Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

  It was an August afternoon, so still and hot that the leaves on the elms hung motionless and exhausted. Now that the older boys were working, his father had thought that Melville also ought to find something to do during his vacation, but his mother had said that Melville had been growing pretty fast and that before long he would have to work all his life like everyone else. He had received good marks his first year at high school, and she thought he deserved a rest. His father said that boys got into trouble doing nothing, especially when they were around Melville’s age. It would be all right if he did not want to work indoors in the drugstore, because maybe he ought to have fresh air and exercise but playing ball on the common and going fishing were not what he’d call exercise, and there was no reason why Melville should not earn a little pocket money—but his mother said Melville would only be a boy once. Finally he had worked on the Sawyer farm during the haying season, but when haying was over, his father had said it would be enough if he did the chores around the house.

  Melville had finished mowing the lawn at three o’clock that afternoon, and Celia had watched him all the time from the hammock on the porch while she read a novel written by Mrs. Humphry Ward. Though he was not resentful, it had made him hot to see her sitting in the shade and looking up from her book every time the lawn mower stopped. When he had finished and had put the mower in the barn and had washed himself under the pump, he went upstairs and put on a clean blue shirt and his long pair of khaki work trousers. When he came down, his mother was out on the porch, too, with her darning.

  “Where are you going, Melly?” his mother asked.

  He told her he was going down to get an orange phosphate at the drugstore.

  “He wants to show off his long trousers downtown,” Celia said. “Doesn’t he look funny in long trousers?”

  When he thought of it now, Celia looked pretty funny herself that afternoon with rats in her hair and a large black bow. There were a number of replies he might have made to Celia, but his mother spoke before he could answer.

  “He looks very well in them,” she said. “He’s growing so, it’s time he wore long trousers. Come here, Melly, and let me tighten your belt.”

  It was one of Harry’s old belts. It needed another hole to be tight enough, and his mother made one with her scissors. He could always remember the simple things she did for him.

  The trolley from Nashua was just in, and Mr. Jacques, the motorman, was in the drugstore drinking a root beer. Mr. Goodwin was out back in the prescription room but he heard Melville ask for an orange phosphate.

  “Is that you, Mel?” he called. “Remember to take his money, Elmer.”

  “Oh, go on, Robert,” Mr. Jacques called, “you don’t take money from children, do you?”

  His father stepped out of the prescription room, cool and neat in his white coat.

  “Melville isn’t a child,” he said, “he’s got on long pants.”

  Mr. Jacques laughed and fanned himself with his visor cap.

  “That’s so,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll blow him to that orange phosphate.”

  “No, no, Sam,” Mr. Goodwin said. “It’s just a family rule—but Mel’s a pretty good boy. Give him the phosphate, Elmer.”

  Then he stepped around the counter and put his hand on Melville’s shoulder.

  “Melville’s a pretty good boy,” Mr. Goodwin said again. “I’m going to make him into a doctor someday.”

  “Is that so?” Mr. Jacques said. “It will take a lot of money educating him into a doctor, won’t it, Robert?”

  “Maybe I can do it,” Mr. Goodwin said, “by taking Melville’s nickels away from him at the fountain.”

  Mr. Jacques finished his root beer.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s a hot day for the soldier boys to be marching.”

  “What soldier boys?” Mr. Goodwin asked.

  “The militia,” Mr. Jacques said. “They’re coming up along the river road. They’re going to camp at Blair tonight on the old fairgrounds.” What news there was usually reached Hallowell by trolley.

  Blair was only five miles away, and the Ford was in the barn, and no one had ever told Melville expressly not to use the Ford. He had never driven it far by himself, but it was an easy road to Blair. Besides, it would do the motor good to be used. At least this was what he told his mother when he returned to the house and he could hear the anxiety in his voice, because he was not at all sure what she would say.

  “Why, I don’t know why you shouldn’t, dear,” she said. “You’ve been working so hard on the lawn.”

  “Harry won’t like it,” Celia said. “Melville really doesn’t know how to run an automobile.”

  He did not wait to hear what his mother answered. The Ford started without any difficulty. He backed it out of the barn, turned it correctly into the yard, and went in low out to the street. He had driven to Blair once before in a horse and buggy, but now he was dealing with mechanical force. The pulsing, shaking engine felt immensely powerful. He squared his shoulders, pulled the little gas lever, and let the clutch drop back into high. It was up to him and no one else to get the car to Blair and back.

  It was not due to any plan that Muriel happened to be on the front porch of the Reeces’ house, and he stopped the car to wave to her without any idea of consequences. He thought he only wanted her to see him in the Ford.

  “Hey, Muriel,” he called, “would you like to take a ride?”

  He waited with the engine running while Muriel walked slowly toward the car.

  “Oh, Melville,” she said, “I’d like to, but I don’t know whether I ought to, and I can’t ask Mother because Mother’s gone to Nashua. Are you going a long way?”

  “Oh, no,” he said, “only down to Blair”—but it seemed like a thousand miles to Blair.

  “Why are you going to Blair?” she asked.

  She listened carefully while he told her about the militia camping at the fairgrounds, but a long while later she told him that of course she had already made up her mind to go.

  “Do you think it’s safe?” she asked.

  “Safe?” he answered. “Of course it’s safe.”

  “Do you think I need a coat or anything?” she asked.

  He looked at her braids and her cotton print dress.

  “No, you don’t need a coat,” he said, “we’re only going to Blair.”

  “Well,” she said, “maybe you ought to see some soldiers,” and then she smiled. “It’s silly, but I’d like to go.”

  Any good leader had to develop a sense of premonition. Premonition, after all, was only a peculiar sort of sensitiveness, not unlike that mysterious prescience that stopped you sometimes from running into an object in the dark. When, as a young subaltern, he led patrols in France and when he was older and examined dispositions on a map, instinct often told him to concentrate in the center or to move by the left flank. When Muriel climbed up beside him to the worn upholstery of that Ford runabout, Melville Goodwin had his first encounter with premonition. There was nothing sharp or definite about it, but he had a reasonable certainty that if he and Muriel went to Blair they would go to other places, and an equal certainty that if he did not go to Blair his life would follow quite a different pattern.

  “Why are we waiting?” Muriel asked. “Why don’t you make the thing go?”

  “All right,” he said, and he pressed the little pedal by the steering post and the car began to move down Prospect Street.

  “Melville,” she asked, “are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Yes,” he said, “of course I’m sure.”

  No one was ever entirely sure—at best you could only be partly sure—and perhaps Muriel always understood this better than he ever did. Perhaps in all the years they were together she was never convinced of his infallibility.

  “My goodness,” she said, “we’re out of Hallowell already.”

  They were only traveling at twenty miles an hour, but the Ford was eating up the d
istance. They were a mile out of Hallowell, beyond the unpainted buildings of the Sawyer farm already, and over the bridge that spanned the Sawyer Brook. The sun was at his back and was dropping low, and he and Muriel were approaching the wooded, rolling country that lay between Hallowell and Blair. His mind was concentrated both on the management of the Ford, which had raised him to another plane, and on the curves and contours of the road. With his instinctive memory for terrain, even at that unaccustomed speed, he was storing away the landmarks, roughly measuring distance, noting down a curve, a white pine, a glacial boulder, a woods road to his right, or a stone wall in the oak thicket to his left.

  “Melville,” Muriel asked—they both had to raise their voices so that they could be heard above the rattling of the car—“do you think I’m too old for braids?”

  He had no fixed ideas on the subject, and he could both watch the road unfold and tell her so.

  “I think I ought to put my hair up,” Muriel said, “something like the way Celia has hers.”

  “It might look all right,” he said, “if it wasn’t in a hard knot.”

  “How do you mean, a hard knot?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “all squeezed up tight with pins in it.”

  “It’s got to have pins in it if you put it up,” she said. “If I had known you were going to ask me for a ride, I’d have put it up.”

  “You look all right,” he said.

  “Oh, you’re just being polite, Melville,” she said.

  “No,” he said, “you look all right.”

  A blue farm wagon drawn by two dapple grays was approaching him, and he kept well to the right.

  “Melville,” she asked, “do you like poetry?”

  “Yes,” he said, “some kinds, but not love poetry.”

  “I know a poem called ‘The Highwayman,’ by Alfred Noyes,” Muriel said. “It has love in it but it’s about fighting. Shall I say it?”

  “Yes,” Melville answered, “go ahead and say it.”

  “All right,” Muriel said. “I wouldn’t say it to just anyone because some people would say that it sounded silly …” and she started it correctly, beginning with the title in the way one had been taught to recite poetry at Hallowell:

  The Highwayman

  by Alfred Noyes

  The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,

  The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,

  The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor …

  The purple moor seemed to wrap itself around them both until he became Mr. Noyes’s highwayman and she was Bess, the landlord’s black-eyed daughter, and he was after a prize that night, and the redcoats were after him, but she could look for him by moonlight and he would be around though hell should bar the way. They were moving toward Blair, not in the Ford but on the misty wings of moonlight, until he lay in his blood on the highway with a bunch of lace at his throat, but even then, his ghost would come and knock on the old inn door. When her voice stopped, Melville came to himself almost with a jolt.

  “It’s kind of a silly poem,” she said, “but it sounds nice, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s all right,” he answered, “except that with all those soldiers after him, he would have waited until there wasn’t any moonlight, if he’d had any sense, and if the road was white, he’d have kept off the road. There’s no use standing around in the moonlight to let someone take a shot at you.”

  His thinking was absolutely sound, and he was pleased that he could criticize the poem.

  “I don’t see why you have to spoil it all,” she said. “It would be braver to come by moonlight.”

  There was no time to argue with her. While she was speaking they had come around a bend, and he could see the buildings of the fairgrounds with the roofs of Blair beyond them and a cloud of dust on the river road.

  “Gosh,” he said, and he hardly recognized his own voice, “the place is full of soldiers.”

  He was like the boy in the novel by Stendhal, looking at the field of Waterloo. He had no experience to guide him in estimating the number of troops. He could only see that columns of infantry and khaki-covered wagons were moving through the main street of the village and filling up the fairgrounds, and that tents were already being pitched in rows.

  “What are we going to do now?” he heard her ask.

  “We’re going to see them,” he said. “That’s what we came for, isn’t it?”

  He wished for the first time on that journey that he had not taken Muriel along. He wanted to see this sight by himself without having to answer her questions, but after a few minutes he hardly gave a thought to Muriel.

  Blair was scarcely a town; it was only one of those crossroad clusters of small white buildings that you so often passed in New England, wondering how it had come to be there in the first place and how anyone living there could manage to support himself. The fairgrounds were on level space next to the church and general store, but the boards of the fence which had formed the façade for its main entrance had nearly all disappeared, and the grandstand for the trotting races had been demolished. However, a few of those barnlike structures so euphemistically known as “exhibition halls” were still intact, and, that afternoon, life had returned to the fairgrounds and to Blair itself. Its inhabitants were lining the single street and clustering on the porch of the general store and post office, watching the volunteer militia end its march and enter camp.

  Melville stopped the Ford on the grass by the side of the road not far from the ruins of the fair gates. He could still remember the heat of the waning sun on his bare head, the rumble of the wagons, the sweating, weary faces and the shuffling medley of tired footsteps, but his military status obtruded itself on these memories, cynically, like an artist’s reducing glass. He could see himself and Muriel, a gawking boy and girl in country clothes, staring in mute respect at a ludicrous spectacle. He remembered the sun on Muriel’s molasses braids, and he remembered that her mouth, usually firm and confident with the assurance of a girl who does the right thing and studies her lessons carefully, had fallen slightly open. He knew now, and Muriel would, too, that the New Hampshire Volunteer Militia was really nothing to gape at, except with charitable pity. As an officer in the regular service, Melville Goodwin now had his own opinion of the National Guard. Troops could not be even passably trained by evening drill in some armory and then by a week or two of summer camping. It was all very well to play at being soldiers, but basically it was a waste of time and tax money, and nothing exemplified his beliefs better than that militia moving into camp at Blair.

  It was a hot day and the troops were soft as butter, though heat was no excuse for sloppiness. They all were straggling; all the precepts in that little black field service book had been lost along the way, and the commissioned officers and the noncoms simply did not know their jobs. There had been a pathetic effort to call companies to attention. The regimental band, if you cared to call it a band, was endeavoring to play them into camp, struggling painfully with “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The colonel, red-faced and perspiring, mounted on a bony black horse that must have been hired from some livery stable, had taken his position with the colors to watch the troops file past. The collar of his blouse was unhooked. He was slouched in the saddle like a melting mold of jelly, and of all things, he was smoking a cigar with the band still on it, not bothering even to remove his cigar from his mouth when he took the salutes. Moreover, he seemed satisfied with the miserable showing the men were making. As they attempted to come to attention and shoulder their Springfield rifles in some sort of alignment, he shouted rustic words of encouragement, which Melville could hear occasionally above the discords of the band. Melville could squirm now with professional pain as he recalled them.

  “Freeze, boys, you’re rubbering,” the colonel shouted. “Hooray for Company C! Dress them up, Charley! Keep time to the music, fellas—one, two, three, four.”

  If the colonel had seriously wished
to make any sort of show with those sad troops, he should have halted them for fifteen minutes before they entered Blair and he should have given orders—if anybody obeyed orders—to have packs adjusted and the men cleaned and buttoned up. As it was, they were winding slowly forward like the lowing herd in Gray’s “Elegy,” groaning and cursing while presumably at attention, using expletives which grew louder when they heard their colonel’s voice.

  “God damn it,” he heard one of the spryer privates shout, “he’s riding, ain’t he?”

  Melville stood utterly bemused by the moving column, boyishly unaware, at that time, of this lack of discipline, fascinated by the Springfields, by the officers’ service revolvers, by the felt hats and blue braids, by the packs and the blankets and by the heavy, rumbling wagons. His heart beat hard with the excitement of it, and rightly so perhaps, for there was always something stirring about any regiment equipped for the field. He lived for a minute or two in a haze of make-believe, no longer a boy in his first long trousers. Instead, he was a young officer just graduated from West Point, young U. S. Grant himself, who had dropped over from Hallowell to take a look at the New Hampshire militia. He was so lost in the beauty of all he saw that he had forgotten Muriel until she tugged at his sleeve.

  “Oh, Mel,” she said, “aren’t they lovely?”

  Melville glanced tolerantly at Muriel. He had read A Plebe at West Point and its sequels and all the historical fiction he could find in the library and was working on Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. He was an authority, and it was necessary for him to be critical and restrain his own enthusiasm.

  “They’re all right,” he said, “but they aren’t regulars, and some of them are out of step.”