text:
Speed

At two in the morning, on Main Street of a Nebraska prairie town that ought to have been asleep since ten, a crowd was packed under a lone arc-light, chattering, laughing, and every moment peering down the dim street to westward.

Out in the road were two new automobile tires, and cans of gasoline, oil, water. The hose of a pressure air-pump stretched across the cement sidewalk, and beside it was an air-gauge in a new chamois case. Across the street a restaurant was glaring with unshaded electric lights; and a fluffy-haired, pert-nose girl alternately ran to the window and returned to look after the food she was keeping warm. The president of the local motor club, who was also owner of the chief garage, kept stuttering to a young man in brown union overalls, “Now be all ready — for land’s sake, be ready. Remember, gotta change those casings in three minutes.” They were awaiting a romantic event — the smashing of the cross-continent road-record by a Mallard car driven by J. T. Buffum.

Everyone there had seen pictures of Buffum in the sporting and automobile pages of the Lincoln and Kansas City papers; everyone knew that face, square, impassive, heavy-cheeked, kindly, with the unsmoked cigar between firm teeth, and the almost boyish bang over a fine forehead. Two days ago he had been in San Francisco, between the smeared gold of Chink dens and the tumult of the Pacific. Two days from now he would be in distant New York.

Miles away on the level prairie road a piercing jab of light grew swiftly into two lights, while a distant drum-roll turned into the burring roar of a huge unmuffled engine. The devouring thing burst into town, came fulminating down on them, stopped with a clashing jerk. The crowd saw the leather-hooded man at the mighty steering wheel nod to them, grinning, human, companionable — the great Buffum.

“Hurray! Hurray!” came the cries, and the silence changed to weaving gossip.

Already the garage youngster, with his boss and three men from another garage, was yanking off two worn casings, filling the gas tank, the oil well, the radiator. Buffum stiffly crawled from the car, stretched his shoulders, his mighty arms and legs, in a leonine yawn. “Jump out, Roy. Eats here,” he muttered to the man in the passenger seat. This man the spectators did not heed. He was merely Buffum’s mechanic and relay driver, a poor thing who had never in his life driven faster than ninety miles an hour.

The garage owner hustled Buffum across to the lunchroom. The moment the car had stormed into town the pretty waitress, jumping up and down with impatience, had snatched the chicken from the warming oven, poured out the real coffee, proudly added real cream. The lunch and the changing of casings took three and a quarter minutes.

The clatter of the motor smote the quiet houses and was gone. The town became drab and dull. The crowd yawned and fumbled its way home.

Buffum planned to get in two hours of sleep after leaving this Nebraska town. Roy Bender, the relay driver, took the wheel. Buffum sat with his relaxed body swaying to the leaping motion, while he drowsily commented in a hoarse, slow shout that pushed through the enveloping roar: “Look out for that hill, Roy. Going to be slippery.”

“How can you tell?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I smell it. But watch out, anyway. Good night, little playmate. Wake me up at four-fifteen.”

That was all of the conversation for seventy-two miles.

It was dawn when Buffum drove again. He was silent; he was concentrated on keeping the speedometer just two miles higher than seemed safe. But for a mile or so, on straight stretches, he glanced with weary happiness at the morning meadows, at shimmering tapestry of grass and young wheat, and caught half a note of the song of a meadowlark. His mouth, so grimly tight in dangerous places, rose at the corners.

Toward noon, as Buffum was approaching the village of Apogee, Iowa, the smooth blaring of the motor was interrupted by a noise as though the engine was flying to pieces.

He yanked at the switch; before the car had quite halted, Roy and he had tumbled out at opposite sides, were running forward to lift the hood. The fan-guard, a heavy wire soldered on the radiator, had worked loose and bent a fan-blade, which had ripped out a handful of honeycomb. The inside of the radiator looked as though it had been hacked with a dull knife. The water was cascading out.

Buffum speculated: “Apogee next town. Can’t get radiator there. None nearer ‘n Clinton. Get this soldered. Here! You!”

The “Here! You!” was directed at the driver of an ancient roadster. “Got to hustle this boat into next town. Want you to haul me in.”

Roy Bender had already snatched a tow-rope from the back of the racing car, was fastening it to the front axle of the Mallard, the rear of the roadster.

Buffum gave no time for disputes. “I’m J. T. Buffum. Racin’ ‘cross continent. Here’s ten dollars. Want your machine ten minutes. I’ll drive.” He had crowded into the seat. Already, with Roy steering the Mallard, they were headed for Apogee.

A shouting crowd ran out from house and store. Buffum slowly looked them over. Of a man in corduroy trousers and khaki shirt, who had plumped out of a garage, he demanded: “Who’s the best solderer in town?”

“I am. Good as anybody in Iowa.”

“Now, wait! Know who I am?”

“Sure! You’re Buffum.”

“My radiator is shot to thunder. Got to be soldered. I want six hours’ work done in one hour, or less. How about the hardware store? Isn’t there a solderer there that’s even better than you?”

“Yes, I guess maybe old Frank Dieters is.”

“Get him, and get the other good man, and get busy. One of you work on each side. Roy Bender here will boss you.” Already Roy was taking down the radiator. “One hour, remember. Hurry! Plenty of money in it —”

“Oh, we don’t care anything about the money!”

“Thanks, old man. Well, I might as well grab a little sleep. Where’ll I get a long-distance connection?” he yawned.

“Across the street at Mrs. Rivers’. Be less noise than in the garage, I guess.”

Over the way was a house that was a large square box with an octagonal cupola on the mansard roof. It was set back in a yard of rough grass and old crabapple trees. At the gate were a smallish, severe woman, in spectacles and apron, and a girl of twenty-five or — six. Buffum looked at the girl twice, and tried to make out what it was that distinguished her from all the other women in the crowd that had come pushing and giggling to see the famous car.

She was sharply individualized. It was not that she was tall and blazing. She was slight — and delicate as a drypoint etching. Her chin was precise though soft; she had a Roman nose, a feminized charming version of the Roman nose. The thing that made her distinctive, Buffum reflected, was her poise. The girl by the gate was as quietly aloof as the small cold moon of winter.

He plodded across the road. He hesitated before speaking.

“I hope there hasn’t been an accident,” she murmured to him.

“No, just a small repair.”

“But, why does everyone seem so much concerned?”

“Why, it’s — it’s — I’m J. T. Buffum.”

“Mr.— uh — Buffum?”

“I reckon you never heard of me.”

“Why, uh — should I have?” Her eyes were serious, regretful at discourtesy.

“No. You shouldn’t. I just mean — Motor-fans usually have. I’m a racer. I’m driving from San Francisco to New York.”

“Really? It will take you — ten days?”

“Four to five days.”

“In two days you will be in the East? See the — the ocean? Oh!”

In her voice was wistfulness. Her eyes saw far-off things. But they came back to Apogee, Iowa, and to the big, dusty man in leather, with a penitent: “I’m ashamed not to have heard of you, but I— we haven’t a car. I hope they will make your repair quickly. May Mother and I give you a glass of milk or something?”

“I’d be glad if you’d let me use your telephone. So noisy at —”

“Of course! Mother, this is Mr. Buffum, who is driving across the country. Oh — my name is Aurilla Rivers.”

Buffum awkwardly tried to bow in two directions at once. Then he followed Aurilla Rivers’ slender back. He noticed how smooth were her shoulder-blades. They were neither jagged nor wadded. It seemed to him that the blue silk of her waist took life from the warm and eager flesh beneath. In her studied serenity she had not lost her youth.

As he drew away from the prying crowd and the sound of hasty hammers and wrenches, he was conscious of clinging peace. The brick of the walk was worn to a soft rose, shaded by gently moving branches of lilac bushes. At the end was a wild-grape arbor and an ancient bench. The arbor was shadowy, and full of the feeling of long and tranquil years. In this land of new houses and new red barns and blazing miles of wheat, it seemed mysterious with antiquity.

And on the doorstep was the bleached vertebra of a whale. Buffum was confused. He traveled so much and so swiftly that he always had to stop to think whether he was East or West, and now — Yes, this was Iowa. Of course. But that vertebra belonged to New England.

And to New England belonged the conch shell and the mahogany table in the wide hall with its strip of rag-carpet down which Miss Rivers led him to the telephone — an old-fashioned wall instrument. Buffum noticed that Miss Rivers conscientiously disappeared through the wide door at the end of the hall into a garden of pinks and pansies and sweet William.

“Please get me long distance.”

“I’m long distance and short distance and —”

“All right. This is Buffum, the transcontinental racer. I want to talk to Detroit, Michigan — Mallard Motor Company — office of the president.”

He waited ten minutes. He sat on the edge of a William and Mary chair, and felt obese, clumsy, extremely dirty. He ventured off his chair — disapproving of the thunder of his footsteps — and stood at the door of the parlor. The corner by the bow window seemed to be a shrine. Above a genuine antediluvian haircloth sofa were three pictures. In the center was a rather good painting of a man who was the very spirit of 1850 in New England — burnsides, grim white forehead, Roman nose, prim triangle of shirt-front. On the right was a watercolor of a house, white doored, narrow eaved, small windowed, standing out against gray sand and blue water, with a moored motor-dory beyond. On the woodshed ell of the pictured house was nailed up the name-board of a ship — Penninah Sparrow.

On the left of the portrait was a fairly recent enlarged photograph of a man somewhat like the granther of 1850, so far as Romanness of nose went, but weaker and more pompous, a handsome old buck, with a pretentious broad eyeglass ribbon and hair that must have been silvery over a face that must have been deep-flushed.

By the sofa was a marble-topped stand on which were fresh sweet peas.

Then central called, and Buffum was talking to the president of the Mallard Motor Company, who for two days and nights had sat by the ticker, watching his flashing progress.

“Hello, chief. Buffum speaking. Held up for about an hour. Apogee, Iowa. Think I can make it up. But better move the schedule up through Illinois and Indiana. Huh? Radiator leak. ‘By!”

He inquired the amount of toll, and rambled out to the garden. He had to hurry away, of course, and get some sleep, but it would be good for him to see Aurilla Rivers again, to take with him the memory of her cool resoluteness. She was coming toward him. He meekly followed her back through the hall, to the front steps. There he halted her. He would see quite enough of Roy Bender and the car before he reached New York.

“Please sit down here a moment, and tell me —”

“Yes?”

“Oh, about the country around here, and uh — Oh! I owe you for the telephone call.”

“Please! It’s nothing.”

“But it’s something. It’s two dollars and ninety-five cents.”

“For a telephone call?”

He caught her hand and pressed the money into it. She plumped down on the steps, and he discreetly lowered his bulk beside her. She turned on him, blazing;

“You infuriate me! You do things I’ve always wanted to — sweep across big distances, command men, have power. I suppose it’s the old Yankee shipmasters coming out in me.”

“Miss Rivers, I noticed a portrait in there. It seemed to me that the picture and the old sofa make a kind of shrine. And the fresh flowers.” She stared a little before she said:

“Yes. It’s a shrine. But you’re the first one that ever guessed. How did you —”

“I don’t know. I suppose it’s because I went through some California missions a few days ago. Tell me about the people in the pictures.”

“You wouldn’t — Oh, some day, perhaps.”

“Some day! Now, you see here, child! Do you realize that in about forty minutes I’ll be kiting out of here at seventy miles an hour? Imagine that I’ve met you a couple of times in the bank or the post office, and finally after about six months I’ve called here, and told your mother I like pansies. All right. All that is over. Now, who are you, Aurilla Rivers? Who and what and why and how and when?”

She smiled. She nodded. She told.

She was a school teacher now, but before her father had died — well, the enlarged photograph in there was her father, Bradley Rivers, pioneer lawyer of Apogee. He had come out from Cape Cod, as a boy. The side-whiskered man of the central portrait was her grandfather, Captain Zenas Rivers, of West Harlepool, on the Cape. The house in the picture was the Rivers’ mansion, birthplace of her father.

“Have you been on the Cape yourself?” Buffum queried. “I remember driving through Harlepool, but I don’t recall anything but white houses and a meeting-house with a whale of a big steeple.”

“The dream of my life has been to go to Harlepool. Once when Father had to go to Boston he did run down there by himself. That’s when he brought back the portrait of Grandfather, and the painting of the old house, and the furniture and all. He said it made him so melancholy to see the changes in the town, and he never would go again. Then — he died. I’m saving up money for a trip back East. I do believe in democracy, but at the same time I feel that families like the Riverses owe it to the world to set an example, and I want to find my own people again. My own people!”

“Maybe you’re right. I’m from the soil. Di-rect! But somehow I can see it in you, same as I do in the portrait of your grandfather. I wish I— Well, never mind.”

“But you are an aristocrat. You do things that other people don’t dare to. While you were telephoning, I saw our school principal, and he said you were a Vi-king and all kinds of —”

“Here! Now! You! Quit! Stop! Wait! A lot of people, especially on newspapers, give me a lot of taffy just because I can drive fast. What I need is someone like you to make me realize what a roughneck I am.”

She looked at him clear-eyed, and pondered: “I’m afraid most of the Apogee boys think I’m rather prim.”

“They would! That’s why they’re stuck in Apogee.” Buffum searched her eyes and speculated: “I wonder if we aren’t alike in this way: Neither of us content to plod. Most people never think of why they’re living. They reckon and guess and s’pose that maybe some day they’ll do better, and then — bing!— they’re dead. But you and I— I seem — I’ve known you a long time. Will you remember me?”

“Oh, yes. There aren’t so many seventy-an-hour people in Apogee!”

From the gate Roy Bender was bellowing: “Ready in two minutes, boss!”

Buffum was on his feet, drawing on his gauntlets and leather coat. She looked at him gravely, while he urged:

“Going on. Day from now, the strain will begin to kind of get me. Will you think about me then? Will you wireless me some good thoughts?”

“Yes!”— very quietly. He yanked off his big gauntlet. He felt her hand fragile in his. Then he was gone, marching down the walk, climbing into the car, demanding of Roy: “Look over oil and battery and ev’thing?”

“You bet. We did everything,” said the garage man, “Get a little rest?”

“Yes. Had a chance to sit in the shade and loaf.”

“Saw you talking to Aurilla Rivers —”

Roy interrupted: “All right, all right, boss. Shoot!”

Buffum heard the garage man out:

“Fine girl, Aurilla is. Smart’s a whip. She’s a real swell. Born and brought up here, too.”

“Who’s this that Miss Rivers is engaged to?” Buffum risked.

“Well, I guess probably she’ll marry Reverend Dawson. He’s a dried-up old stick but he comes from the East. Some day she’ll get tired of school teaching, and he’ll grab her. Marry in haste and repent at Reno, like the fellow says.”

“That’s right. Fix up the bill, Roy? G’by.”

Buffum was off. Five minutes later he was six and three-quarters miles away. In his mind was but one thought — to make up the lost time; in his eyes was no vision save speedometer and the road that rushed toward him.

A little after dark he rumbled at Roy: “Here. Take her. Going to get some sleep.” He did sleep, for an hour, then struggling into full wakefulness he dug his knuckles into his eyes like a sleepy boy, glanced at the speedometer, laid a hand on the steering wheel and snapped at Roy: “All right. Move over.”

At dawn nothing existed in the world save the compulsion to keep her at top speed. The earth was shut off from him by a wall of roar and speed. He did not rouse to human feeling even when he boomed into Columbus Circle, the breaker of the record.

He went instantly to bed: slept twenty-six and one-quarter hours, then attended a dinner given to himself, and made a speech that was unusually incoherent, because all through he remembered that he was due in San Francisco in eight days. He was to sail for Japan, and a road race round the shore of Hondo. Before he returned, Aurilla Rivers would undoubtedly have married the Reverend Mr. Dawson, have gone to Cape Cod on her wedding trip. She would think only with disgust of large men with grease on their faces.

He could take one day for the trip up and back. He could get to Cape Cod more quickly by motor than by train. He was going to have one more hour with Aurilla, on his way to San Francisco. He would be more interesting to her if he could gossip of her ancestral background. He could take pictures of the place to her, and perhaps an old chair from the mansion. As he drove down Front Street, in West Harlepool, he saw the house quite as it had appeared in Aurilla’s picture with the name-board of a wrecked ship over the woodshed, the Penninah Sparrow.

Down the road was a one-room shop with the sign “Gaius Bearse, Gen’l Merchandise. Clam Forks, Windmills, and Souvenirs.” Out on the porch poked a smallish man. Buffum ambled toward him and saw that the man was very old.

“Good morning. This Cap’n Bearse?” inquired Buffum.

“I be.”

“Uh, uh! Say — uh, Cap’n, can you tell me who’s living in the Rivers mansion now?”

“The which mansion?”

“Rivers. The house across there.”

“Huh! That’s the Kendrick house.”

“But it was built by a Rivers.”

“No, ‘twa’n’t. That house was built by Cap’n Cephas. Kendricks living in it ever since. Owned now by William Dean Kendrick. He’s in the wool business, in Boston, but his folks comes down every summer. I ought to know. The Kendricks are kin of mine.”

“B-but where did the Riverses live?”

“The Riverses? Oh, them! Come from the West, don’t ye? Spend the summer here?”

“No. What makes you think I come from the West?”

“Rivers went out there. Bradley Rivers. He the one you’re thinking of?”

“Yes.”

“Friend of yours —”

“No. Just happened to hear about him.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. There never was any Rivers family.”

“What?”

“The father of this here Bradley Rivers called himself Zenas Rivers. But land, Zenas’ right name was Fernao Ribeiro. He was nothing but a Portygee deckhand. Fernao, or Zenas, became a wrecker. He was a good hand in a dory, but when he was drinking, he was a caution for snakes. He come straight from the Cape Verde Islands.”

“I understand Bradley Rivers’ ancestors were howling aristocrats, and came over on the Mayflower.”

“Maybe so, maybe so. Aristocrats at drinking Jamaica rum, I guess. But they didn’t come on no Mayflower. Zenas Rivers came over on the brig Jennie B. Smith!”

“I understand Zenas owned this — this Kendrick House?”

“Him? Why, boy, if Zenas or Brad either ever set foot across the threshold of that house, it was to fill the wood box, or maybe sell lobsters!”

“B-but — what kind of looking man was Zenas?”

“Thick-set, dark-complected fellow — real Portygee.”

“Didn’t he have a Roman nose?”

“Him? Huh! Had a nose like a herring.”

“But Bradley had a Roman nose. Where’d he get it?”

“From his maw. She was a Yankee, but her folks wa’n’t much account. So she married Zenas. Brad Rivers always was an awful liar. He came back here about seven-eight years ago, and he boasted he was the richest man in Kansas or maybe ’twas Milwaukee.”

“Did he buy a picture of the Kendrick mansion while he was here?”

“Believe he did. He got one of these artists to paint a picture of the Kendrick house. And he bought a couple of things of me — a horsehair sofy, and a picture of old Cap’n Gould that May Gould left here.”

“Did — did this Captain Gould in the portrait have a Roman nose? And side whiskers? Stern looking?”

“That’s him. What’s Brad been telling you, boy?”

“Nothing!” sighed Buffum. “Then Rivers was just a plain dub? Like me?”

“Plain? Brad Rivers? Well, Zenas sent Brad to school to Taunton for a year or so, but just the same, we always allowed he was so ordinary that there wa’n’t a dog belonging to a Kendrick or a Bearse or a Doane that would bite him. Ask any of the old codgers in town.”

“I will, but — thanks.”

He came down from the Apogee street, inconspicuously creeping through the dust, a large, amiable man in a derby.

He had only fifty-one minutes before the return of the Apogee branch train to the junction to connect with the next express westward.

He rang; he pounded at the front door; he went round to the back; and there he discovered Aurilla’s mother, washing napkins. She looked at him over her spectacles, and she sniffed: “Yes?”

“Do you remember I came through here recently? Racing car? I wanted to see Miss Rivers for a moment.”

“You can’t. She’s at school, teaching.”

“When will she be back? It’s four now.”

“Maybe right away, maybe not till six.”

His train left at four-forty-nine. He waited on the front steps. It was four-twenty-one when Aurilla Rivers came along the walk. He rushed to her, his watch in his hand, and before she could speak, he was pouring out:

“‘Member me? Darn glad! Got less ‘n twenty-eight minutes before have to catch train San Francisco steamer Japan possibly India afterwards glad to see me please oh please don’t be a Rivers be Aurilla just got twenty-seven ‘n’ half minutes glad?”

“Why — why — ye-es —”

“Thought about me?”

“Of course.”

“Ever wish I might come shooting through again?”

“You’re so egotistical!”

“No, just in a hurry. Only got twenty-seven minutes more! Ever wish I’d come back? Oh — please! Can’t you hear the Japan steamer whistling — calling us?”

“Japan!”

“Like to see it?”

“Terribly.”

“Will you come with me? I’ll have a preacher meet us on the train. If you’ll phone to Detroit, find out all about me. Come! Quick! Marry me! Just twenty-six and a half more.”

She could only whisper in answer: “No. I mustn’t think of it. It tempts me. But Mother would never consent.”

“What has your mother to do —”

“Everything! With our people, the individual is nothing, the family’s sacred. I must think of Bradley Rivers, and old Zenas, and hundreds of fine old Yankees, building up something so much bigger than just one individual happiness. It’s, oh, noblesse oblige!” How could he, in face of her ancestor worship, tell the truth? He burst out:

“But you’d like to? Aurilla! Just twenty-five minutes now!” He chucked his watch into his pocket. “See here. I want to kiss you. I’m going seven thousand miles away, and I can’t stand it, unless — I’m going to kiss you, there under the grape arbor!” His fingers slipped under her elbow.

She came reluctantly, appealing, “No, no, please, no!” till he swept the words away with a kiss, and in the kiss she forgot all that she had said, and clung to him, begging: “Oh, don’t go away. Don’t leave me here in this dead village. Stay here — catch the next steamer! Persuade Mother —”

“I must catch this one. I’m due there — big race. Come!”

“With — without clothes?”

“Buy ’em on way — San Francisco!”

“No, I mustn’t. And there are others to consider besides Mother.”

“Mr. Dawson? Really care for him?”

“He’s very gentle and considerate and really such a good scholar. Mother wants Mr. Dawson to get a pastorate on Cape Cod, and she thought that way I might pick up with the old threads, and be a real Rivers again. As Mrs. Dawson, I could find the old house and all —” She was interrupted by his two hands behind her shoulders, by his eyes searching hers with a bitter honesty.

“Don’t you ever get tired of ancestors?” he cried.

“I do not! Whatever I may be — they were splendid. Once in a mutiny on the clipper that he was commanding, Zenas Rivers —”

“Dear, there wasn’t any Zenas Rivers. He was a Portuguese immigrant named Ribeiro, Fernao Ribeiro. The picture there in the house is a Captain Gould.”

She had slipped from his embrace. But he went steadily on, trying with eyes and voice to make her understand his tenderness:

“Old Zenas was a squat, dark chap, a wrecker, and not very nice. The first real aristocrat in your family is you.”

“Wait! You mean that — that it wasn’t any of it true? But the Rivers’ mansion?”

“There isn’t any. The house in the picture has always belonged to the Kendricks. I’ve just been on Cape Cod, and I found —”

“It isn’t true? Not any of it, about the Rivers —”

“None of it. I didn’t mean to tell you. If you don’t believe me, you can write.”

“Oh, don’t! Wait!” She turned, looked to the right. He remembered that down the street to the right was a rise of ground with a straggly village cemetery. She murmured:

“Poor Dad! I loved him, oh, so much, but — I know Dad told fibs. But never to harm people. Just because he wanted us to be proud of him. Mr.— what is your name?”

“Buffum.”

“Come.”

He followed her swift steps into the house, into the room of the shrined portraits. She looked from “Zenas Rivers” to the sketch of the “Rivers’ Mansion.” She patted the glass over her father’s photograph. She blew the dust from her fingers. She sighed: “It smells musty in here, so musty!” She ran to the mahogany chest of drawers and took out a sheet of parchment. On it, he saw, was a coat of arms. She picked up a pencil, turned over the parchment, and drew a flying motor car.

She turned and thrust the sketch at him, crying: “There’s the coat of arms of the family to come, the crest of a new aristocracy that knows how to work!” With a solemnity that wasn’t solemn at all, he intoned: “Miss Rivers, would you mind marrying me, somewhere between here and California?”

“Yes,” he kissed her —“if you can make”— she kissed him —“Mother understand. She has friends and a little money. She can get along without me. But she believes the aristocracy fable.”

“May I lie to her?”

“Why, once might be desirable.”

“I’ll tell her my mother was a Kendrick of Harlepool, and I’ll be terribly top-lofty, but in a hurry — especially the hurry! Just got thirteen minutes now!”

From the hall sounded Mrs. Rivers’ petulant voice: “Aurilly!”

“Y-yes, Mother?”

“If you and that man are going to catch the train, you better be starting.”

“W-w-why,” Aurilla gasped; then, to Buffum: “I’ll run right up and pack my bag.”

“It’s all ‘tended to, Aurilly. Minute I saw that dratted man coming again, I knew he’d be in a hurry. But I do think you might let me know my son-inlaw’s name before you go. You only got eleven minutes. You better hurry — hurry — hurry!”

title: Speed


text:
The Kidnaped Memorial

Wakamin is a town with a soul. It used to have a sentimental soul which got thrills out of neighborliness and “The Star–Spangled Banner,” but now it wavers between two generations, with none of the strong, silly ambition of either. The pioneering generation has died out, and of the young men, a hundred have gone to that new pioneering in France. Along the way they will behold the world, see the goodness and eagerness of it, and not greatly desire to come back to the straggly ungenerous streets of Wakamin.

Those who are left, lords of the dead soul of Wakamin, go to the movies and play tight little games of bridge and aspire only to own an automobile, because a car is the sign of respectability.

Mr. Gale felt the savorlessness of the town within ten minutes after he had arrived. He had come north to wind up the estate of his cousin, the late proprietor of the Wakamin Creamery. Mr. Gale was from the pine belt of Alabama but he did not resemble the stage Southerner. There was a look of resoluteness and industry about his broad red jaw. He spoke English very much like a man from New York or San Francisco. He did not say “Yessuh,” nor “Ah declah”; he had neither a large white hat nor a small white imperial; he was neither a Colonel nor a Judge. He was Mr. Gale, and he practiced law, and he preferred lemonade to mint juleps. But he had fought clear through the War for the Southern Confederacy; and once, on a gray wrinkled morning before a cavalry battle, he had spoken to Jeb Stuart.

While he was settling up the estate, Mr. Gale tried out the conversational qualities of the editor and the justice of the peace, and gave up his attempt to get acquainted with the Wakamites — except for Mrs. Tiffany, at whose house he went to board. Mrs. Captain Tiffany was daughter and widow of Territorial Pioneers. She herself had teamed-it from St. Paul, with her young husband, after the War. The late Captain Tiffany had been the last commander of the Wakamin G. A. R. Post, and Mrs. Tiffany had for years been president of the Women’s Relief Corps. After the barniness of the Wakamin Hotel Mr. Gale was at home in her cottage, which was as precise and nearly as small as the whitewashed conch shell at the gate. He recovered from the forlorn loneliness that had obsessed him during walks on these long, cold, blue twilights of spring. Nightly he sat on the porch with Mrs. Tiffany, and agreed with her about politics, corn-raising, religion, and recipes for hot biscuits.

When he was standing at the gate one evening of April, a small boy sidled across the street, made believe that he was not making-believe soldiers, rubbed one shin with the other foot, looked into the matter of an electric-light bug that was sprawling on its foolish back, violently chased nothing at all, walked backward a few paces, and came up to Mr. Gale with an explosive, “Hello!”

“Evening, sir.”

“You staying with Mrs. Tiffany?”

“Yes, for a while.”

“Where do you come from?”

“I’m from Alabama.”

“Alabama? Why, gee, then you’re a Southerner!”

“I reckon I am, old man.”

The small boy looked him all over, dug his toe into the leaf-mold at the edge of the curb, whistled, and burst out, “Aw, gee, you aren’t either! You don’t wear gray, and you haven’t got any darky body servant. I seen lots of Confederuts in the movies, and they always wear gray, and most always they got a body servant, and a big sword with a tossel on it. Have you got a sword with a tossel?”

“No, but I’ve got a suit of butternuts back home.”

“Gee, have you? Say, were you ever a raider?”

“No, but I know lots about raiders, and once I had dinner with Colonel Mosby.”

“Gee, did you? Say, what’s your name? Say, are you a gen’rul?”

“No, I was a high private. My name is Gale. What is your name, if I may ask you, as one man to another?”

“I’m Jimmy Martin. I live across the street. My dad’s got a great big phonograph and seventy records. Were you a high private? How high? Gee, tell me about the raiders!”

“But James, why should a loyal Northerner like you desire to know anything about the rebel horde?”

“Well, you see, I’m the leader of the Boy Scouts, and we haven’t any Scout Master, at least we did have, but he moved away, and I have to think up games for the Scouts, and gee, we’re awfully tired of discovering the North Pole, and being Red Cross in Belgium, and I always have to be the Eskimos when we discover the North Pole, or they won’t play, and I thought maybe we could be raiders and capture a Yankee train.”

“Well, you come sit on the porch, James. It occurs to me that you are a new audience for my stories. Let us proceed to defend Richmond, and do a quick dash into Illinois, to our common benefit. Is it a bargain?”

It was, and Jimmy listened, and Mrs. Tiffany came out and listened also and the three lovers of the Heroic Age sat glowing at one another till from across the village street, long and thin and drowsy, came the call, “Jim-m-m-ee Mar-r-r-tin!”

Later, Jimmy’s mother was surprised to discover her heir leading a Confederate raid, and she was satisfied only when she was assured that the raid was perfectly proper, because it was led by General Grant, and because all the raiders had voluntarily set free their slaves.

It was Jimmy Martin who enticed Mr. Gale to go spearing pickerel, and they two, the big slow-moving man and the boy who took two skips to his one solid pace, plowed through the willow thickets along the creek all one Saturday afternoon.

At the end of the trip, Jimmy cheerfully announced that he would probably get a whale of a licking, because he ought to have been chopping stovewood. Mr. Gale suggested strategic measures; he sneaked after Jimmy, through a stable door to the Martins’ woodshed, and cut wood for an hour, while Jimmy scrabbled to pile it.

In the confidences of Jimmy and in Mrs. Tiffany’s stories of her Vermont girlhood and pioneer days in Minnesota, Mr. Gale found those green memories of youth which he had hoped to discover, on coming North, in comradely talks with veterans of the Wakamin G. A. R.

But now there was no G. A. R. at all in Wakamin.

During the past year the local post had been wiped out. Of the four veterans remaining on Decoration Day a year before, three had died and one had gone West to live with his son, as is the Mid–Western way. Of the sturdy old men who had marched fifty strong to Woodlawn Cemetery a decade before, not one old man was left to leaven the land.

But they did live on in Mrs. Tiffany’s gossip, as she begged Mr. Gale to assure her that there would be a decorating of the graves, though the comrades were gone. This assurance Mr. Gale always gave, though upon sedulous inquiry at the barber shop he discovered that there was very little chance for a celebration of the Day. The town band had broken up when the barber, who was also the bandleader, had bought a car. The school principal had decided that this year it was not worth while to train the girls to wear red-white-and-blue cheesecloth, and sing “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” from a decked-over hay wagon.

Mr. Gale endeavored to approve this passing of Decoration Day. He told himself that he was glad to hear that all of his old enemies had gone. But no matter how often he said it, he couldn’t make it stick. He felt that he, too, was a derelict, as he listened to Mrs. Tiffany’s timid hopes for a celebration. To her, the Day was the climax of the year, the time when all her comrades, living and dead, drew closer together. She had a dazed faith that there would be some sort of ceremony.

She went on retrimming the blue bonnet which she had always worn in the parade, at the head of the W. R. C. Not till the day before the holiday did she learn the truth. That evening she did not come down to supper. She called in a neighbor’s daughter to serve Mr. Gale. The young woman giggled, and asked idiotic questions about Society Folks in the South, till Mr. Gale made his iron-gray eyebrows a line of defense. He tramped out the road eastward from town, after supper, growling to himself between periods of vacuous unhappiness:

“Feel’s if it’s me and the boys I fought with, not them I fought against, they’re going to neglect tomorrow. Those Yanks were lively youngsters. Made me do some tall jumping. Hate to think of ’em lying there in the cemetery, lonely and waiting, trusting that we — that the Dam-yanks — will remember them. Look here, J. Gale, Esq., you sentimental old has-been, what do you mean, whimpering about them? You know good and well you never did like Yanks — killed your daddy and brother. But — poor old codgers, waiting out there —”

His walk had brought him to a fenced field. He peered across. It was set with upright and ghostly stones. He had come to the cemetery. He stopped, prickly. He heard creepy murmurs in the dusk. He saw each white stone as the reproachful spirit of an old soldier robbed of his pension of honor. He turned away with a measured calmness that was more panicky than a stumbling retreat.

The morning of the empty Decoration Day was radiant as sunshine upon a beech trunk. But nowhere was the old-time bustle of schoolgirls in bunting, of mothers preparing lunch baskets, of shabby and halting old civilians magically transformed into soldiers. A few families mechanically hung out flags. Mrs. Tiffany did not. When Mr. Gale came down to breakfast he found her caressing an ancient silken flag. She thrust it into a closet, locked the door, hastened out to the kitchen. She was slow in the serving of breakfast, looked dizzy, often pressed her hand against her side. Mr. Gale begged her to let him help. She forbade him sternly. She seemed to have a calm and embittered control of herself.

He hastened out of the house. There was no business to which he could attend on this holiday. He made shameless overtures for the company of Jimmy Martin, who was boisterous over the fact that summer vacation had begun, and his dear, dear teachers gone away. The Martin family was not going to any of the three or four picnics planned for the day, and Jimmy and Mr. Gale considered gravely the possibility of a fishing trip. They sat in canvas chairs on the tiny lawn, and forgot a certain difference in age.

The door of the Tiffany house slammed. They stopped, listened. Nervous footsteps were crossing the porch, coming along the gravel walk. They looked back. Running toward them was Mrs. Tiffany. She wore no hat. Her hair was like a shell-torn flag, thin gray over the yellowed skin of her brow. Her hands dabbled feebly in the air before her glaring eyes. She moaned:

“Oh, Mr. Gale, I can’t stand it! Don’t they know what they’re doing? My boy lies there, my husband, and he’s crying for me to come to him and show I remember him. I tell you I can hear him, and his voice sounds like a rainy wind. I told him I’d go to Woodlawn all by myself, I said I’d fill my little basket with flowers, and crabapple blossoms, but he said he wanted the others to come too, he wanted a Decoration Day parade that would honor all the graves. Oh, I heard him —”

Mr. Gale had sprung up. He put his arm about her shoulder. He cried, “There will be a parade, ma’am! We’ll remember the boys, every one of them, every grave. You go in the house, honey, and you put on your bonnet, and pack a little sack for you and me to eat after the ceremony, maybe you’ll have time to bake a batch of biscuits, but anyway, in an hour or so, maybe hour and a half, you’ll hear the parade coming, and you be all ready.” Mr. Gale’s voice had something of the ponderous integrity of distant cannon. He smoothed her disordered hair. He patted her, like the soft pawing of a fond old dog, and led her to the paint-blistered door of the house.

He went back to his canvas chair, scratching his scalp, shaking his head. Jimmy, who had edged away, returned and sighed, “Gee, I wisht I could do something.”

“I bet you would, if you were a little older, James, but — better run away. This old Rebel has got to stir up his sleepy brain and conjure up a Federal parade, with a band and at least twenty flags, out of the sparrows in the street. Good-by.”

After five minutes, or it may have been ten, of clawing at his chin, Mr. Gale looked happy. He hastened down the street. He entered the drug store, and from the telephone booth he talked to hotel clerks in three different towns within ten miles of Wakamin.

He hurried to the livery stable which operated the two cars in town that were for hire. One of the cars was out. The second was preparing to leave, as he lumbered up to the door.

“I want that car,” he said to the stableman-chauffeur.

“Well, you can’t have it.” The stableman bent over, to crank up.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m going to take a skirt out for a spin, see?”

“Look here. I’m Mr. Gale who —”

“Aw, I know all about you. Seen you go by. You out-of-town guys think we have to drop everything else just to accommodate you —”

Mr. Gale puffed across the floor like a steam-roller. He said gently, “Son, I’ve been up all night, and I reckon I’ve had a lee-tle mite too much liquor. I’ve taken a fancy to going riding. Son, I’ve got the peacefulest heart that a grown-up human ever had; I’m like a little playing pussy-cat, I am; but I’ve got a gun in my back pocket that carries the meanest .44–40 bullet in the South. Maybe you’ve heard about us Southern fire-eaters, heh? Son, I only want that car for maybe two hours. Understand?”

He bellowed. He was making vast, vague, loosely swinging gestures, his perspiring hands very red. He caught the stableman by the shoulder. The man’s Adam’s apple worked grotesquely up and down. He whimpered:

“All right. I’ll take you.”

Mr. Gale pacifically climbed into the car. “Joralemon, son, and fast, son, particular fast,” he murmured.

In the speeding car he meditated: “Let’s see. Must be forty years since I’ve toted any kind of a gun — and twenty years since I’ve called anybody ‘son.’ Oh, well.”

Again, “Let’s see. I’ll be a Major. No, a Colonel; Colonel Gale of the Tenth New York. Private Gale, I congratulate you. I reckon the best you ever got from a darky was ‘Cap’n’ or ‘boss.’ You’re rising in the world, my boy. Poor woman! Poor, faithful woman —”

When they reached the town of Joralemon, Mr. Gale leaned out from the car and inquired of a corner loafer, “Where’s the Decoration Day parade? The G. A. R.?”

“At the exercises in Greenwood Cemetery.”

“Greenwood, son,” he blared, and the stableman made haste.

At the entrance to the cemetery Mr. Gale insinuated, “Now wait till I come back, son. I’m getting over that liquor, and I’m ugly, son, powerful ugly.”

“All right,” growled the stableman. “Say, do I get paid —?”

“Here’s five dollars. When I come back with my friends, there’ll be another five. I’m going to steal a whole Decoration Day parade.”

“How?”

“I’m going to surround them.”

“My — Gawd!” whispered the stableman.

The Southerner bristled at the sight of the Northern regimental flag among the trees of the cemetery. But he shrugged his shoulders and waddled into the crowd. The morning’s radiance brought out in hot primary colors the red and yellow of flowers in muddy glass vases upon the graves. Light flashed from the mirrory brown surfaces of polished granite headstones, with inscriptions cut in painfully white letters. The air was thick with the scent of dust and maple leaves and packed people. Round a clergyman in canonicals were the eight veterans now left in Joralemon; men to whose scrawny faces a dignity was given by their symbolic garb. From their eyes was purged all the meanness of daily grinding. The hand of a sparse-bearded Yankee, who wore an English flag pinned beside his G. A. R. button, was resting on the shoulder of a Teutonic-faced man with the emblem of the Sigel Corps.

Round the G. A. R. were ringed the Sons of Veterans, the Hose and Truck Company, the Women’s Relief Corps, and the Joralemon Band; beyond them a great press of townspeople. The road beside the cemetery was packed with cars and buggies, and the stamp of horses’ feet as they restlessly swished at flies gave a rustic rhythm to the pause in the clergyman’s voice.

Here in a quiet town, unconscious of the stir of the world beyond, was renewed the passion of their faith in the Union.

Mr. Gale shoved forward into the front row. Everyone glared at the pushing stranger. The voice of the gray, sunken-templed clergyman sharpened with indignation for a second. Mr. Gale tried to look unconcerned. But he felt hot about the spine. The dust got into his throat. The people about him were elbowing and sticky. He was not happy. But he vowed, “By thunder, I’ll pull this off if I have to kidnap the whole crowd.”

As the clergyman finished his oration, Mr. Gale pushed among the G. A. R. He began loudly, cheerfully, “Gentlemen —”

The clergyman stared down from his box rostrum. “What do you mean, interrupting this ceremony?”

The crowd was squeezing in, like a street mob about a man found murdered. Their voices united in a swelling whisper. Their gaping mouths were ugly. Mr. Gale was rigid with the anger that wipes out all fear of a crowd, and leaves a man facing them as though they were one contemptible opponent.

“Look here,” he bawled, “I had proposed to join you in certain memorial plans. It may interest you to know that I am Colonel John Gale, and that I led the Tenth New York through most of the war!”

“Ah,” purred the clergyman, “you are Colonel — Gale, is it?”

“I am.” The clergyman licked his lips. With fictitious jocularity Mr. Gale said, “I see you do not salute your superior officer. But I reckon a dominie isn’t like us old soldiers. Now, boys, listen to me. There’s a little woman —”

The clergyman’s voice cut in on this lumbering amiability as a knife cuts butter: “My dear sir, I don’t quite understand the reason for this farce. I am a ‘dominie,’ as you are pleased to call it, but also I am an old soldier, the present commander of this post, and it may ‘interest you to know’ that I fought clear through the war in the Tenth New York! And if my memory is still good, you were not my commanding officer for any considerable period!”

“No!” bellowed Mr. Gale, “I wa’n’t! I’m a Southerner. From Alabama. And after today I’m not even sure I’m reconstructed! I’m powerful glad I never was a blue-bellied Yank, when I think of that poor little woman dying of a broken heart up in Wakamin!”

With banal phrases and sentimental touches, with simple words and no further effort to be friendly, he told the story of Mrs. Captain Tiffany, though he did not satisfy the beggar ears of the crowd with her name.

His voice was at times almost hostile. “So,” he wound up, “I want you-all to come to Wakamin and decorate the graves there, too. You, my dear sir, I don’t care a damaged Continental whether you ever salute me or not. If you boys do come to Wakamin, then I’ll know there’s still some MEN, as there were in the ‘60’s. But if you eight or nine great big husky young Yanks are afraid of one poor old lone Johnny Reb, then by God, sir, I win another scrimmage for the Confederate States of America!”

Silence. Big and red, Mr. Gale stood among them like a sandstone boulder. His eyes were steady and hard as his clenched fist. But his upper lip was trembling and covered with a triple row of sweat drops.

Slowly, as in the fumbling stupor of a trance, the clergyman drew off his canonicals and handed them to a boy. He was formal and thin and rather dry of aspect in his black frock coat. His voice was that of a tired, polite old gentleman, as he demanded of Mr. Gale, “Have you a car to take us to Wakamin?”

“Room for five.”

To a man beside him the clergyman said, “Will you have another car ready for us?” Abruptly his voice snapped: “‘Tention. Fall in. Form twos. B’ th’ right flank. For’ard. March!”

As he spoke he leaped down into the ranks, and the veterans tramped toward the gate of the cemetery, through the parting crowd. Their faces were blurred with weariness and dust and age, but they stared straight ahead, they marched stolidly, as though they had been ordered to occupy a dangerous position and were too fagged to be afraid.

The two rear-line men struck up with fife and drum. The fifer was a corpulent banker, but he tootled with the agility of a boy. The drummer was a wisp of humanity. Though his clay-hued hands kept up with the capering of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” his yellowish eyes were opening in an agonized stare, and his chin trembled.

“Halt!” the clergyman ordered. “Boys, seems to me the commander of this expedition ought to be Colonel Gale. Colonel, will you please take command of the post?”

“W— why, I wouldn’t hardly call it regular.”

“You old Rebel, I wouldn’t call any of this regular!”

“Yes,” said Mr. Gale. “‘Tention!”

The old drummer, his eyes opening wider and wider, sank forward from the knees, and held himself up only by trembling bent arms. Two men in the crowd caught him. “Go on!” he groaned. His drumsticks clattered on the ground.

Uneasily exchanging glances, the other old men waited. Each face said, “Risky business. Hot day. We might collapse, too.”

The clergyman slipped the drum belt over his own head, picked up the sticks. “Play, confound you, Lanse!” he snapped at the pompous banker-fifer, and together they rolled into a rude version of “Marching Through Georgia.”

The squad straightened its lines and marched on without even an order from Mr. Gale, who, at the head of the procession, was marveling, “I never did expect to march to that tune!”

The two motor cars shot from Joralemon to Wakamin, with steering wheels wrenching and bucking on the sandy road, and old men clinging to seat-edge and robe-rack. They stopped before the Tiffany cottage.

Mrs. Tiffany sat on the porch, her blue bonnet lashed to her faded hair, with a brown veil, a basket of flowers and a shoe-box of lunch on her knees. As the cars drew up, she rushed out, with flustered greetings. The old men greeted her elaborately. One, who had known Captain Tiffany, became the noisy spokesman. But he had little of which to speak. And the whole affair suddenly became a vacuous absurdity. Now that Mr. Gale had them here, what was he going to do with them?

The quiet of the village street flowed over them. This was no parade; it was merely nine old men and an old woman talking in the dust. There was no music, no crowd of spectators, none of the incitements of display which turn the ordinary daily sort of men into one marching thrill. They were old, and tired, and somewhat hungry, and no one saw them as heroes. A small automobile passed; the occupants scarce looked at them.

The unparading parade looked awkward, tried to keep up brisk talk, and became dull in the attempt.

They were engulfed in the indifferent calm of the day. After the passing of the one automobile, there was no one to be seen. The box-elder trees nodded slowly. Far off a rooster crowed, once. In a vacant lot near by a cud-chewing cow stared at them dumb and bored. Little sounds of insects in the grass underlaid the silence with a creeping sleepiness. The village street, stretching out toward the wheat fields beyond, grew hotter and more hazy to their old eyes. They all stood about the cars, plucking at hinges and door-edges, wondering how they could give up this childish attempt and admit that they were grannies. A sparrow hopped among them unconcernedly.

“Well?” said the clergyman.

“Wel-l —” said Mr. Gale.

Then Jimmy Martin strolled out in front of his house.

He saw them. He stopped short. He made three jubilant skips, and charged on them.

“Are you going to parade?” he shrilled at Mr. Gale.

“Afraid not, Jimmy. Reckon we haven’t quite got the makings. The young people don’t appear to care. Reckon we’ll give up.”

“No, no, no!” Jimmy wailed. “The Scouts want to come!”

He dashed into his house, while the collapsed parade stared after him with mild elderly wonder. He came back to the gate. He wore a Boy Scout uniform and a red neckerchief, and he carried a cheap bugle.

He stood at the gate, his eyes a glory, and he blew the one bugle call he knew — the Reveille. Wavering at first, harsh and timorous, the notes crept among the slumberous trees, then swelled, loud, madly imploring, shaking with a boy’s worship of the heroes.

Another boy ran out from a gate down the street, looked, came running, stumbling, panting. He was bare headed, in corduroy knickers unbuckled at the knees, but in his face was the same ageless devotion that had made a splendor of the mere boys who marched out in ‘64 and ‘65. He saluted Jimmy. Jimmy spoke, and the two of them, curiously dignified, very earnest, marched out before the scatter of old people and stood at attention, their serious faces toward Woodlawn and the undecked graves.

From a box-elder down the street climbed another boy; one popped out of a crabapple orchard; a dozen others from drowsy distances. They scurried like suddenly disturbed ants. They could be heard calling, clattering into houses. They came out again in Scout uniforms; they raced down the street and fell into line.

They stood with clean backs rigid, eyes forward, waiting to obey orders. As he looked at them, Mr. Gale knew that some day Wakamin would again have a soul.

Jimmy Martin came marching up to Mr. Gale. His voice was plaintive and reedy, but it was electric as he reported: “The Boy Scouts are ready, sir.”

“‘Tention!” shouted Mr. Gale.

The old men’s backs had been straightening, the rheumy redness of disappointment had gone from their eyes. They lined out behind the boys. Even the Wakamin stableman seemed to feel inspiration. He sprang from his car, helped Mrs. Tiffany in, and wheeled the car to join the procession. From nowhere, from everywhere, a crowd had come, and stood on the sidewalk, rustling with faint cheering. Two women hastened to add flowers to those in Mrs. Tiffany’s basket. The benumbed town had awakened to energy and eagerness and hope.

To the clergyman Mr. Gale suggested, “Do you suppose that just for once this Yankee fife-and-drum corps could play ‘Dixie’?” Instantly the clergyman-drummer and the banker-fifer flashed into “Way Down South in the Land of Cotton.” The color-bearer raised the flag.

Mr. Gale roared, “Forward! M—”

There was a high wail from Mrs. Tiffany: “Wait! Land o’ goodness! What’s Decoration Day without one single sword, and you menfolks never thinking —”

She ran into her house. She came out bearing in her two hands, as though it were an altar vessel, the saber of Captain Tiffany.

“Mr. Gale, will you carry a Northerner’s sword?” she asked.

“No, ma’am, I won’t!”

She gasped.

He buckled on the sword belt, and cried, “This isn’t a Northerner’s sword any more, nor a Southerner’s, ma’am. It’s an American’s! Forward! March!”

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: The Kidnaped Memorial