“Oh, well, Caspar,” interrupted the Senator. Then he seemed to weigh a great fact in his mind. “I guess—” He paused again in profound consideration. “I guess—” He lit a small brown cigar. “I guess you are no damn good.”
December 2, 1899
[The Saturday Evening Post, Vol. 172, pp. 449–452.]
* Wounds in the Rain.
AN EPISODE OF WAR
The lieutenant’s rubber blanket lay on the ground, and upon it he had poured the company’s supply of coffee. Corporals and other representatives of the grimy and hot-throated men who lined the breastwork had come for each squad’s portion.
The lieutenant was frowning and serious at this task of division. His lips pursed as he drew with his sword various crevices in the heap, until brown squares of coffee, astoundingly equal in size, appeared on the blanket. He was on the verge of a great triumph in mathematics, and the corporals were thronging forward, each to reap a little square, when suddenly the lieutenant cried out and looked quickly at a man near him as if he suspected it was a case of personal assault. The others cried out also when they saw blood upon the lieutenant’s sleeve.
He had winced like a man stung, swayed dangerously, and then straightened. The sound of his hoarse breathing was plainly audible. He looked sadly, mystically, over the breastwork at the green face of a wood, where now were many little puffs of white smoke. During this moment the men about him gazed statue-like and silent, astonished and awed by this catastrophe which happened when catastrophes were not expected—when they had leisure to observe it.
As the lieutenant stared at the wood, they too swung their heads, so that for another instant all hands, still silent, contemplated the distant forest as if their minds were fixed upon the mystery of a bullet’s journey.
The officer had, of course, been compelled to take his sword into his left hand. He did not hold it by the hilt. He gripped it at the middle of the blade, awkwardly. Turning his eyes from the hostile wood, he looked at the sword as he held it there, and seemed puzzled as to what to do with it, where to put it. In short, this weapon had of a sudden become a strange thing to him. He looked at it in a kind of stupefaction, as if he had been endowed with a trident, a scepter, or a spade.
Finally he tried to sheathe it. To sheathe a sword held by the left hand, at the middle of the blade, in a scabbard hung at the left hip, is a feat worthy of a sawdust ring. This wounded officer engaged in a desperate struggle with the sword and the wobbling scabbard, and during the time of it he breathed like a wrestler.
But at this instant the men, the spectators, awoke from their stone-like poses and crowded forward sympathetically. The orderly-sergeant took the sword and tenderly placed it in the scabbard. At the time, he leaned nervously backward, and did not allow even his finger to brush the body of the lieutenant. A wound gives strange dignity to him who bears it. Well men shy from this new and terrible majesty. It is as if the wounded man’s hand is upon the curtain which hangs before the revelations of all existence—the meaning of ants, potentates, wars, cities, sunshine, snow, a feather dropped from a bird’s wing; and the power of it sheds radiance upon a bloody form, and makes the other men understand sometimes that they are little. His comrades look at him with large eyes thoughtfully. Moreover, they fear vaguely that the weight of a finger upon him might send him headlong, precipitate the tragedy, hurl him at once into the dim, gray unknown. And so the orderly-sergeant, while sheathing the sword, leaned nervously backward.
There were others who proffered assistance. One timidly presented his shoulder and asked the lieutenant if he cared to lean upon it, but the latter waved him away mournfully. He wore the look of one who knows he is the victim of a terrible disease and understands his helplessness. He again stared over the breastwork at the forest, and then, turning, went slowly rearward. He held his right wrist tenderly in his left hand as if the wounded arm was made of very brittle glass.
And the men in silence stared at the wood, then at the departing lieutenant; then at the wood, then at the lieutenant.
As the wounded officer passed from the line of battle, he was enabled to see many things which as a participant in the fight were unknown to him. He saw a general on a black horse gazing over the lines of blue infantry at the green woods which veiled his problems. An aide galloped furiously, dragged his horse suddenly to a halt, saluted, and presented a paper. It was, for a wonder, precisely like a historical painting.
To the rear of the general and his staff a group, composed of a bugler, two or three orderlies, and the bearer of the corps standard, all upon maniacal horses, were working like slaves to hold their ground, preserve their respectful interval, while the shells boomed in the air about them, and caused their chargers to make furious quivering leaps.
A battery, a tumultuous and shining mass, was swirling toward the right. The wild thud of hoofs, the cries of the riders shouting blame and praise, menace and encouragement, and, last, the roar of the wheels, the slant of the glistening guns, brought the lieutenant to an intent pause. The battery swept in curves that stirred the heart; it made halts as dramatic as the crash of a wave on the rocks, and when it fled onward this aggregation of wheels, levers, motors had a beautiful unity, as if it were a missile. The sound of it was a war chorus that reached into the depths of man’s emotion.
The lieutenant, still holding his arm as if it were of glass, stood watching this battery until all detail of it was lost, save the figures of the riders, which rose and fell and waved lashes over the black mass.
Later, he turned his eyes toward the battle, where the shooting sometimes crackled like bush-fires, sometimes sputtered with exasperating irregularity, and sometimes reverberated like the thunder. He saw the smoke rolling upward and saw crowds of men who ran and cheered, or stood and blazed away at the inscrutable distance.
He came upon some stragglers, and they told him how to find the field hospital. They described its exact location. In fact, these men, no longer having part in the battle, knew more of it than others. They told the performance of every corps, every division, the opinion of every general. The lieutenant, carrying his wounded arm rearward, looked upon them with wonder.
At the roadside a brigade was making coffee and buzzing with talk like a girls’ boarding school. Several officers came out to him and inquired concerning things of which he knew nothing. One, seeing his arm, began to scold. “Why, man, that’s no way to do. You want to fix that thing.” He appropriated the lieutenant and the lieutenant’s wound. He cut the sleeve and laid bare the arm, every nerve of which softly fluttered under his touch. He bound his handkerchief over the wound, scolding away in the meantime. His tone allowed one to think that he was in the habit of being wounded every day. The lieutenant hung his head, feeling, in this presence, that he did not know how to be correctly wounded.
The low white tents of the hospital were grouped around an old schoolhouse. There was here a singular commotion. In the foreground two ambulances interlocked wheels in the deep mud. The drivers were tossing the blame of it back and forth, gesticulating and berating, while from the ambulances, both crammed with wounded, there came an occasional groan. An interminable crowd of bandaged men were coming and going. Great numbers sat under the trees nursing heads or arms or legs. There was a dispute of some kind raging on the steps of the schoolhouse. Sitting with his back against a tree a man with a face as gray as a new army blanket was serenely smoking a corncob pipe. The lieutenant wished to rush forward and inform him that he was dying.
A busy surgeon was passing near the lieutenant. “Good morning,” he said, with a friendly smile. Then he caught sight of the lieutenant’s arm, and his face at once changed. “Well, let’s have a look at it.” He seemed possessed suddenly of a great contempt for the lieutenant. This wound evidently placed the latter on a very low social plane. The doctor cried out impatiently: “What mutton-head had tied it up that way anyhow?” The lieutenant answered, “Oh, a man.”
When the wound was disclosed the doctor fi
ngered it disdainfully. “Humph,” he said. “You come along with me and I’ll ’tend to you.” His voice contained the same scorn as if he were saying: “You will have to go to jail.”
The lieutenant had been very meek, but now his face flushed, and he looked into the doctor’s eyes. “I guess I won’t have it amputated,” he said.
“Nonsense, man! Nonsense! Nonsense!” cried the doctor. “Come along, now. I won’t amputate it. Come along. Don’t be a baby.”
“Let go of me,” said the lieutenant, holding back wrathfully, his glance fixed upon the door of the old schoolhouse, as sinister to him as the portals of death.
And this is the story of how the lieutenant lost his arm. When he reached home, his sisters, his mother, his wife, sobbed for a long time at the sight of the flat sleeve. “Oh, well,” he said, standing shamefaced amid these tears, “I don’t suppose it matters so much as all that.”
Christmas, 1899
[The Gentlewoman, London, pp. 24, xiv.]
SHAME*
“Don’t come in here botherin’ me,” said the cook, intolerantly. “What with your mother bein’ away on a visit, an’ your father comin’ home soon to lunch, I have enough on my mind—and that without bein’ bothered with you. The kitchen is no place for little boys, anyhow. Run away, and don’t be interferin’ with my work.” She frowned and made a grand pretense of being deep in herculean labors; but Jimmie did not run away.
“Now—they’re goin’ to have a picnic,” he said, half audibly.
“What?”
“Now—they’re goin’ to have a picnic.”
“Who’s goin’ to have a picnic?” demanded the cook, loudly. Her accent could have led one to suppose that if the projectors did not turn out to be the proper parties, she immediately would forbid this picnic.
Jimmie looked at her with more hopefulness. After twenty minutes of futile skirmishing, he had at least succeeded in introducing the subject. To her question he answered, eagerly: “Oh, everybody! Lots and lots of boys and girls. Everybody.”
“Who’s everybody?”
According to custom, Jimmie began to singsong through his nose in a quite indescribable fashion an enumeration of the prospective picnickers: “Willie Dalzel an’ Dan Earl an’ Ella Earl an’ Wolcott Margate an’ Reeves Margate an’ Walter Phelps an’ Homer Phelps an’ Minnie Phelps an’—oh—lots more girls an’—everybody. An’ their mothers an’ big sisters too.” Then he announced a new bit of information: “They’re goin’ to have a picnic.”
“Well, let them,” said the cook, blandly.
Jimmie fidgeted for a time in silence. At last he murmured, “I—now—I thought maybe you’d let me go.”
The cook turned from her work with an air of irritation and amazement that Jimmie should still be in the kitchen. “Who’s stoppin’ you?” she asked, sharply. “I ain’t stoppin’ you, am I?”
“No,” admitted Jimmie, in a low voice.
“Well, why don’t you go, then? Nobody’s stoppin’ you.”
“But,” said Jimmie, “I—you—now—each fellow has got to take somethin’ to eat with ’m.”
“Oh ho!” cried the cook, triumphantly. “So that’s it, is it? So that’s what you’ve been shyin’ round here fer, eh? Well, you may as well take yourself off without more words. What with your mother bein’ away on a visit, an’ your father comin’ home soon to his lunch, I have enough on my mind—an’ that without being bothered with you.”
Jimmie made no reply, but moved in grief toward the door. The cook continued: “Some people in this house seem to think there’s ’bout a thousand cooks in this kitchen. Where I used to work b’fore, there was some reason in ’em. I ain’t a horse. A picnic!”
Jimmie said nothing, but he loitered.
“Seems as if I had enough to do, without havin’ you come round talkin’ about picnics. Nobody ever seems to think of the work I have to do. Nobody ever seems to think of it. Then they come and talk to me about picnics! What do I care about picnics?”
Jimmie loitered.
“Where I used to work b’fore, there was some reason in ’em. I never heard tell of no picnics right on top of your mother bein’ away on a visit an’ your father comin’ home soon to his lunch. It’s all foolishness.”
Little Jimmie leaned his head flat against the wall and began to weep. She stared at him scornfully. “Cryin’, eh? Cryin’? What are you cryin’ fer?”
“N-n-nothin’,” sobbed Jimmie.
There was a silence, save for Jimmie’s convulsive breathing. At length the cook said: “Stop that blubberin’, now. Stop it! This kitchen ain’t no place fer it. Stop it!— Very well! If you don’t stop, I won’t give you nothin’ to go to the picnic with—there!”
For the moment he could not end his tears. “You never said,” he sputtered—“you never said you’d give me anything.”
“An’ why would I?” she cried, angrily. “Why would I—with you in here a-cryin’ an’ a-blubberin’ an’ a-bleatin’ round? Enough to drive a woman crazy! I don’t see how you could expect me to! The idea!”
Suddenly Jimmie announced: “I’ve stopped cryin’. I ain’t goin’ to cry no more ’tall.”
“Well, then,” grumbled the cook—“well, then, stop it. I’ve got enough on my mind.” It chanced that she was making for luncheon some salmon croquettes. A tin still half full of pinky prepared fish was beside her on the table. Still grumbling, she seized a loaf of bread and, wielding a knife, she cut from this loaf four slices, each of which was as big as a six-shilling novel. She profligately spread them with butter, and jabbing the point of her knife into the salmon tin she brought up bits of salmon, which she flung and flattened upon the bread. Then she crashed the pieces of bread together in pairs, much as one would clash cymbals. There was no doubt in her own mind but that she had created two sandwiches.
“There,” she cried. “That’ll do you all right. Lemme see. What’ll I put ’em in? There—I’ve got it.” She thrust the sandwiches into a small pail and jammed on the lid.
Jimmie was ready for the picnic. “Oh, thank you, Mary!” he cried, joyfully, and in a moment he was off, running swiftly.
The picnickers had started nearly half an hour earlier, owing to his inability to quickly attack and subdue the cook, but he knew that the rendezvous was in the grove of tall, pillarlike hemlocks and pines that grew on a rocky knoll at the lake shore. His heart was very light as he sped, swinging his pail. But a few minutes previously his soul had been gloomed in despair; now he was happy. He was going to the picnic, where privilege of participation was to be bought by the contents of the little tin pail.
When he arrived in the outskirts of the grove he heard a merry clamor, and when he reached the top of the knoll he looked down the slope upon a scene which almost made his little breast burst with joy. They actually had two campfires! Two campfires! At one of them Mrs. Earl was making something—chocolate, no doubt—and at the other a young lady in white duck and a sailor hat was dropping eggs into boiling water. Other grown-up people had spread a white cloth and were laying upon it things from baskets. In the deep cool shadow of the trees the children scurried, laughing. Jimmie hastened forward to join his friends.
Homer Phelps caught first sight of him. “Ho!” he shouted; “here comes Jimmie Trescott! Come on, Jimmie; you be on our side!” The children had divided themselves into two bands for some purpose of play. The others of Homer Phelps’s party loudly endorsed his plan. “Yes, Jimmie, you be on our side.” Then arose the usual dispute. “Well, we got the weakest side.”
“ ’Tain’t any weaker’n ours.”
Homer Phelps suddenly started and, looking hard, said, “What you got in the pail, Jim?”
Jimmie answered, somewhat uneasily, “Got m’ lunch in it.”
Instantly that brat of a Minnie Phelps simply tore down the sky with her shrieks of derision. “Got his lunch in it! In a pail!” She ran screaming to her mother. “Oh, mamma! Oh, mamma! Jimmie Trescott’s got his picnic in a pai
l!”
Now there was nothing in the nature of this fact to particularly move the others—notably the boys, who were not competent to care if he had brought his luncheon in a coal bin; but such is the instinct of childish society that they all immediately moved away from him. In a moment he had been made a social leper. All old intimacies were flung into the lake, so to speak. They dared not compromise themselves. At safe distances the boys shouted, scornfully: “Huh! Got his picnic in a pail!” Never again during that picnic did the little girls speak of him as Jimmie Trescott. His name now was Him.
His mind was dark with pain as he stood, the hang-dog, kicking the gravel, and muttering as defiantly as he was able, “Well, I can have it in a pail if I want to.” This statement of freedom was of no importance, and he knew it, but it was the only idea in his head.
He had been baited at school for being detected in writing a letter to little Cora, the angel child, and he had known how to defend himself, but this situation was in no way similar. This was a social affair, with grown people on all sides. It would be sweet to catch the Margate twins, for instance, and hammer them into a state of bleating respect for his pail; but that was a matter for the jungles of childhood, where grown folk seldom penetrated. He could only glower.
The amiable voice of Mrs. Earl suddenly called: “Come, children! Everything’s ready!” They scampered away, glancing back for one last gloat at Jimmie standing there with his pail.
He did not know what to do. He knew that the grown folk expected him at the spread, but if he approached he would be greeted by a shameful chorus from the children—more especially from some of those damnable little girls. Still, luxuries beyond all dreaming were heaped on that cloth. One could not forget them. Perhaps if he crept up modestly, and was very gentle and very nice to the little girls, they would allow him peace. Of course it had been dreadful to come with a pail to such a grand picnic, but they might forgive him.
The Complete Short Stories and Sketches of Stephen Crane Page 91
