Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Old Judge Priest

The Yankees, however, unaccountably fought, and it was not a ninety-day picnic after all. It was not any kind of a picnic. And when it was over, after four years and a month, Miss Sally May Ghoulson and Abner Tilghman did not marry. It was just before the battle of Chickamauga when the other men in the company first noticed that the two Tilghmans had become as strangers, and worse than strangers, to each other. They quit speaking to each other then and there, and to any man’s knowledge they never spoke again. They served the war out, Abner rising just before the end to a captaincy, Edward serving always as a private in the ranks. In a dour, grim silence they took the fortunes of those last hard, hopeless days and after the surrender down in Mississippi they came back with the limping handful that was left of the company; and in age they were all boys still – but in experience, men, and in suffering, grandsires.

Two months alter they got back Miss Sally May Ghoulson was married to Edward, the younger brother. Within a year she died, and after a decent period of mourning Edward married a second time – only to be widowed again after many years. His second wife bore him children and they died – all except one, a daughter, who grew up and married badly; and after her mother’s death she came back to live with her deaf father and to minister to him. As for Captain Abner Tilghman, he never married – never, so far as the watching eyes of the town might tell, looked with favour upon any woman. And he never spoke to his brother or to any of his brother’s family – or his brother to him.

With years the wall of silence they had builded up between them turned to ice and the ice to stone. They lived on the same street, but never did Edward enter Captain Abner’s bank, never did Captain Abner pass Edward’s house – always he crossed over to the opposite side. They belonged to the same Veterans’ Camp – indeed there was only the one for them to belong to; they voted the same ticket – straight Democratic; and in the same church, the old Independent Presbyterian, they worshipped the same God by the same creed, the older brother being an elder and the younger a plain member – and yet never crossed looks.

The town had come to accept this dumb and bitter feud as unchangeable and eternal; in time people ceased even to wonder what its cause had been, and in all the long years only one man had tried, before now, to heal it up. When old Doctor Henrickson died, a young and earnest clergyman, fresh from a Virginia theological school, came out to take the vacant pulpit; and he, being filled with a high sense of his holy calling, thought it shameful that such a thing should be in the congregation. He went to see Captain Tilghman about it. He never went but once. Afterward it came out that Captain Tilghman had threatened to walk out of church and never darken its doors again if the minister ever dared to mention his brother’s name in his presence. So the young minister sorrowed, but obeyed, for the captain was rich and a generous giver to the church.

And he had grown richer with the years, and as he grew richer his brother grew poorer – another man owned the drug store where Edward Tilghman had failed. They had grown from young to middle-aged men and from middle-aged men to old, infirm men; and first the grace of youth and then the solidness of maturity had gone out of them and the gnarliness of age had come upon them; one was halt of step and the other was dull of ear; and the town through half a century of schooling had accustomed itself to the situation and took it as a matter of course. So it was and so it always would be – a tragedy and a mystery. It had not been of any use when the minister interfered; it was of no use now. Judge Priest, with the gesture of a man who is beaten, dropped the fan on the porch floor, went into his darkened sitting room, stretched himself wearily on a creaking horsehide sofa and called out to Jeff to make him a mild toddy – one with plenty of ice in it.

On this same Sunday – or, anyhow, I like to fancy it was on this same Sunday – at a point distant approximately nine hundred and seventy miles in a northeasterly direction from Judge Priest’s town, Corporal Jacob Speck, late of Sigel’s command, sat at the kitchen window of the combined Speck and Engel apartment on East Eighty-fifth Street in the Borough of Manhattan, New York. He was in his shirtsleeves; his tender feet were incased in a pair of red-and-green carpet slippers. In the angle of his left arm he held his youngest grandchild, aged one and a half years, while his right hand carefully poised a china pipe, with a bowl like an egg-cup and a stem like a fishpole. The corporal’s blue Hanoverian eyes, behind their thick-lensed glasses, were fixed upon a comprehensive vista of East Eighty-fifth Street back yards and clothespoles and fire escapes; but his thoughts were elsewhere.

Reared back there at seeming ease, the corporal none the less was distracted in his mind. It was not that he so much minded being left at home to mind the youngest baby while the rest of the family spent the afternoon amid the Teutonic splendours of Smeltzer’s Harlem River Casino, with its acres of gravel walks and its whitewashed tree trunks, its straggly flower beds and its high-collared beers. He was used to that sort of thing. Since a plague of multiplying infirmities of the body had driven him out of his job in the tax office, the corporal had not done much except nurse the babies that occurred in the Speck-Engel establishment with such unerring regularity. Sometimes, it is true, he did slip down to the corner for maybe zwei glasses of beer and a game of pinocle; but then, likely as not, there would come inopportunely a towheaded descendant to tell him Mommer needed him back at the flat right away to mind the baby while she went marketing or to the movies.

He could endure that – he had to. What riled Corporal Jacob Speck on this warm and sunny Sunday was a realisation that he was not doing his share at making the history of the period. The week before had befallen the fiftieth anniversary of the marching away of his old regiment to the front; there had been articles in the papers about it. Also, in patriotic commemoration of the great event there had been a parade of the wrinkled survivors – ninety-odd of them – following their tattered, faded battle flag down Fifth Avenue past apathetic crowds, nine-tenths of whom had been born since the war – in foreign lands mainly; and at least half, if one might judge by their looks, did not know what the parading was all about, and did not particularly care either.

The corporal had not participated in the march of the veterans; he had not even at-tended the banquet that followed it. True, his youngest grandchild was at the moment cutting one of her largest jaw teeth and so had required, for the time, an extraordinary and special amount of minding; but the young lady’s dental difficulty was not the sole reason for his absence. Three weeks earlier the corporal had taken part in Decoration Day, and certainly one parade a month was ample strain upon underpinning such as he owned. He had returned home with his game leg behaving more gamely then usual and his sound one full of new and painful kinks. Also, in honour of the occasion, he had committed the error of wearing a pair of stiff new shoes; wherefore he had favoured carpet slippers ever since.

Missing the fiftieth anniversary was not the main point with the corporal – that was merely the fortune of war, to be accepted with fortitude and with no more than a proper and natural amount of grumbling by one who had been a good soldier and was now a good citizen; but for days before the event, and daily ever since, divers members of the old regiment had been writing pieces to the papers – the German papers and the English-printing papers too – long pieces, telling of the trip to Washington, and then on into Virginia and across to Tennessee, speaking of this campaign and that and this battle and that. And because there was just now a passing wave of interest in Civil War matters, the papers had printed these contributions, thereby reflecting much glory on the writers thereof. But Corporal Speck, reading these things, had marvelled deeply that sane men should have such disgustingly bad memories; for his own recollection of these events differed most widely from the reminiscent narration of each misguided chronicler.

It was, indeed, a shameful thing that the most important occurrences of the whole war should be so shockingly mangled and mishandled in the retelling. They were so grievously wrong, those other veterans, and he was so absolutely right. He was always right in these matters. Only the night before, during a merciful respite from nursing duties, he had, in Otto Wittenpen’s back barroom, spoken across the rim of a tall stein with some bitterness regarding certain especially grievous misstatements of plain fact on the part of faulty-minded comrades. In reply Otto had said, in a rather sneering tone the corporal thought:

“Say, then, Jacob, why don’t you yourself write a piece to the paper telling about this regiment of yours – the way it was?”

“I will. To-morrow I will do so without fail,” he had said, the ambition of authorship suddenly stirring within him. Now, however, as he sat at the kitchen window, he gloomed in his disappointment, for he had tried and he knew he had not the gift of the written line. A good soldier he had been – ja, none better – and a good citizen, and in his day a capable and painstaking doorkeeper in the tax office; but he could not write his own story. That morning, when the youngest grandbaby slept and his daughter and his daughter’s husband and the brood of his older grandchildren were all at the Lutheran church over in the next block, he sat himself down to compose his article to the paper; but the words would not come – or, at least, after the first line or two they would not come.

The mental pictures of those stirring great days when he marched off on his two good legs – both good legs then – to fight for the country whose language he could not yet speak were there in bright and living colours; but the sorry part of it was he could not clothe them in language. In the trash box under the sink a dozen crumpled sheets of paper testified to his failure, and now, alone with the youngest Miss Engel, he brooded over it and got low in his mind and let his pipe go smack out. And right then and there, with absolutely no warning at all, there came to him, as you might say from the clear sky, a great idea – an idea so magnificent that he almost dropped little Miss Engel off his lap at the splendid shock of it.

With solicitude he glanced down at the small, moist, pink, lumpy bundle of prickly heat and sore gums. Despite the jostle the young lady slept steadily on. Very carefully he laid his pipe aside and very carefully he got upon his feet, jouncing his charge soothingly up and down, and with deftness he committed her small person to the crib that stood handily by. She stirred fretfully, but did not wake. The corporal steered his gimpy leg and his rheumatic one out of the kitchen, which was white with scouring and as clean as a new pin, into the rearmost and smallest of the three sleeping rooms that mainly made up the Speck-Engel apartment.

The bed, whereon of nights Corporal Speck reposed with a bucking bronco of an eight-year-old grandson for a bedmate, was jammed close against the plastering, under the one small window set diagonally in a jog in the wall, and opening out upon an airshaft, like a chimney. Time had been when the corporal had a room and a bed all his own; that was before the family began to grow so fast in its second generation and he still held a place of lucrative employment at the tax office.

As he got down upon his knees beside the bed the old man uttered a little groan of discomfort. He felt about in the space underneath and drew out a small tin trunk, rusted on its corners and dented in its sides. He made a laborious selection of keys from a key-ring he got out of his pocket, unlocked the trunk and lifted out a heavy top tray. The tray contained, among other things, such treasures as his naturalisation papers, his pension papers, a photograph of his dead wife, and a small bethumbed passbook of the East Side Germania Savings Bank. Underneath was a black fatigue hat with a gold cord round its crown, a neatly folded blue uniform coat, with the G. A. R. bronze showing in its uppermost lapel, and below that, in turn, the suit of neat black the corporal wore on high state occasions and would one day wear to be buried in. Pawing and digging, he worked his hands to the very bottom, and then, with a little grunt, he heaved out the thing he wanted – the one trophy, except a stiffened kneecap and an honourable record, this old man brought home from the South. It was a captured Confederate knapsack, flattened and flabby. Its leather was dry-rotted with age and the brass C. S. A. on the outer flap was gangrened and sunken in; the flap curled up stiffly, like an old shoe sole.

The crooked old fingers undid a buckle fastening and from the musty and odorous interior of the knapsack withdrew a letter, in a queer-looking yellowed envelope, with a queer-looking stamp upon the upper right-hand corner and a faint superscription upon its face. The three sheets of paper he slid out of the envelope were too old even to rustle, but the close writing upon them in a brownish, faded ink was still plainly to be made out.

Corporal Speck replaced the knapsack in its place at the very bottom, put the tray back in its place, closed the trunk and locked it and shoved it under the bed. The trunk resisted slightly and he lost one carpet slipper and considerable breath in the struggle. Limping back to the kitchen and seeing little Miss Engel still slumbered, he eased his frame into a chair and composed himself to literary composition, not in the least disturbed by the shouts of roistering sidewalk comedians that filtered up to him from down below in front of the house, or by the distant clatter of intermittent traffic over the cobbly spine of Second Avenue, half a block away. For some time he wrote, with a most scratchy pen; and this is what he wrote:

“To the Editor of the ‘Sun,’ City,

“Dear Sir: The undersigned would state that he served two years and nine months – until wounded in action – in the Fighting Two Hundred and Tenth New York Infantry, and has been much interested to see what other comrades wrote for the papers regarding same in connection with the Rebellion War of North and South respectively. I would state that during the battle of Chickamauga I was for a while lying near by to a Confederate soldier – name unknown – who was dying on account of a wound in the chest. By his request I gave him a drink of water from my canteen, he dying shortly thereafter. Being myself wounded – right knee shattered by a Minie ball – I was removed to a field hospital; but before doing so I brought away this man’s knapsack for a keepsake of the occasion. Some years later I found in said knapsack a letter, which previous to then was overlooked by me. I inclose herewith a copy of said letter, which it may be interesting for reading purposes by surviving comrades.

“Respectfully yours,

“Jacob Speck,

“Late Corporal L Company,

“Fighting Two Hundred and Tenth New York, U. S. A.”

With deliberation and squeaky emphasis the pen progressed slowly across the paper, while the corporal, with his left hand, held flat the dead man’s ancient letter before him, intent on copying it. Hard words puzzled him and long words daunted him, and he was making a long job of it when there were steps in the hall without. Entered breezily Miss Hortense Engel, the eldest of all the multiplying Engels, pretty beyond question and every inch American, having the gift of wearing Lower Sixth Avenue’s stock designs in a way to make them seem Upper Fifth Avenue’s imported models. Miss Engel’s face was pleasantly flushed; she had just parted lingeringly from her steady company, Mr. Lawrence J. McLaughlin, plumber’s helper, in the lower hallway, which is the trysting place and courting place of tenement-dwelling sweethearts, and now she had come to make ready the family’s cold Sunday night tea. At sight of her the corporal had another inspiration – his second within the hour. His brow smoothed and he fetched a sigh of relief.

“‘Lo, grosspops!” she said. “How’s every little thing? The kiddo all right?”

She unpinned a Sunday hat that was plumed like a hearse and slipped on a long apron that covered her from high collar to hobble hem.

“Girl,” said her grandfather, “would you make to-morrow for me at the office a copy of this letter on the typewriter machine?”

He spoke in German and she answered in New-Yorkese, while her nimble fingers wrestled with the task of back-buttoning her apron.

“Sure thing! It won’t take hardly a minute to rattle that off. Funny-looking old thing!” she went on, taking up the creased and faded original. “Who wrote it? And whatcher goin’ to do with it, grosspops?”

“That,” he told her, “is mine own business! It is for you, please, to make the copy and bring both to me to-morrow, the letter and also the copy.”

So on Monday morning, when the rush of taking dictation at the offices of the Great American Hosiery Company, in Broome Street, was well abated, the competent Miss Hortense copied the letter, and that same evening her grandfather mailed it to the Sun, accompanied by his own introduction. The Sun straightway printed it without change and – what was still better – with the sender’s name spelled out in capital letters; and that night, at the place down by the corner, Corporal Jacob Speck was a prophet not without honour in his own country. Much honour, in fact, accrued.

You may remember that, upon a memorable occasion, Judge Priest went on a trip to New York and while there had dealings with a Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee, a promoter of gas and other hot-air propositions; and that during the course of his stay in the metropolis he made the acquaintance of one Malley, a Sun reporter. This had happened some years back, but Malley was still on the staff of the Sun. It happened also that, going through the paper to clip out and measure up his space, Malley came upon the corporal’s contribution. Glancing over it idly, he caught the name, twice or thrice repeated, of the town where Judge Priest lived. So he bundled together a couple of copies and sent them South with a short letter; and therefore it came about in due season, through the good offices of the United States Post-office Department, these enclosures reached the judge on a showery Friday afternoon as he loafed upon his wide front porch, waiting for his supper.

First, he read Malley’s letter and was glad to hear from Malley. With a quickened interest he ran a plump thumb under the wrappings of the two close-rolled papers, opened out one of them at page ten and read the opening statement of Corporal Jacob Speck, for whom instantly the judge conceived a longdistance fondness. Next he came to the letter that Miss Hortense Engel had so accurately transcribed, and at the very first words of it he sat up straighter, with a surprised and gratified little grunt; for he had known them both – the writer of that letter and its recipient. One still lived in his memory as a red-haired girl with a pert, malicious face, and the other as a stripling youth in a ragged grey uniform. And he had known most of those whose names studded the printed lines so thickly. Indeed, some of them he still knew – only now they were old men and old women – faded, wrinkled bucks and belles of a far-distant day.

As he read the first words it came back to the judge, almost with the jolting emphasis of a new and fresh sensation, that in the days of his own youth he had not liked the girl who wrote that letter nor the man who received it. But she was dead this many and many a year – why, she must have died soon after she wrote this very letter – the date proved that – and he, the man, had fallen at Chickamauga, taking his death in front like a soldier; and surely that settled everything and made all things right! But the letter – that was the main thing. His old blue eyes skipped nimbly behind the glasses that saddled the tip of his short pink nose, and the old judge read it – just such a letter as he himself had received many a time; just such a wartime letter as uncounted thousands of soldiers North and South received from their sweethearts and read and reread by the light of flickering campfires and carried afterward in their knapsacks through weary miles of marching.

It was crammed with the small-town gossip of a small town that was but little more than a memory now – telling how, because he would not volunteer, a hapless youth had been waylaid by a dozen high-spirited girls and overpowered, and dressed in a woman’s skirt and a woman’s poke bonnet, so that he left town with his shame between two suns; how, since the Yankees had come, sundry faithless females were friendly – actually friendly, this being underscored – with the more personable of the young Yankee officers; how half the town was in mourning for a son or brother dead or wounded; how a new and sweetly sentimental song, called Rosalie, the Prairie Flower, was being much sung at the time – and had it reached the army yet? – how old Mrs. Hobbs had been exiled to Canada for seditious acts and language and had departed northward between two files of bluecoats, reviling the Yankees with an unbitted tongue at every step; how So-and-So had died or married or gone refugeeing below the enemy’s line into safely Southern territory; how this thing had happened and that thing had not.

The old judge read on and on, catching gladly at names that kindled a tenderly warm glow of half-forgotten memories in his soul, until he came to the last paragraph of all; and then, as he comprehended the intent of it in all its barbed and venomed malice, he stood suddenly erect, with the outspread paper shaking in his hard grip. For now, coming back to him by so strange a way across fifty years of silence and misunderstanding, he read there the answer to the town’s oldest, biggest tragedy and knew what it was that all this time had festered, like buried thorns, in the flesh of those two men, his comrades and friends. He dropped the paper, and up and down the wide, empty porch he stumped on his short legs, shaking with the shock of revelation and with indignation and with pity for the blind and bitter uselessness of it all.

“Ah, hah!” he said to himself over and over again understandingly. “Ah, hah!” And then: “Next to a mean man, a mean woman is the meanest thing in this whole created world, I reckin. I ain’t shore but whut she’s the meanest of the two. And to think of what them two did between ‘em – she writin’ that hellish black lyin’ tale to ‘Lonzo Pike and he puttin’ off hotfoot to Abner Tilghman to poison his mind with it and set him like a flint ag’inst his own flesh and blood! And wasn’t it jest like Lon Pike to go and git himself killed the next day after he got that there letter! And wasn’t it jest like her to up and die before the truth could be brought home to her! And wasn’t it like them two stubborn, set, contrary, closemouthed Tilghman boys to go ‘long through all these years, without neither one of ‘em ever offerin’ to make or take an explanation!” His tone changed. “Oh, ain’t it been a pitiful thing! And all so useless! But – oh, thank the Lord – it ain’t too late to mend it part way anyhow! Thank God, it ain’t too late fur that!”

Exulting now, he caught up the paper he had dropped, and with it crumpled in his pudgy fist was half-way down the gravel walk, bound for the little cottage snuggled in its vine ambush across Clay Street, before a better and a bigger inspiration caught up with him and halted him midway of an onward stride.

Was not this the second Friday in the month? It certainly was. And would not the Camp be meeting to-night in regular semimonthly session at Kamleiter’s Hall? It certainly would. For just a moment Judge Priest considered the proposition. He slapped his linen clad flank gleefully, and his round old face, which had been knotted with resolution, broke up into a wrinkly, ample smile; he spun on his heel and hurried back into the house and to the telephone in the hall. For half an hour, more or less, Judge Priest was busy at that telephone, calling in a high, excited voice, first for one number and then for another. While he did this his supper grew cold on the table, and in the dining room Jeff, the white-clad, fidgeted and out in the kitchen Aunt Dilsey, the tur-baned, fumed – but, at Kamleiter’s Hall that night at eight, Judge Priest’s industry was in abundant fulness rewarded.

Once upon a time Gideon K. Irons Camp claimed a full two hundred members, but that had been when it was first organised. Now there were in good standing less than twenty. Of these twenty, fifteen sat on the hard wooden chairs when Judge Priest rapped with his metal spectacle case for order, and that fifteen meant all who could travel out at nights. Doctor Lake was there, and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, the faithful and inevitable. It was the biggest turnout the Camp had had in a year.

Far over on one side, cramped down in a chair, was Captain Abner Tilghman, feeble and worn-looking. His buggy horse stood hitched by the curb downstairs. Sergeant Jimmy Bagby had gone to his house for him and on the plea of business of vital moment had made him come with him. Almost directly across the middle aisle on the other side sat Mr. Edward Tilghman. Nobody had to go for him. He always came to a regular meeting of the Camp, even though he heard the proceedings only in broken bits.

The adjutant called the roll and those present answered, each one to his name; and mainly the voices sounded bent and sagged, like the bodies of their owners. But a keen onlooker might have noticed a sort of tremulous, joyous impatience, which filled all save two of these old, grey men, pushing the preliminaries forward with uncommon speed. They fidgeted in their places.

Presently Judge Priest cleared his throat of a persistent huskiness and stood up.

“Before we purceed to the regular routine,” he piped, “I desire to present a certain matter to a couple of our members.” He came down off the little platform, where the flags were draped, with a step that was almost light, and into Captain Abner Tilghman’s hand he put a copy of a city paper, turned and folded at a certain place, where a column of printed matter was scored about with heavy pencil bracketings. “Cap’n,” he said, “ez a personal favour to me, suh, would you please read this here article? – the one that’s marked” – he pointed with his finger – “not aloud – read it to yourself, please.”

It was characteristic of the paralytic to say nothing. Without a word he adjusted his glasses and without a word he began to read. So instantly intent was he that he did not see what followed next – and that was Judge Priest crossing over to Mr. Edward Tilghman’s side with another copy of the same paper in his hand.

“Ed,” he bade him, “read this here article, won’t you? Read it clear through to the end – it mout interest you mebbe.” The deaf man looked up at him wonderingly, but took the paper in his slightly palsied hand and bent his head close above the printed sheet.

Judge Priest stood in the middle aisle, making no move to go back to his own place. He watched the two silent readers. All the others watched them too. They read on, making slow progress, for the light was poor and their eyes were poor. And the watchers could hardly contain themselves; they could hardly wait. Sergeant Jimmy Bagby kept bobbing up and down like a pudgy jack-in-the-box that is slightly stiff in its joints. A small, restrained rustle of bodies accompanied the rustle of the folded newspapers held in shaky hands.

Unconscious of all scrutiny, the brothers read on. Perhaps because he had started first – perhaps because his glasses were the more expensive and presumably therefore the more helpful – Captain Abner Tilghman came to the concluding paragraph first. He read it through – and then Judge Priest turned his head away, for a moment almost regretting he had chosen so public a place for this thing.

He looked back again in time to see Captain Abner getting upon his feet. Dragging his dead leg behind him, the paralytic crossed the bare floor to where his brother’s grey head was bent to his task. And at his side he halted, making no sound or sign, but only waiting. He waited there, trembling all over, until the sitter came to the end of the column and read what was there – and lifted a face all glorified with a perfect understanding.

“Eddie!” said the older man – “Eddie!” He uttered a name of boyhood affection that none there had heard uttered for fifty years nearly; and it was as though a stone had been rolled away from a tomb – as though out of the grave of a dead past a voice had risen resurrected. “Eddie!” he said a third time, pleadingly, abjectly, humbly, craving for forgiveness.

“Brother Abner!” said the other man. “Oh, Brother Abner!” he said – and that was all he did say – all he had need to say, for he was on his feet now, reaching out with wide-spread, shaking arms.

Sergeant Jimmy Bagby tried to start a yell, but could not make it come out of his throat – only a clicking, squeaking kind of sound came. Considered as a yell it was a miserable failure.

Side by side, each with his inner arm tight gripped about the other, the brothers, bareheaded, turned their backs upon their friends and went away. Slowly they passed out through the doorway into the darkness of the stair landing, and the members of the Gideon K. Irons Camp were all up on their feet.

“Mind that top step, Abner!” they heard the younger man say. “Wait! I’ll help you down.” And that was all except a scuffling sound of uncertainly placed feet, growing fainter and fainter as the two brothers passed down the long stairs of Kamleiter’s Hall and out into the night together – that was all, unless you would care to take cognisance of a subdued little chorus such as might be produced by twelve or thirteen elderly men snuffling in a large bare room. As commandant of the Camp it was fitting, perhaps, that Judge Priest should speak first.