University of Virginia Library

13. THIRTEENTH INSTALLMENT.

And yet I was not happy.[1] For a time, indeed, all
went well. My negroes (the men dressed in nappy cotton
and the women in striped homespun) behaved very
well. People came to see me, dined with me, and talked
politics. My Curdsville fiddler was always ready to entertain
them, a negro boy was never wanting to fetch a pail
or can of fresh water (I had a cocoanut rimmed with silver
and a real, regular sweet old gourd to drink out of), or to

bring a coal of fire between two chips from the kitchen in
summer-time to light our pipes with, or to get some mint
from the mint bed. In a word, I led the life of an old
Virginian with plenty of money, and enjoyed it. But
times changed; settlers from all parts of the world began
to crowd up to and around my plantation; no wages
could tempt the negroes from going to the negro districts
of the South; people ceased to come to me except for
money (my Folly had left me but a few millions and I
got tired of everlasting giving); my Curdsville fiddler,
getting lonesome, left me never to return, and finally I
was left alone with an old negro cook (women stick to
men to the last), her grand-daughter, and one or two
great grand-sons. With them I got along after a fashion,
but it was a mournful fashion. The garden and a few
outside acres under cultivation supplied me with roasting
ears and turnip greens. I had generally a roast shoat in
season, sometimes a lamb, a full supply of chickens, and
you may be sure the negroes took good care not to let me
get out of hog meat.

I grew morbid. Fishing palled on me, jogging about
on my sway-back mare became tiresome, sitting under my
favorite pine and listening to its soughing brought recollections
no longer tender but only sad and full of vain
longing for the friends that had gone before me; trimming
the knots on a hickory stick brought no comfort,
my eyesight failed as my hearing had long before, appetite
failed, and even the reading of my books, when I
could read at all, and the wondering admiration of myself
in my better days[2] served but to irritate me. One of the
greatest of calamities—a lonely old age—had befallen me.

My thoughts grew dark and bitter, darker and more
bitter day by day, as the lonesome months went by. Oh
for the sight of the face of a single friend of my youth
and early manhood! But they were gone—my children
and grandchildren, the children and grandchildren of the
thousands I had befriended, were scattered and gone. I
was forgotten by the human race. Desire had failed, the
possibility of enjoyment was forever past. Aches and

pains were not lacking to fill up the measure of my misery.
I had outlived life—the saddest of all the evil things of
which this sad, bad world is full. I could not think a
bright or cheering thought; no one wanted me now to
do a good deed. I was unremembered, yet alive and
suffering. All the low, vile, underhand, over-reaching,
treacherous, mean, and contemptible actions and transactions
of all the men I had ever known came back to me
with terrific force, and abode with me. I could not get
rid of them. Recalling all I had done for my State and
its people, seeing how neglected and steeped in solitary
woe and pain I was, I hated and despised my race with
the hatred and despite of a soured and impotent old age.
My soul was full of gall and desire to do harm.

I forgot the torrents of crime, wave after wave, worldwide
and high in volume (committed? no! only not committed
for want of opportunity) that had passed through
me time and again, oh! so often; and I forgot (God
help me) the myriads of kindnesses that had been done
to me and mine; to me by my uncle James, his family
and my other kin; to me by hundreds of newspaper men,
other men too; to my dear wife during her long, long
sickness; to my dear old father by black and white in
Tappahannock. I forgot the love and the prayers, so
undeserved, the forgiving and forgetting that had followed
all through my life. I forgot these things. I remembered
only, thought only of the meanness, the misery and the
wickedness (there is plenty of all three) of this wretched
existence.

Fortunately for me I retained enough sense to know
that action, action is the only cure for the crime of over-contemplation
and brooding. It was but little I could
do, but that little I did with all my small remaining
strength. I plodded around my plantation, trying to
study animal and vegetable nature, and running the risk
daily of tumbling into some ditch, gully or branch, and
so drowning myself. I would have rather liked that. It
was of no use; still I trudged, and still I brooded over the
ills of life and the vileness of human nature. How long
this would have lasted it is useless to conjecture, but one
day as I was toiling slowly up a hill a strange, very strange

apparition on the top attracted my attention. Amazed
and very much frightened, too, I stood still in my tracks,
and the thing, whatever it was, came on. I was unarmed
and greatly scared.

To my intense relief it proved to be the automaton
of Commodore Porter. Eustace, having made a fortune
out of him, had sold him to a subsidiary side-showman,
from whom the Commodore, indignant, had escaped in
the night. Wandering indefinitely about the country,
various Vandal malignants had evilly entreated him, and
he appeared before me in a calash, a cavalry sword and
boots, a hoop-skirt and bustle, no other clothes, and his
machinery inside working visibly and violently. One
hand was tied behind him, in the other he held the tall
staff of Terrill of Bath, that resembled an exaggerated
parasol-handle of the period, and his mind, or rather the
mechanism of it, was excited, for the evil entreaters had
broken off a part of his tongue, and strapped the rest of
it down, so that he could not make himself intelligible
at all.

“Commodore,” said I, “they seem to have served
thee badly.”

He made no reply—gritted his teeth in wrath, and
glared at me. I could not laugh at so hapless a being,
but was both distressed and delighted to see him, and he
was so glad at last to meet a friend that he shed a few
kerosene tears (his eyes, his joints and journals were
greased with that excellent unguent) of relief, and we
went joyfully home together. In a day or two I had
him dressed nicely in a suit of my old clothes, a little
too short in the arms and legs for him, but comfortable;
his tongue untied, his slides, hinges and wheels all freshly
oiled, and the whole man in elegant running order. He
was fine company for me for awhile, but, as old men will
do, we gradually grew morose, and longed for some excitement.
Action, action was what we wanted; we were
tired of smoking. My faculty of invention had not altogether
deserted me, so I sent for several salt-sacks full of
silver Mexican dollars, and amused myself for days by
throwing them at the bodies and faces of poor men of
the vicinage, allowing them to take every dollar that hit

them, the Commodore picking up the dollars that missed
and bringing them back to me, and relishing the sport
hugely. After a fellow had an eye, or two or three teeth
knocked out, he generally went home; but one wretched
man, with the worst face I ever saw, allowed both eyes,
all of his upper and lower front teeth to be knocked out,
his nose mashed flat, and cut in two, and his forehead to
be completely skinned before he gave up.

“There, Commodore,” said I, “that is the natural
human greed for money; did you ever see the like of it;
would you, could you have believed it?”

The Commodore merely laughed. But when I learned
that the poor man had stood all this for the sake of an
afflicted wife and children, it nearly killed me, although
I gave him a sack of silver to ease my conscience.[3]

The Commodore had often begged me to let him try
his hand, but he was so powerful I was afraid; one day,
however, I consented. He threw the first dollar smack
through a stalwart negro, back-bone and all, and it took
the rest of our silver to buy off judge and jury, and to
save ourselves from being hanged. This put an end to
our sport.

We grew more and more melancholy and savage,
and I got more and more afraid of the Commodore. I
couldn't bear to let him run down completely, for that
would be depriving myself of all society; but he became
so ill-natured and dangerous, that I had to keep him only
partially wound up—which made him madder than ever.
He had a hole in his back, and a key, kept in a box
under his ribs, with which he was set going; and, his
springs being tremendous, it took all my strength to
wind him thoroughly. Unluckily for me, he discovered
that by inserting a door-knob in the hole in his back
and by whirling himself around he could wind himself
up, which he did, and came down stairs to my room a
good many times, and whaled me very cruelly. The
wonder is that he didn't kill me. I wish he had, for

now life was but a constant terror. Finally, I hit upon
the plan of greasing the door-knobs (strange he never
found it out!), and that, and that alone, prolonged my
days. It was a frightful strain upon my failing memory
not to forget to grease my knobs, every one of them.
My cook and the other servants wouldn't have done it
for the world—they had a mortal terror of the Commodore,
and ran for their lives at the very sight of him.
A sad, sad time I had.

There came a night—well do I remember it—a wild
night, towards the end of December, a night of tempest
and thick darkness. A lean and very aged man, full of
pain and troublous thoughts, lay in his bed. For him
there was but one sentience, and one sufferer in the universe.
Outside, the fierce wind poured its flood, pausing
ever and anon only to gain added strength and fierceness.
What cared the wind for the aching and mind-tormented
centenarian? The house shuddered from end to end;
there were whisperings under doors and through keyholes;
challenges and replies anear and afar, rustlings
and passings outside the shaking casements, noiseless
goings to and fro, and tellings of unknown things in inarticulate
tongues of those without to those within; unusual
and great business and bustle in ghostland. Terrors
were about and abroad—strange work, God wot, to be
done. My poor friend, automaton as he was, came down
in abject affright, crouched close to my bedside beside
the hearth, almost emberless now, and said no word.
The trouble of life's ending was upon me. I could not
sleep. I arose, dressed myself, paid no heed to the out-stretched
supplicating wooden hand of the Commodore,
and, uncloaked and bareheaded, went out into the storm.
Brain and heart were afire; I felt no cold. In a fodder-stack
near the stable I had made on the leeward side a
deep hole into which I would often go late at night to
watch the stars, and worry my poor limited mind, until
astronomy became a numbing pain. I laid down there
awhile and looked at the tree-arms tossing helplessly,
and the tall spectral tops of the pines in the distant
wood bowed in submission to the storm. I felt the pitilessness
of the wind. I could see all the oceans with the

waves tumbling horizon after horizon away, the world
round, and I felt the strength and the unmercifulness of
water. The force of volcanoes that know not that mankind
inhabit the world; the throes of earthquakes that
swallow cities of men, women and children, and do not
consider, but go on. I heard the rush of monstrous fish
under the waters, the crash of flesh-eating beasts through
jungles, the faint, slimy sound of venomous reptiles
crawling to their prey, the cracking of the crunched
bones of innocent victims, the yells and cries, never
heard by man, of the fighting saurians of the fore-world;
I felt as with the hand the remorseless power of famines,
and listened with ears other than mine own to the march
of pestilences that look not back nor remember. Diseases
took shape, and in hideous personation came before
me—cancer, carbuncle, fungus, abscess, deformities, insanities,
rheums, neuralgias, ulcers, pains unnamed and
innumerable—a horrid throng. The dolors too terrible
to be told, of mind, body and heart, that pious men,
guileless women and sinless children suffer; the shame
and remorse of guilty men; the hardness, worse than
shame or remorse, of those who feel neither—all came
to me, all the misery and wickedness of this perplexing
world, all that was suffered in the endless past, and all
that is to be endured (and for what?) in the endless
future, one vast, wide, undivided, solid, black mass of
ever-enduring agony, pressed down and in upon me.

I rose up. This was too much. As I went out of the
stack, the thick, ragged clouds that had been hurrying all
night long to some rendezvous on the other side of the
globe fled clear away—the crescent moon, white and cold,
and sharp and hard as a saddler's knife, came out and shed
a ghostly light on the scene. The wind died; the trees
stood still; a great frost set in. There was peace—the
peace of frost—that, too, was pitiless, and of death. I
walked to the horse-block, and sat down. Mine hour
was come. I felt it, knew it, and was glad. No one
ever came to ride my horses. The side-saddle and sun-bonnet
were unused, had never been used. I was deserted.
The fair, fond face of woman had been blotted
wholly out of my life, almost out of my memory.

“So much motion awhile ago,” said I, “and now so
much rest, blessed rest. What am I but motion, and
why not now cease, be not no more forever, and mingle
with the infinite sources of motion that lie among the
stars?”

On a sudden I felt the earth rise up out of its orbit.
The movement was swift, inconceivably so, but not hurried.
By a finer sense than sight I saw that the stars
were not falling, but that I was going up to them. Their
steely fires grew brighter momently, and presently I knew
that the splendor of countless flaming suns would fall
full upon me. A great awe and expectation came over
me.[4] Just then I heard a voice,—