixty-four-year-old cub reporter.
“Just like the old codger!” he said, tapping the manuscript with his hand affectionately. “Starts out to write about the kid; gives the kid a couple of paragraphs; and then uses up twenty pages more telling what great men the kid’s father and grandfather were. Here, you fellows, just listen a minute to this.”
He read a few sentences aloud.
“Get the angle, don’t you? Major figures that any spunk and any sense the Morehead boy’s got is a heritage from his revered ancestors, and that he’ll just naturally have to make good because he had ‘em for his ancestors. Well, at that, the Maje is probably right, without realising it. I’m thinking Captain James Payne Morehead, Junior, and his bunch of little fair-haired playmates are going to need something more than they’ve got now when they go up against that bunch of huskies from Sangamon next Saturday. How about it, eh?” We knew about it, or at least we thought we knew about it, as surely as anyone may know in advance of the accomplished event. There was a note of foreboding in the answers we made to our immediate superior there in the city room. One of the boys summed it up: “‘Pride goeth before a fall,’” he said; “and biting off more than you can chaw is bad on the front teeth – provided the Midsylvania eleven have any front teeth left after the Sangamon eleven get through toying with their bright young faces on Saturday afternoon.” Which, differently expressed, perhaps, was the common sentiment. A chill of dread was descending upon the community at large; in fact, had been descending like a dark, dank blanket for upward of a week now. During the first few hours after the announcement came out that the team of Sangamon College, making their post-season tour, would swing downward across Messrs. Mason and Dixon’s justly celebrated survey marks for the express purpose of playing against Midsylvania, there had been a flare-up of jubilation that was statewide.
It was no small honour for victorious Midsylvania that her football eleven should be the chosen eleven below the Line to meet these all-conquering gladiators from above it. So everybody agreed, at the outset. But on second thought, which so often is the better thought of the two, the opportunity seemed, after all, not so glorious. A hero may go down leading a forlorn hope – may die holding a last ditch – and posterity possibly will applaud him; but we may safely figure that he does not greatly enjoy himself while thus engaged; nor can his friends and well-wishers, looking on, be so very happy, either, over the dire and distressful outcome of the sacrificial deed. The nearer came the day of the game and the more people read about the strength of the invaders, the more dismal loomed the prospect for the defenders.
To begin with, Sangamon was one of the biggest fresh-water colleges on the continent, and one of the richest. Sangamon had six times as many students enrolled as Midsylvania, which meant, of course, six times the bulk of raw material from which to pick and choose for her team. Sangamon had a professional coach, paid trainers and paid rubbers; and Sangamon had a fat fund to support her in her athletic endeavours.
Midsylvania, it is almost needless to state, had none of these. Sangamon had gone through the fall, mopping up ambitious contenders, east and west, due north, north by east, and north by west. Sangamon had two players – not one, but actually two – that the experts of the New York dailies had nominated for the All-American – her fullback, Vretson, known affectionately and familiarly as the Terrible Swede; and her star end, Fay, who, in full football panoply of spiked shoes and padded knickers, had, on test, done a hundred yards in twelve seconds flat. It isn’t so very often that the astigmatic Eastern sharps can see across the Appalachians when they come to make up the roster of nominees for the seasonal hall of football fame. This year, though, they had looked as far inland as Sangamon. At the peril of a severe eyestrain they had to, because Sangamon simply would not be denied.
