 | Marjorie Daw, and other people |  |
3. QUITE SO.
1. I.
OF course that was not his name. Even in
the State of Maine, where it is still a custom
to maim a child for life by christening him
Arioch or Shadrach or Ephraim, nobody would
dream of calling a boy “Quite So.” It was
merely a nickname which we gave him in camp;
but it stuck to him with such bur-like tenacity,
and is so inseparable from my memory of him,
that I do not think I could write definitely of
John Bladburn if I were to call him anything
but “Quite So.”
It was one night shortly after the first battle
of Bull Run. The Army of the Potomac, shattered,
stunned, and forlorn, was back in its old
quarters behind the earth-works. The melancholy
line of ambulances bearing our wounded
Bridge; the blue smocks and the gray still lay
in windrows on the field of Manassas; and the
gloom that weighed down our hearts was like
the fog that stretched along the bosom of the
Potomac, and infolded the valley of the Shenandoah.
A drizzling rain had set in at twilight,
and, growing bolder with the darkness, was beating
a dismal tattoo on the tent,—the tent of
Mess 6, Company A, -th Regiment N. Y. Volunteers.
Our mess, consisting originally of eight
men, was reduced to four. Little Billy, as one
of the boys grimly remarked, had concluded to
remain at Manassas; Corporal Steele we had to
leave at Fairfax Court-House, shot through the
hip; Hunter and Suydam we had said good by
to that afternoon. “Tell Johnny Reb,” says
Hunter, lifting up the leather side-piece of the
ambulance, “that I'll be back again as soon as
I get a new leg.” But Suydam said nothing;
he only unclosed his eyes languidly and smiled
farewell to us.
The four of us who were left alive and unhurt
that shameful July day sat gloomily smoking our
brier-wood pipes, thinking our thoughts, and listening
That, and the occasional whine of a hungry cur,
foraging on the outskirts of the camp for a stray
bone, alone broke the silence, save when a vicious
drop of rain detached itself meditatively
from the ridge-pole of the tent, and fell upon
the wick of our tallow candle, making it “cuss,”
as Ned Strong described it. The candle was in
the midst of one of its most profane fits when
Blakely, knocking the ashes from his pipe and addressing
no one in particular, but giving breath,
unconsciously as it were, to the result of his cogitations,
observed that “it was considerable of a
fizzle.”
“The `on to Richmond' business?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder what they'll do about it over yonder,”
said Curtis, pointing over his right shoulder.
By “over yonder” he meant the North in
general and Massachusetts especially. Curtis
was a Boston boy, and his sense of locality was
so strong that, during all his wanderings in Virginia,
I do not believe there was a moment, day
or night, when he could not have made a bee-line
for Faneuil Hall.
“Do about it?” cried Strong. “They 'll
make about two hundred thousand blue flannel
trousers and send them along, each pair with a
man in it,—all the short men in the long trousers,
and all the tall men in the short ones,” he
added, ruefully contemplating his own leg-gear,
which scarcely reached to his ankles.
“That's so,” said Blakely. “Just now, when
I was tackling the commissary for an extra
candle, I saw a crowd of new fellows drawing
blankets.”
“I say there, drop that!” cried Strong. “All
right, sir, did n't know it was you,” he added
hastily, seeing it was Lieutenant Haines who had
thrown back the flap of the tent, and let in a
gust of wind and rain that threatened the most
serious bronchial consequences to our discontented
tallow dip.
“You're to bunk in here,” said the lieutenant,
speaking to some one outside. The some
one stepped in, and Haines vanished in the darkness.
When Strong had succeeded in restoring the
candle to consciousness, the light fell upon a tall,
shy-looking man of about thirty-five, with long,
rain-drops stood in clusters, like the night-dew
on patches of cobweb in a meadow. It was an
honest face, with unworldly sort of blue eyes,
that looked out from under the broad visor of the
infantry cap. With a deferential glance towards
us, the new-comer unstrapped his knapsack,
spread his blanket over it, and sat down unobtrusively.
“Rather damp night out,” remarked Blakely,
whose strong hand was supposed to be conversation.
“Quite so,” replied the stranger, not curtly,
but pleasantly, and with an air as if he had said
all there was to be said about it.
“Come from the North recently?” inquired
Blakely, after a pause.
“Yes.”
“From any place in particular?”
“Maine.”
“People considerably stirred up down there?”
continued Blakely, determined not to give up.
“Quite so.”
Blakely threw a puzzled look over the tent,
and seeing Ned Strong on the broad grin, frowned
air, and began humming softly,
“I wish I was in Dixie.”
“The State of Maine,” observed Blakely, with
a certain defiance of manner not at all necessary
in discussing a geographical question, “is a
pleasant State.”
“In summer,” suggested the stranger.
“In summer, I mean,” returned Blakely with
animation, thinking he had broken the ice.
“Cold as blazes in winter, though,—is n't it?”
The new recruit merely noddled.
Blakely eyed the man homicidally for a moment,
and then, smiling one of those smiles of
simulated gayety which the novelists inform us
are more tragic than tears, turned upon him with
withering irony.
“Trust you left the old folks pretty comfortable?”
“Dead.”
“The old folks dead!”
“Quite so.”
Blakely made a sudden dive for his blanket,
tucked it around him with painful precision, and
was heard no more.
Just then the bugle sounded “lights out,”—
bugle answering bugle in far-off camps. When
our not elaborate night-toilets were complete,
Strong threw somebody else's old boot at the
candle with infallible aim, and darkness took
possession of the tent. Ned, who lay on my
left, presently reached over to me, and whispered,
“I say, our friend `quite so' is a garrulous
old boy! He'll talk himself to death some
of these odd times, if he is n't careful. How he
did run on!”
The next morning, when I opened my eyes, the
new member of Mess 6 was sitting on his knapsack,
combing his blond beard with a horn comb.
He nodded pleasantly to me, and to each of the
boys as they woke up, one by one. Blakely did
not appear disposed to renew the animated conversation
of the previous night; but while he
was gone to make a requisition for what was in
pure sarcasm called coffee, Curtis ventured to
ask the man his name.
“Bladburn, John,” was the reply.
“That's rather an unwieldy name for everyday
use,” put in Strong. “If it would n't hurt
your feelings, I'd like to call you Quite So,—
it agreeable?”
Bladburn gave a little laugh, all to himself,
seemingly, and was about to say, “Quite so,”
when he caught at the words, blushed like a girl,
and nodded a sunny assent to Strong. From that
day until the end, the sobriquet clung to him.
The disaster at Bull Run was followed, as the
reader knows, by a long period of masterly inactivity,
so far as the Army of the Potomac was
concerned. McDowell, a good soldier but unlucky,
retired to Arlington Heights, and McClellan,
who had distinguished himself in Western
Virginia, took command of the forces in front of
Washington, and bent his energies to reorganizing
the demoralized troops. It was a dreary
time to the people of the North, who looked
fatuously from week to week for “the fall of
Richmond”; and it was a dreary time to the
denizens of that vast city of tents and forts
which stretched in a semicircle before the beleaguered
Capitol,—so tedious and soul-wearing
a time that the hardships of forced marches and
the horrors of battle became desirable things to
them.
Roll-call morning and evening, guard-duty,
dress-parades, an occasional reconnoissance, dominos,
wrestling-matches, and such rude games
as could be carried on in camp made up the sum
of our lives. The arrival of the mail with letters
and papers from home was the event of the day.
We noticed that Bladburn neither wrote nor
received any letters. When the rest of the boys
were scribbling away for dear life, with drumheads
and knapsacks and cracker-boxes for
writing-desks, he would sit serenely smoking his
pipe, but looking out on us through rings of smoke
with a face expressive of the tenderest interest.
“Look here, Quite So,” Strong would say,
“the mail-bag closes in half an hour. Ain't you
going to write?”
“I believe not to-day,” Bladburn would reply,
as if he had written yesterday, or would write to-morrow:
but he never wrote.
He had become a great favorite with us, and
with all the officers of the regiment. He talked
less than any man I ever knew, but there was
nothing sinister or sullen in his reticence. It
was sunshine, — warmth and brightness, but no
voice. Unassuming and modest to the verge of
singular pluck and nerve.
“Do you know,” said Curtis to me one day,
“that that fellow Quite So is clear grit, and
when we come to close quarters with our Palmetto
brethren over yonder, he'll do something
devilish?”
“What makes you think so?”
“Well, nothing quite explainable; the exasperating
coolness of the man, as much as anything.
This morning the boys were teasing
Muffin Fan” [a small mulatto girl who used to
bring muffins into camp three times a week, — at
the peril of her life!] “and Jemmy Blunt of
Company K — you know him — was rather rough
on the girl, when Quite So, who had been reading
under a tree, shut one finger in his book, walked
over to where the boys were skylarking, and with
the smile of a juvenile angel on his face lifted
Jemmy out of that and set him down gently in
front of his own tent. There Blunt sat speechless,
staring at Quite So, who was back again
under the tree, pegging away at his little Latin
grammar.”
That Latin grammar! He always had it about
pages at odd intervals and in out-of-the-way
places. Half a dozen times a day he would draw
it out from the bosom of his blouse, which had
taken the shape of the book just over the left
breast, look at it as if to assure himself it was all
right, and then put the thing back. At night
the volume lay beneath his pillow. The first
thing in the morning, before he was well awake,
his hand would go groping instinctively under
his knapsack in search of it.
A devastating curiosity seized upon us boys
concerning that Latin grammar, for we had discovered
the nature of the book. Strong wanted
to steal it one night, but concluded not to. “In
the first place,” reflected Strong, “I have n't the
heart to do it, and in the next place I have n't
the moral courage. Quite So would placidly break
every bone in my body.” And I believe Strong
was not far out of the way.
Sometimes I was vexed with myself for allowing
this tall, simple-hearted country fellow to
puzzle me so much. And yet, was he a simple-hearted
country fellow? City bred he certainly
was not; but his manner, in spite of his awkwardness,
and then, too, he dropped a word or a phrase that
showed his familiarity with unexpected lines of
reading. “The other day,” said Curtis, with the
slightest elevation of eyebrow, “he had the cheek
to correct my Latin for me.” In short, Quite So
was a daily problem to the members of Mess 6.
Whenever he was absent, and Blakely and Curtis
and Strong and I got together in the tent, we
discussed him, evolving various theories to explain
why he never wrote to anybody and why nobody
ever wrote to him. Had the man committed
some terrible crime, and fled to the army to hide
his guilt? Blakely suggested that he must have
murdered “the old folks.” What did he mean
by eternally conning that tattered Latin grammar?
And was his name Bladburn, anyhow?
Even his imperturbable amiability became suspicious.
And then his frightful reticence! If he
was the victim of any deep grief or crushing
calamity, why did n't he seem unhappy? What
business had he to be cheerful?
“It's my opinion,” said Strong, “that he's a
rival Wandering Jew; the original Jacobs, you
know, was a dark fellow.”
Blakely inferred from something Bladburn had
said, or something he had not said, — which was
more likely, — that he had been a schoolmaster
at some period of his life.
“Schoolmaster be hanged!” was Strong's
comment. “Can you fancy a schoolmaster going
about conjugating baby verbs out of a dratted
little spelling-book? No, Quite So has evidently
been a — a — Blest if I can imagine what he's
been!”
Whatever John Bladburn had been, he was a
lonely man. Whenever I want a type of perfect
human isolation, I shall think of him, as he was
in those days, moving remote, self-contained, and
alone in the midst of two hundred thousand
men.
2. II.
The Indian summer, with its infinite beauty
and tenderness, came like a reproach that year
to Virginia. The foliage, touched here and there
with prismatic tints, dropped motionless in the
golden haze. The delicate Virginia creeper was
almost minded to put forth its scarlet buds
again. No wonder the lovely phantom — this
dusky Southern sister of the pale Northern June
— lingered not long with us, but, filling the once
peaceful glens and valleys with her pathos, stole
away rebukefully before the savage enginery of
man.
The preparations that had been going on for
months in arsenals and foundries at the North
were nearly completed. For weeks past the air
had been filled with rumors of an advance; but
the rumor of to-day refuted the rumor of yesterday,
and the Grand Army did not move. Heintzelman's
corps was constantly folding its tents,
like the Arabs, and as silently stealing away;
next morning. One day, at length, orders came
down for our brigade to move.
“We're going to Richmond, boys!” shouted
Strong, thrusting his head in at the tent; and
we all cheered and waved our caps like mad.
You see, Big Bethel and Bull Run and Ball's
Bluff (the bloody B's, as we used to call them,)
had n't taught us any better sense.
Rising abruptly from the plateau, to the left
of our encampment, was a tall hill covered with
a stunted growth of red-oak, persimmon, and
chestnut. The night before we struck tents I
climbed up to the crest to take a parting look at
a spectacle which custom had not been able to
rob of its enchantment. There, at my feet, and
extending miles and miles away, lay the camps
of the Grand Army, with its camp-fires reflected
luridly against the sky. Thousands of lights
were twinkling in every direction, some nestling
in the valley, some like fire-flies beating their
wings and palpitating among the trees, and
others stretching in parallel lines and curves, like
the street-lamps of a city. Somewhere, far off,
a band was playing, at intervals it seemed; and
bugle shot sharply up through the night, and
seemed to lose itself like a rocket among the
stars, — the patient, untroubled stars. Suddenly
a hand was laid upon my arm.
“I'd like to say a word to you,” said Bladburn.
With a little start of surprise, I made room
for him on the fallen tree where I was seated.
“I may n't get another chance,” he said.
“You and the boys have been very kind to me,
kinder than I deserve; but sometimes I 've
fancied that my not saying anything about myself
had given you the idea that all was not right
in my past. I want to say that I came down to
Virginia with a clean record.”
“We never really doubted it, Bladburn.”
“If I did n't write home,” he continued, “it
was because I had n't any home, neither kith
nor kin. When I said the old folks were dead,
I said it. Am I boring you? If I thought I
was —”
“No, Bladburn. I have often wanted you to
talk to me about yourself, not from idle curiosity,
I trust, but because I liked you that rainy night
you ever since. This is n't too much to say,
when Heaven only knows how soon I may be
past saying it or you listening to it.”
“That's it,” said Bladburn, hurriedly, “that's
why I want to talk with you. I've a fancy that
I sha' n't come out of our first battle.”
The words gave me a queer start, for I had
been trying several days to throw off a similar
presentiment concerning him, — a foolish presentiment
that grew out of a dream.
“In case anything of that kind turns up,” he
continued, “I'd like you to have my Latin grammar
here, — you've seen me reading it. You
might stick it away in a bookcase, for the sake
of old times. It goes against me to think of it
falling into rough hands or being kicked about
camp and trampled under foot.”
He was drumming softly with his fingers on
the volume in the bosom of his blouse.
“I did n't intend to speak of this to a living
soul,” he went on, motioning me not to answer
him; “but something took hold of me to-night
and made me follow you up here. Perhaps if I
told you all, you would be the more willing to
me. When the war broke out I was teaching
school down in Maine, in the same village where
my father was schoolmaster before me. The old
man when he died left me quite alone. I lived
pretty much by myself, having no interests outside
of the district school, which seemed in a
manner my personal property. Eight years ago
last spring a new pupil was brought to the
school, a slight slip of a girl, with a sad kind
of face and quiet ways. Perhaps it was because
she was n't very strong, and perhaps because she
was n't used over well by those who had charge
of her, or perhaps it was because my life was
lonely, that my heart warmed to the child. It
all seems like a dream now, since that April
morning when little Mary stood in front of my
desk with her pretty eyes looking down bashfully
and her soft hair falling over her face. One day
I look up, and six years have gone by, — as they
go by in dreams, — and among the scholars is a
tall girl of sixteen, with serious, womanly eyes
which I cannot trust myself to look upon. The
old life has come to an end. The child has become
a woman and can teach the master now.
her until that day!
“Long after the children had gone home I sat
in the school-room with my face resting on my
hands. There was her desk, the afternoon shadows
failing across it. It never looked empty and
cheerless before. I went and stood by the low
chair, as I had stood hundreds of times. On the
desk was a pile of books, ready to be taken away,
and among the rest a small Latin grammar which
we had studied together. What little despairs
and triumphs and happy hours were associated
with it! I took it up curiously, as if it were
some gentle dead thing, and turned over the
pages, and could hardly see them. Turning the
pages, idly so, I came to a leaf on which something
was written with ink, in the familiar girlish
hand. It was only the words `Dear John,'
through which she had drawn two hasty pencil
lines — I wish she had n't drawn those lines!”
added Bladburn, under his breath.
He was silent for a minute or two, looking off
towards the camps, where the lights were fading
out one by one.
“I had no right to go and love Mary. I was
would have blighted her youth. I was as wrong
as wrong can be. But I never meant to tell her.
I locked the grammar in my desk and the secret
in my heart for a year. I could n't bear to meet
her in the village, and kept away from every
place where she was likely to be. Then she came
to me, and sat down at my feet penitently, just
as she used to do when she was a child, and
asked what she had done to anger me; and then,
Heaven forgive me! I told her all, and asked her
if she could say with her lips the words she had
written, and she nestled in my arms all a trembling
like a bird, and said them over and over
again.
“When Mary's family heard of our engagement,
there was trouble. They looked higher
for Mary than a middle-aged schoolmaster. No
blame to them. They forbade me the house, her
uncles; but we met in the village and at the
neighbors' houses, and I was happy, knowing she
loved me. Matters were in this state when the
war came on. I had a strong call to look after
the old flag, and I hung my head that day when
the company raised in our village marched by
could n't tear myself away. About this time the
minister's son, who had been away to college,
came to the village. He met Mary here and
there, and they became great friends. He was
a likely fellow, near her own age, and it was
natural they should like one another. Sometimes
I winced at seeing him made free of the home
from which I was shut out; then I would open
the grammar at the leaf where `Dear John' was
written up in the corner, and my trouble was
gone. Mary was sorrowful and pale these days,
and I think her people were worrying her.
“It was one evening two or three days before
we got the news of Bull Run. I had gone down
to the burying-ground to trim the spruce hedge
set round the old man's lot, and was just stepping
into the enclosure, when I heard voices
from the opposite side. One was Mary's, and
the other I knew to be young Marston's, the
minister's son. I did n't mean to listen, but
what Mary was saying struck me dumb. We
must never meet again, she was saying in a wild
way. We must say good by here, forever, —
good by, good by! And I could hear her sobbing.
no; my hand, not my lips! Then it seemed he
kissed her hands, and the two parted, one going
towards the parsonage, and the other out by the
gate near where I stood.
“I don't know how long I stood there, but the
night-dews had wet me to the bone when I stole
out of the graveyard and across the road to the
school-house. I unlocked the door, and took the
Latin grammar from the desk and hid it in my
bosom. There was not a sound or a light anywhere
as I walked out of the village. And now,”
said Bladburn, rising suddenly from the tree-trunk,
“if the little book ever falls in your way,
won't you see that it comes to no harm, for my
sake, and for the sake of the little woman who
was true to me and did n't love me? Wherever
she is to-night, God bless her!”
As we descended to camp with our arms resting
on each other's shoulder, the watch-fires were
burning low in the valleys and along the hillsides,
and as far as the eye could reach the silent
tents lay bleaching in the moonlight.
3. III.
We imagined that the throwing forward of our
brigade was the initial movement of a general
advance of the army; but that, as the reader
will remember, did not take place until the following
March. The Confederates had fallen back to
Centreville without firing a shot, and the National
troops were in possession of Lewinsville, Vienna,
and Fairfax Court-House. Our new position was
nearly identical with that which we had occupied
on the night previous to the battle of Bull Run,
— on the old turnpike road to Manassas, where
the enemy was supposed to be in great force.
With a field-glass we could see the Rebel pickets
moving in a belt of woodland on our right, and
morning and evening we heard the spiteful roll
of their snare-drums.
Those pickets soon became a nuisance to us.
Hardly a night passed but they fired upon our
outposts, so far with no harmful result; but after
a while it grew to be a serious matter. The
wood into a field covered with underbrush, and
lie there in the dark for hours, waiting for a shot.
Then our men took to the rifle-pits,—pits ten or
twelve feet long by four or five deep, with the
loose earth banked up a few inches high on the
exposed sides. All the pits bore names, more or
less felicitous, by which they were known to their
transient tenants. One was called “The Pepper-Box,”
another “Uncle Sam's Well,” another
“The Reb-Trap,” and another, I am constrained
to say, was named after a not to be mentioned
tropical locality. Though this rude sort of
nomenclature predominated, there was no lack
of softer titles, such as “Fortress Matilda” and
“Castle Mary,” and one had, though unintentionally,
a literary flavor to it, “Blair's Grave,”
which was not popularly considered as reflecting
unpleasantly on Nat Blair, who had assisted in
making the excavation.
Some of the regiment had discovered a field of
late corn in the neighborhood, and used to boil a
few ears every day, while it lasted, for the boys
detailed on the night-picket. The corn-cobs were
always scrupulously preserved and mounted on
carried away one of these barbette guns, there
was swearing in that particular trench. Strong,
who was very sensitive to this kind of disaster,
was complaining bitterly one morning, because
he had lost three “pieces” the night before.
“There's Quite So, now,” said Strong, “when
a Minie-ball comes ping! and knocks one of his
guns to flinders, he merely smiles, and does n't
at all see the degradation of the thing.”
Poor Bladburn! As I watched him day by
day going about his duties, in his shy, cheery
way, with a smile for every one and not an extra
word for anybody, it was hard to believe he was
the same man who, that night before we broke
camp by the Potomac, had poured out to me the
story of his love and sorrow in words that burned
in my memory.
While Strong was speaking, Blakely lifted
aside the flap of the tent and looked in on us.
“Boys, Quite So was hurt last night,” he
said, with a white tremor to his lip.
“What!”
“Shot on picket.”
“Why, he was in the pit next to mine,” cried
Strong.
“Badly hurt?”
“Badly hurt.”
I knew he was; I need not have asked the
question. He never meant to go back to New
England!
Bladburn was lying on the stretcher in the
hospital-tent. The surgeon had knelt down by
him, and was carefully cutting away the bosom
of his blouse. The Latin grammar, stained and
torn, slipped, and fell to the floor. Bladburn
gave me a quick glance. I picked up the book,
and as I placed it in his hand, the icy fingers
closed softly over mine. He was sinking fast.
In a few minutes the surgeon finished his examination.
When he rose to his feet there were
tears on the weather-beaten checks. He was a
rough outside, but a tender heart.
“My poor lad,” he blurted out, “it's no use.
If you've anything to say, say it now, for you've
nearly done with this world.”
Then Bladburn lifted his eyes slowly to the
surgeon, and the old smile flitted over his face as
he murmured,
“Quite so.”
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