Chapter 6
The next night on returning to his boardinghouse Joseph was met at the door by his little landlady, an elderly widow with an innocent, pure, and chronically apprehensive face, for life had been no gentler to her than to Joseph, himself. However, it had had the reverse effect on Mrs. Alice Marhall: It had made her so compassionate of others that she wept when accepting the money her boarders paid her weekly, knowing their endless hard labor and their desperate plight-these young and old men without kin or comfort. As she had neither herself-though she never knew a paroxysm of self-pity-she mourned over them. No bitterness had settled in her timid soul, no hatred of God and man, no vengefulness. Part of this was due to the fact that she had very little intelligence and part to her faith which never questioned. To Mrs. Marhall "God knew best, our Consolation and our Help," and she prayed fervently not only for "the heathen" and the black slaves but everyone whom her small mothlike mind brushed for an instant. She would have incurred Joseph's immediate contempt-for her conversations were always full of pieties and biblical aphorisms-had she not reminded him of his mother's mother who had died in the Famine of starvation. There was the same unshakable simplicity, the same patience and sincerity, the same far distant look of one who had known and had seen unspeakable pain and suffering and had accepted it with heartbreaking endurance. But the apprehensive expression of the brutalized innocent remained on her small pallid face, in the anxious look of her dwindled gray eyes, in the nervous placating smile, in the aimless little movements of her hands. Her black crinoline was greenish in its ancient folds and threadbare, but her mobcap was always white and tied with old-fashioned ribbons, and her apron glistened with starch and was never stained. She seemed like a starved old bird to Joseph, and her hands were scorched with homemade soap and labor, for no one helped her in her dying house and she did all things connected with it-including emptying the slops-without aid. She sometimes irritated Joseph with her homilies and her concern for him and the other boarders-when she could waylay him-but he never dismissed her with a sharp word or overtly showed her impatience. He had lost his own innocence long ago but the innocence of such as Mrs. Mar- hall always touched him. Moreover, he had been brought up to respect age, even if senile, and to honor the old if only because of the evil life had inflicted on them through long and monstrous years. For, had they not mastered the secret of endurance, and were they not brave? She accosted Joseph tonight as he entered the house-wet and chilled -with her outstretched gnarled hand which, however, did not touch him. She had early learned that he flinched at contact with others, so the hand, meant to reach in sympathy and maternal consolation, did not even approach his streaming sleeve. She held a corked bottle in her other hand, and she smiled tentatively. "Mr. Armagh," she said, in her voice which was barely more than a whisper, "I heard you coughing all night, as you have coughed for weeks, but it was terrible, last night, truly it was. And I-I mixed an old elixir for you, my father's remedy for all ills, but mostly for the lungs and the throat, and I hope you will take it kindly and not think I am interfering-" (In spite of her lack of keen intelligence she had the elemental perceptiveness of a young child, and she knew Joseph for a proud young man and one as remote and as indifferent to others as a tower on a hill.) Joseph's lips tightened, and then he saw her pleading eyes, always so watery and shrinking, and he thought again of his grandmother who had given her last loaf of bread to a pregnant girl. So he took the bottle. She said, "It's very good, truly. Thyme and horehound and honey with a little sorrel. So harmless, but so very effective." "Thank you," he said. She liked his "foreign" voice, deep and resonant and polite, with its undertone of lilting music. "I should like to pay you for it, Mrs. Marhall." She was about to refuse, hurt, when she remembered his pride. She averted her eyes. "It was nothing, truly. I grow the herbs in my garden, and I had a little honey left over from the summer, a kind friend who keeps bees-" She looked at Joseph then, and blurted, "Three cents will be more than enough, Mr. Armagh!" She added, "On your payday." He put the bottle in his pocket, gravely inclining his head as he prepared to mount the steps to his room to wash and then to join the other boarders in what Mrs. Marhall somewhat grandly called her "dining room." But Mrs. Marhall, deprecatingly clearing her throat, said, "You had a caller, Mr. Armagh, but it seems to me a very peculiar caller-" Joseph thought immediately of Mayor Hennessey. "A policeman?" he asked, and he left the first step of the stairway and returned to Mrs. Mar- hall and she saw his face and was frightened, and retreated. "Peculiar?" he demanded in a loud voice. "What do you mean by that? What was his name, his appearance?" She put up her hands to him, palms outward, as if she would fend off a blow, and again when Joseph saw this he felt a poignant twinge. He tried to smile. "I am a stranger," he said, "and I know no one, so how could I have a caller? I was just surprised." But Mrs. Marhall was from childhood acquainted with fear, and she saw the acute fear in Joseph's eyes and trembled, herself. She said in a quick and stammering tone, "Oh, I am sure it wasn't anyone alarming, Mr. Armagh, not a policeman for what would a policeman want with you? It was just a-gentleman-a rather rough gentleman, not really a gentleman - Oh, dear, I'm afraid I am muddled! Just a big-man-nicely spoken but a little crude in manner, and he held his hat in his hands and bowed to me, and said he was a friend of yours. He asked if you lived here." Joseph controlled his quickened breathing. Mayor Hennessey need not have sent a man for that information. Sister Elizabeth could have given it to him, and now the absurdity of the mayor sending a messenger to him struck him and his rigid body relaxed. "What was his name?" "A Mr. Adams. That's what he said. An old friend. He seemed to know you, Mr. Armagh. He described you to me, and it was just so, eighteen or thereabouts, and tall and thin with thick auburn hair-that is the color, isn't it?-and you worked in a sawmill. Dear me, I hope I did no wrong admitting you lived here, Mr. Armagh! And I told him you had lived here for nearly three years and was very respectable, and minded your manners and paid promptly and I had no complaints and he said he was glad to hear it, and it was truly you. I asked him if he wished to leave a message, and he said no, but that he would see you on Sunday."
She was so heartened at Joseph's sudden bleak smile that she tittered and applied her apron to one eye. "Oh, you know who he was, Mr. Armagh, and I am so relieved!" So, thought Joseph, old Squibbs is making sure of me, is he, and satisfying himself that I lived in this house and for some time, and am honest, and no thief who will skip with his swag of a fine Sunday. "He called you 'Scottie,'" said Mrs. Marhall, "which I think was disrespectful. Nicknames are always uncivil-unless they are used by friends." "Oh, he is an old friend," said Joseph, and smiled again without much humor. "Did he ask if I had a family, or something of that nature?" "Indeed, and I was a little surprised at that, if he was an old friend, he would know, would he not? And I told him no, you had no family, you were an orphan from a place in Scotland-?" "Edinburgh," said Joseph. Mrs. Marhall nodded. "Edinburgh. Yes, that I told him. You had no kin, I said, leastways you'd never mentioned anyone, and it is very sad. He agreed with me."
Joseph, taciturn by nature, had not spoken of his brother or sister to anyone in the town but the Sisters at the orphanage. The less anyone knows of you the better for you, was his complete conviction, and the fewer attempts they will make to be friendly and intrusive and later, perhaps, dangerous. He had learned, as a child, to be silent in the presence of the Sassenagh, or, if viciously questioned, to tell as little as possible. This lesson, fortified by his natural discretion concerning himself and his natural mistrust, was one never to be forgotten. Daniel Armagh had not been able to understand the reserve of his older son and his carefulness1 even in the presence of his family, for Daniel by temperament had accepted and trusted all men-and had, Joseph often thought, dearly paid for his folly. "You cannot suspect, Joey, like some unshriven miser or thieving vagabond, and have no confidence in any creature. What would the world be like, Joey, if everyone mistrusted everyone else, and had no love and no faith?" Safer, the child Joseph had thou
ght. But he had only said, "It's sorry I am, Dada, and I meant no disrespect." There was none to connect Joseph Armagh of Philadelphia Terrace, the young Scotsman of Edinburgh who worked in a sawmill on the river and had no kin of his own, with St. Agnes's Orphanage, an obscure and stricken and hidden little building in the worst part of the town, and one not known except to Catholics. None knew of his brother and sister and that he was an Irishman and a "Papist," if only a nominal one. "So, he will see me Sunday," said Joseph to Mrs. Marhall. "I expected him then. Not today. And a good evening to you, Mistress Marhall." The word "mistress" instead of the American "missus" always made Mrs. Marhall preen as at a grand compliment. It had a gay and a vaguely forbidden but an exciting intimation. She folded her wounded hands under her apron and watched Joseph ascend the stairs with the foolish fondness of a mother. A very likely boy, and a proud clean one, and he would go far, for he was a gentleman in spite of his work and his poverty, and she prayed a little innocent but fervent prayer for him and was comforted. Joseph washed at his commode and neatly emptied the bowl into the slop pail and rolled down his blue sleeves. He looked at the bottle of "elixir." It would do no harm. The old ladies, including his grandmother, in Ireland, were fine ones for gathering herbs which they mixed in evil- tasting brews, but he remembered that they were often efficacious. At least, he had never heard that they had killed anyone. His cough was becoming more annoying and exhausting since his cold, and he thought of the "consumption" so rife among his people. So he uncorked the bottle and drank some of the contents, and to his surprise it was not vile and it soothed his raw throat. He would remember to take it to work tomorrow together with the lunch-newspaper wrapped-which Mrs. Marhall prepared for him. The name of John Tyler, the names of the seven seceding Southern states of the Union, the initial affair at Fort Sumter, the agony of President Lincoln, were all unimportant to Joseph Armagh while the winter deepened. The world of men except as it pertained to himself and his family was unimportant. He wasted no penny on a newspaper; he never stopped In the streets of the town to hear the shouts and angry words of new crowds; he did not listen to his fellow workers who talked excitedly of Buchanan and Cobb and Floyd and Major Anderson. They were aliens in an alien world, to him, which concerned him not at all. The language they spoke did not resound in him, their lives did not touch his nor did he permit them to touch his. When Mrs. Marhall said to him once, fearfully, "Oh, is it not terrible, Mr. Armagh, this threat of War between the States?" he had replied with impatience, "I am not interested, Mistress Marhall. I have too much to do." She had stared at him then, disbelieving, and then, incredulously, believing, and though she had always considered him enigmatic and beyond her simple comprehension, now she felt as if he were not of flesh or blood and did not possess any of the sentiments of men or any of their concerns, and she was almost as deeply frightened then as ever she had been in her suffering life. She silently retreated, and pondered and could come to no conclusion. Mr. Lincoln's train passed through Winfield on the route to Pittsburgh, and a holiday was given so that men could go to the depot for a brief glimpse of the melancholy man who was on his way to Washington for his inaugural as President. The majority wished him well, especially now that the threat of war was increasing, but the hint of assassination excited them and they would not have been too grieved had it come to pass. Their lives were so dingy, so obscure and so lacking in gaiety or any joy or notable event, that a national calamity would have titillated them. But Joseph Armagh, as indifferent to Mr. Lincoln as he was to the existence of the farthest star, did not go to the depot. He had no interest in events except as they threatened him and Scan and Regina, for too deeply and at too young an age had he experienced anguish and frenzy and grief, and if he thought of his relationship to the world at all it was as its enemy. There was not even any active love in him for Ireland any longer, only memory like a dream. If he had been forcibly questioned he would have said, "I have no country, no allegiances, no loyalties, no kinsmen among others. The world rejected me when I was defenseless, and so I reject it now with all my heart and with any passion I still retain, and I ask of it only to remain apart from me as I do what I must do. Do not try to stir up in me any commitment to any man or any nation or any faith or any cause; do not try to draw me among you, or speak to me as one of you. Let me alone, and I will let you alone, because if I should become any part of you or engage myself among you I could not bear to live any longer. So, let us live in a truce." He read the books which Sister Elizabeth had managed to procure for him, but he would not read of current affairs and the growing fear and distress in the country. He read philosophy and essays and poetry and literature-all of the past-for now only they had eternal verity to him and could interest him. As for the future, it belonged to him alone and nothing must move him from his course, not war or blood nor the convulsions of men. "I thought him a lad of intelligence and mind," Father Barton said to Sister Elizabeth. She cocked her head at him and said, "Yes, Father? And is he not?" "I tried to speak to him of the threatening war and what it portends, Sister." "Father," said the nun, as if speaking to a child, "Joseph left the affairs of the world long ago. He is like a sextant pointed to one star only. Let him be." When the priest still could not understand, she said to him gently, "He dares let nothing approach him, for his soul is like worn thin crystal which could shatter at a touch." "He is not the only one who has suffered in this world!" the priest replied with unusual asperity. "We each respond to events," said Sister Elizabeth, "according to our nature-some of us with fortitude and faith, and some disastrously. Can any man understand another? No, only God, and what is between Joseph and God is theirs alone." "I fear for his soul," said Father Barton. "I also fear for his soul," said Sister Elizabeth, but the priest suspected she feared for a different reason than his which he could never comprehend. He could only complain, "I doubt he has a soul like crystal. Stone, Sister, is more like it. You are fanciful." This conversation would not have interested Joseph in the least had he even heard of it. He paid the convent an extra dollar a week for his family now, as the long torture of the winter drew towards spring. For fear of falling ill he spent fifty cents extra a week on food for himself, and bought a stout pair of boots to protect his feet from the snow. He grew two inches that winter and appeared years older than his actual age of seventeen. Each Sunday, armed with a truncheon that never left the seat beside him, he drove a van or a wagon of ostensible feed and grain to the various saloons in the town. Each Sunday he collected the forty or fifty or sixty or even the one hundred dollars in payment for the true illicit load he carried under the burlap bags. The money was given him in brown paper, which he kept in his pockets-tight rolls tied with thick string. He delivered the money to Mr. Squibbs, who was highly satisfied with his latest employee, and to such an extent that after the first few months he did not even count the money in Joseph's presence. He allowed his "Sunday lads" fifty cents extra for a lunch, but Joseph did not spend it. He saved it, along with two of the four dollars he made on Sunday, and he had contrived a money belt of sorts to tie about his waist, for he would not leave the bills in his boardinghouse. Nor did he consider the bank, and for a reason pertinent to him. The police never stopped or questioned him, and he was too indifferent to wonder why, though the ten dollars promised by Mr. Squibbs would have been welcome even at the cost of a night in jail. But for some reason he was not halted. "He looks stupid, like a dummy," said Mr. Squibbs's brother. "That's why the po-leese don't even see him. If they did they'd think we'd have more sense than to hire him to carry likker." Mr. Squibbs chuckled. "All the better. But he don't look stupid. Looks kind of like he don't even live here. Got a mean look in his eye, though, if you just try to be pleasant or make a joke, and he looks at you like you're pizen or somebody from the moon." The thoughts of Joseph Armagh were long thoughts, which would have appalled Sister Elizabeth. The money increased in his money belt. He counted it every day or two, greasy bills of a great size which were more precious to him than his own life. They were t
he passports which guaranteed entry into living for his brother and sister. Without them, they would be barred forever from the world in which they must live-which would never be his world. And as the months passed that which was within him became more taut and rigid, and more dangerous. The Confederacy was making active plans for war. Not long after Mr. Lincoln's inauguration three members of a Southern commission went to Washington to discuss with the President a more or less amiable, agreement concerning public debts and public property, agreements which would go into effect after total separation of the Confederacy from the Union. They informed Mr. Lincoln that "we are the representatives of an independent nation, de facto and de jure, and we possess our own government perfect in all its parts and endowed with all the means of self-support, and we desire only a speedy adjustment of all questions in dispute on terms of amity, good-will and mutual interest." To which Mr. Lincoln sorrowfully replied that his new Secretary of State, William H. Seward of New York, would answer in due time. The President understood the pride and the deep anger and affront which the South cherished, and he knew that according to the Constitution it had even' right to secede from the Union. To object, to use force against the South, was un-Constitutional, and none knew this better than the President. But as he loved his country, both North and South, he was as terrified as any man of his character could be. Beyond the Atlantic lay the old lustful nations, the imperialistic nations, who craved this new and burgeoning country, and desired nothing more than to have her sundered and weakened or fighting a bloody fraternal war, so that they could fall upon her and divide up her members among themselves. It was at this point that Imperial Russia casually mentioned to the British Empire-through the tactful offices of ambassadors-that should Britain overtly and covertly take an active part in the approaching conflict, and seize before others also had an opportunity to seize-Russia's sentiments would not be lukewarm. Britain, never impulsive, sat back to consider, though she openly declared her sympathy with the South, a declaration which made the Czar smile in his magnificent beard. This episode, vaguely mentioned in American newspapers, ought to have interested Joseph Armagh. It did not. He was as removed from and as dispassionate about this world as a shadow. He lived his internal and secret life, and had his deadly concentration of will which had been trained on the world like a great weapon ready for attack. On the warm April day when Captain George James fired on Fort Sumter, Joseph Armagh, after his day's work, set out on the three-mile walk to Green Hills, where the Mayor of Winfield lived. The roaring excitement in the town was, to him, like the far barking of dogs, and just as significant.
Captains and the Kings Page 8
