Part 5
Those Thanksgivings will never return. The caps are torn now, and the heads that wore them would fit them no more. We could not meet to be happy again, if we tried, because of the vacant places. The rogue who was made parson would not be present either,--which of us, outside Paradise, is quite the same after so many years?--having vanished just as surely as the old friends, and the dear kindred, who have died. For, in your own phrase, little folk, that was _me_. At least, I like to think it was. Perhaps this is all a make-believe story; but if you doubt it, go and ask somebody else who was there.
VAGABONDIANA.
CERTAIN words sound like caresses. "Thou vagabond!" must have been at some time or other a gentler appellation than our rude transition would make it. Why not? "Rogue" and "truant" have yet their playful uses. Though we translate illy such endearments of antiquity, we may read in Gascoigne:--
"O Abraham's _brats_! O brood of blessèd seed!"
The "goodly and virtuous young imps" of old citation, we should also construe but saucily. Besides, "vagabond" lendeth itself gracefully to the affectionate diminutives of alien tongues, which, to a philologist, may be as good as an argument: what can be tenderer than _vagaböndchen_, _vagabondellino_, and a like musical play of syllables over the solid English rock?
The vagabond is the modern representative of the knight-errant, shorn of his romance, inasmuch as both fall neatly under the definition of a stroller, a free lance, whom the domestic Lar does not allure or attach to any one fireside. The immortal Don of la Mancha, revived in this age, should figure as a tramp in the police station, before he had adorned public life twenty-four hours. But the vagabond proper has an Asiatic cousin, who gets princelier treatment. The Rônin of chivalrous Japan is a gentleman of leisure, who, not averse to a chance of seasonable employment, roams at large, settling his private differences, and serving Heaven unmolested, according to his lights. Vagabonds are legally denominated "such as wake on the night, and sleep on the day; and haunt customable taverns and ale-houses, and rout about; and no man wots whence they come nor whither they go:" a comprehensive statement in three parts, which has, moreover, a covert whimsical reference categorically to actors, politicians, and bank-clerks. A vagabond, primarily, was merely an idle person; and if his name has come to imply variations of decorum, and a questionable standing in polite circles, it is to be accounted for only on the worn adage that Satan takes personal care of undedicated energies.
Our friend is vagrant as the swallow, "born in the eighth climate, and framed and constellated unto all." He is the world's freeman. He strays at his fancy, sign-boards and mile-stones his only ritual, and changes of weather the sole political economy of his study, by which he abides. Everybody's property is his in fief. Terminus and his stakes were never set up for him. He has no particular reason for moving on the first of May, nor for passing the winter in warm quarters. When he is very weary, since he has no tent to strike, nor bed to make, he unconcernedly "lays his neck on the lap of his mother." Neither landlord nor tenant is he; and never has he known a spring-cleaning, nor packed a trunk, nor priced a door-plate. He trolls out that joyful strophe which Richard Brome wrote for his forefathers, as he swings past inland villages:
"Come away! why do we stay? We have no debt or rent to pay, No bargains or accompts to make, Nor land nor lease, to let or take: Or if we had, should that remore us, When all the world's our own before us, And where we pass and make resort, There is our kingdom and our court!"
He has his choice of professions: he may have a natural disposition to beg, yet, on the whole, consider it genteeler to steal. He is exempt from Adam's curse. Nobody expects him to work, save in a moment of inspiration. When he has no funds, he travels on his dignity. There is that in his eye which awes the merchantman, and mesmerizes the maid at the hostel gate.
The vagabond, "extravagant and erring spirit," as Horatio would call him, has had his court-painter, who took the portraits of several of his eccentric family in the year of Waterloo, and exposed them for sale in Covent Garden under the title: "Etchings of Remarkable Beggars, Itinerant Traders, and other persons of Notoriety," drawn from the life in London town. There glisten perennially the seraphic upturned eyes of "Hot Peas!" there you may see the Hogarthian face and attitude of the one-armed vender of gasping "Live Haddock!" the pastoral cousin offering "Young (toy) Lambs!" the dealer in pickled cucumbers, his arms akimbo, a fork stuck in the dish on his head, and a surreptitious wink in his well-conducted eye; the flying pie-man, smirking like Malvolio, and starched and skirted like a dignitary of bluff Hal's; the reduced beau, sweeping crossings, with his yet fastidious air; and the humble bespectacled painter, his own drayman, changing quarters on holy Luke's day, so festooned with torsos, casts, brushes, phials, easels, that he seems a perambulating studio.
The vagabondistic sect is of exceedingly mutable nature. It distends, it contracts; it swears in, now a person of probity, not of wealth; now a sinner, like the rest of us, who seldom moves in good society: an odd congregation, comprising dozens that have no business among the elect, and lacking a proportionate number who stray untethered into other folds. On this showing, not only all mendicants, pedlers, street-singers, pick-pockets, and uneasy minds are accepted rascals, but poor queer B., who wrote poetry, and went veiled like the great Mokanna, distraught to know whether the aggregate stare of her fellow-citizens was attributable to her renown, or to her scarce Hellenic beauty, falls into the same category; and the venerable campaigner, who tacks on to her hurdy-gurdy a certificate of army membership signed by Napoleon (presumably to be referred to her fighting spouse, deceased),--that wrinkled and taciturn spook of what was once French vivacity and grace, faithfully grinding "_Partant pour la Syrie_," in snow and sun, within a fixed radius of Boston Common,--even she must emerge, despite the music of Austerlitz and Jena, nothing short of a naturalized Yankee vagabond! There are laws yet unrepealed, Céleste! for thy suppression; prices set on the innocuous heads of "minstrels and useless persons."
We could wish that a new Plutarch should write up the patron-saint of vagabonds,--one Bampfylde Moore Carew, a Devonshire celebrity born under William and Mary, a most conscientious, well-bred person, and of good parts, who became a gentleman at large only under irresistible conviction; and who, after a series of adventures before which an Arabian tale covers its head, rose to be king of the gypsies, and Great High Joss of beggars and mimics, henceforward: a pleasant, adroit creature, familiar with the wildernesses of what were not yet the Atlantic States, reckless enough to be kindly-disposed towards his fellows, and successful in everything he undertook, living, "gray as a wharf-rat, and supple as the devil," to a consistent and edifying old age.
We have a sneaking kindness for him and his votaries. A congenital affinity softens us towards suspicious characters. We were early aware that we startled shop-keepers with our roving thumb, how or whence we know not; but we have come to love the indiscreet something in us which calls forth Puritan vigilance, and we should violently resent a change of tactics. More than once a jeweller (who might have made a mad wag if he had not been so choked with virtue) refused to give back our repaired watch, eying us with grewsome distrust, and absolutely disclaimed having beheld our cockney countenance before! We enter a warehouse, only to await identification, as they are pleased to call it, from Tom, Dick, and Harry, and only by force of eloquence, or by literal making of faces (honest, ingenuous, reliable, unevasive faces, out of use, but quite as good as new, and triumphantly effective), do we succeed in securing the household necessities. Reading once, of a windy day, seated on the sea-wall of the Charles, through a chance waiting-hour, in cloistral privacy, we were accosted across lots by a sombre policeman, and mysteriously lured back to the confines of civilization; whereupon the misguided creature, scanning our cheerful lineaments,--cheerful from the pages of "Travels with a Donkey,"--burst into uncanny laughter, and presently explained that he had been detailed to save yon despondent crank from plunging into the hungry river!
Our career of vagabond by brevet had wellnigh closed. Seriously, sir or madam, you may stand by that harbor-mouth, and have an inkling into the tragedies of the strollers of whom "men wot not whence they come, nor whither they go." But, to keep you on the liberal side of compassion, you who are not of the faith must also be made aware that Aldebaran is a gracious star to his own; and that "wild and noble sights" are vouchsafed to the outer and inner eye of shabbiest Bohemianism, "such as they that sit in parlors never dream of."
MATHEMATICS.
RHADAMANTHUS is so old by this time, and so hardened into his own way of thinking, that I suppose it is useless to wish he were of my mind. What I look upon as justice, he may, moreover, call spitefulness, or worse. But I dearly desire to sit enthroned by Styx in his stead, that I might adjudge dire reparative torments to old Euclid and to Eaton, that modern figurative fiend, and to the entire tribe of evil-inventing Arabs. What hope is there in this world for redress? Such creatures have been lauded as friends of civilization and of human progress. Tens of thousands, mostly helpless minors, and stray rebels of all ages, among whom I am but a meek atom, make passionate protest. We go about, with an ancient school-rhyme for our Marseillaise:--
"Multiplication's a vexation, Subtraction's just as bad; The Rule of Three, it puzzles me, And Fractions drive me mad."
We aspire to be moderate. We handle a slate and pencil forgivingly. We consider that history is somewhat against us; for Cæsar believed doggedly in addition; and the generals of the great Alexander were fond of division all their days. We try to get over our distrust of the Book of Numbers, and to think it quite canonical; vainly, vainly. We are still the army of the disaffected; and your numeric blood, which was transfused into us by main force, seethes and hisses in our unproselytized veins.
Mine antipathy to a unit, like an ancestral prejudice, developed in infancy. I cannot reconcile myself to that persistent squandering of my capabilities--and nothing shall persuade me that they were not fine, primarily--on insufferable jargon of twice two, and thirteen times twenty-seven; on angles, polygons, hypothenuses, and roots of diabolic cubes; on halving and cancelling everything Solomon in his wisdom had never heard of, save the growing, intact, substantial aversion outlasting all else. What glory and honor did it bring me? The singular privilege of taking and giving money on faith; of confusing ounces, yards, and quarts, and of being "circumvented," as Burton scornfully put it, "by every base tradesman."
The Vallais cretins, it is confidently asserted, cannot be taught mathematics. If so, the Vallais cretin is my cousin-german. My heart warms to him. I am his transatlantic affinity. He is the happier, inasmuch as his little eccentricity is recognized, and no tampering follows; whereas I fell heir to years of crazy importunities. I bethink me with anguish of so many precious hours spent between sunrise and sunset, in compulsory handling of snaky arithmetical characters, when I might have mastered the literature of Timbuctoo, or successfully dug out, in a mellower land, the hoary toy-pistols of little child Astyanax. It is drilled into my younger brethren and sistren (such is their venerable and true English title!) that a cipher to right of them, or a cipher to left of them, under certain circumstances which happily I forget, make vast differences with silly figures. Not one of the unfortunates is a stranger to such dogmas. A visitor of classrooms, with a proper dash of vinegar in him, knows nevertheless that the tender geometric parrot-prodigy shall scarce be taught some more curious problems: why political bribery is not a state-prison crime, nor oppression of dumb beasts, nor marriage--_O tempora!_--without love. Therefore the cretin wears his rue with a difference, and is enviable. He is not chained up (simply because it is the general barbaric custom) to "the hard-grained muses of the cube and square;" that is, not unless he gets astray on the educational world, and finds it quite useless to proclaim his identity.
If any one take kindly to the Black Art (as he might to the small-pox), he must, of course, be humored. Believe him sincerely mistaken. Perhaps he may not ripen into a college professor whose business it is to disseminate his evil lore. Perhaps, Heaven assoil him! he may.
A CHILD IN CAMP.
LIKE the royal personages in the drama, I was ushered on the stage of life, literally, with flourish of trumpets. The Civil War was at its bursting-point, the President calling for recruits: it was impertinent of me, but in that solemn hour I came a-crowing into the world. And since I was born under allegiance, a lady whom I learned to love with incredible quickness,
"O bella Libertà! O bella!"--
rocked my fortunate cradle. She gave me a little flag for toy, instead of coral-and-bells; and filled my virginal ear with the classic strains of "John Brown's Body," ere yet I had heard a secular lullaby. She it was who dyed my infant mind in her own tri-color, and whose exciting companionship roused me surprisingly early into wide-awake consciousness and speculation. In laughing recognition of her old, old favor, these confused twilight memories (Impressions of America, as it were, _ab ovo_) may be recorded.
A young person some twenty-four years my senior, for whom I had a violent liking, had preceded me "to the warres." I saw his ship sail away, at that exceedingly tender age when a human being is involved in mummy-like cerements, and cannot properly be said to exist at all. In the winter of 1864--he had been away during that long interval--I enlisted and went South to visit him. I had thrived at home through the distended agony of those days. I had a general idea that my cue in life was to fight; and I would smile endearingly over a colored plate of the Battle of Trafalgar, whose smoky glare, and indications of turmoil and slaughter, were supremely to my mind. Red, however, by some process of mistaken zeal, I came to regard as inimical to the party to which, as catechumen, I belonged. I had not then a very copious vocabulary at my command; but I soon indicated my convictions by screeching like a young eagle at the most innocent auction-flag that ever floated out of a Boston door of a sunny morning, or flushing with unmistakable wrath at a casual visitor who bore a trace of that outrageous color in anything worn or carried. It was long, indeed, before I was persuaded to transfer my misguided sentiment to A.D. 1775, and to believe that the neighboring rebel had no especial affinity with the hue in question. Prior to my memorable journey to Virginia, I had spent a few months in camp the year before. A slight epidemic ran the rounds of the tents, and took in ours. The only recollection which survives is a vivid one of neighboring trees, and a distant hill, visible as I lay facing the narrow door; a view which included the ever-flitting figure of the sentinel, his steady, silent tread, musket on shoulder, and the kind rustic face in profile, which turned, ever and anon, smilingly about, like the moon at her merriest. That welcome shadow which fell before him in the broad light was cut down in the ranks at Malvern Hill.
But my earliest real experiences began in '64. Hostilities had been some weeks suspended; yet the headquarters of a Southern regiment lay within gun-shot, and thither my delighted terrors reverted. Was Jeff Davis lurking on the other bank of the stream? Might they creep over by night and fall upon us? If I should be allowed to venture alone into the thicket, would the fiery eyes of the "reb" glare upon me? Please could I settle difficulties with any little boy in the opposing camp? in the admirable Roman fashion, of whose precedent I was yet ignorant.
How they would laugh, those bearded and epauletted guests of our exceptionally elegant log-house! And how uproariously they often planted me, regardless of ink and paper, on the table, and toasted me in some cordial beverage until I pranced in glee!
Be it humbly admitted that the freedom I enjoyed among officers and men of several organizations, and the indulgence which they showed, tended not to improve my scarce seraphic disposition. More than once was I called to order for some breach of discipline, the most venial of which were cutting the tent-strings, hanging about the sentry and impeding his progress with efforts to relieve him of his musket, or concealing the drum-sticks to postpone an anticipated signal. The dark-eyed young man to whom I owed allegiance--
"Ay me! while life did last that league was tender,"
--would exclaim, with the awful sense of a newly acquired dignity: "Disobey a colonel if you dare!" and threaten me, not with vulgar deprivations of supper, or trivial captivity in closets, but with a veritable court-martial for my predestined doom, when I should be so bad again.
Our family retinue consisted of a cook of jolly and rubicund exterior, and a pleasant lad, who, among his other duties, cared for my glossy-coated Arabian, and led him about like a circus-master, while I "snatched a fearful joy" upon his back. The memory of the former personage is embalmed in the fragrance of roast beef and mashed potatoes, edibles which he announced frequently with a melodramatic flourish and intonation never to be forgotten. Burly old Bush! He had a quaint way of delivering his best things, _stans pede in uno_, with a sidelong light of the eye to let you into the secret of his rich hyperboles.
Another favorite of mine was an adjutant, owner of two sociable King Charles spaniels, which I was permitted to endow with portions of my supper, and which I visited as regularly as a country lover his sweetheart, when the general evening relaxation set in. Captain J., too, stern, reticent, and little popular with his men, was strangely gentle to one that rode on his arm, and fell asleep, many a time, at his knee. He was a fascinating story-teller, and held my fancy longer than any soldier-playmate of his day. He had the absolute confidence of my infallible young man. The old figure, "true as steel," was made for him. They forbore to tell me till long afterwards, that he fell, shot through and through, at the Wilderness, with his face to the foe.
He had a brother, a mere boy, whose sunny hair I can remember under the military cap. But him I may come across any hour, prosperous and sunny-haired still. The only other figures plain to my mind's eye are F., the sweet-mannered gentleman who took care of me in a long railway journey; S., the surgeon, maker of jokes and of whistles; W., who used to sing "Malbrook s'en va-t en guerre," with immense satisfaction to himself, at least; and C., an inveterate patriot, who gave his good right arm for the asking, at touch of a cannon-ball.
During that stay there was much gayety and little mishap. My elders rode off to many a hunt, or held tournaments with all the tilting and fair ladies' smiles incidental, nay, essential, to their success. Twice, in the midst of less serious things, the men were called to sleep under arms. I can very well remember, another time, ominous talk of Mosby and his guerillas, and a cloud of dust on the horizon which seemed to betoken his restless squadron. But these were variations on a winter full of pastime, and uncommonly clement and merry. The campaign that followed was so arduous, and involved such heavy losses, that it is cheering to remember the hearty voices of old play-fellows during that genial holiday, to take down the books they used to read from their anchorage on a shelf, and to treasure up the gay incidents that brightened their tragic story.
I recall a waiter of exceeding blackness who impressed me in a Washington hotel, and a sandwich, uncommonly sharp with mustard, obtained on the homeward journey at the Baltimore station, where the city seemed to turn out to feed the very hungry in my person; and nothing at all further, beyond these unspiritual details, till the war drew to a close. For then my best-beloved soldier came home. He was terribly shattered with suffering and fatigue,--how irrevocably hurt I knew not. If "the stars had fallen from heaven to light upon his shoulders," the thunderbolt had fallen too; and the general's insignia was sealed with a minie-ball. After a series of escapes thrilling enough for a dime novel, after a plunge, horse and man, into a ravine, a solitary stampede in a swamp, the loss of a scabbard and a patch of clothing by the familiar brushing of a bomb, and a hole through a cap neatly made by an attentive sharp-shooter, the charmed bullets had hit at last. It was my earliest glimpse of the painful side of the war, when he stood worn, pale, drooping, waiting recognition with a weary smile, at the door of the sunny little house we all loved. Instantly, heedless of any persuasive arms or voices, I slipped headlong, like a startled seal from the rocks, and disappeared under the table. Such was my common mode of receiving strangers; and here, indeed, was a most bewildering and appalling stranger. In vain my soldier called me by the most endearing names; even the whimsical nomenclature of camp-life failed to convince me that this was no imposition. I shut my disbelieving eyes, and crouched on the carpet. For two long hours I did not capitulate, and then but warily. What was this spectre with whom I must not frolic, on whose shoulders I must not perch, whose head, bound in bandages, I must not handle? What was he, in place of my old-time comrade, blithe and boyish, and how could he expect to inherit the confidence I had given to quite another sort of person? Unhallowed Dixie! How it had cozened me out of what I prized most!
The wound that jarred upon me, I quickly came to consider as an admirable distinction, and altogether proper and desirable. I longed to be shot, in the interests of my native land; and presently, "by the foot of Pharaoh!" so I was, thanks to a pistol in the hands of a maladroit little neighbor. I underwent the ether-sponge and the knife, and my chubby cheek displayed with pride the reduced fac-simile of the parental scar. It was my day of jubilee, ere the cicatrice had vanished, when I might lean against that elder veteran's knee, and recount Munchausen-like tales of "our" prowess in the war.
I remember the shock of national loss when the President was assassinated; and, after that, the coming and going of army-faces,--some strange, some familiar. It was like Virginia once more, to hear the band march, serenading, up the quiet street; to recognize hearty voices at the garden gate; to command my most dutiful to "shoulder arms!" and "right wheel!" and, waking from slumber, to creep to the head of the stairs, and surreptitiously greet dear M. and B. and broad-shouldered A., as they passed below.