 | I. Marjorie Daw, and other people |  |
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.
| I. Marjorie Daw, and other people | |