The Happy End Part 28

The drumming in Elim's ears grew louder, a hum of voices was added to it, and it grew nearer, actual. A crowd of men was entering the boarding house, carrying about them a pressure of excited exclamations and a more subtle disturbance. Elim Meikeljohn left Kaperton and went out into the hall. An ascending man met him.

"War!" he cried. "The d.a.m.ned rebels have a.s.saulted and taken Sumter!

Lincoln has called for fifty thousand volunteers!" He hurried past and left Elim grasping the handrail of the stair.

War! The word carried an overwhelming significance to his mind dominated by the intangible drumming, to his newly released freedom. War upon oppression, upon the criminal slaveholders of the South! He descended the stairs, pausing above the small agitated throng in the hall.

A pa.s.sionate elation swept over him. He held his long arms upward and out.

"How many of the fifty thousand are here?" he asked. His ringing voice was answered in an a.s.sent that rolled in a solid volume of sound up the stairs. Elim Meikeljohn's soul leaped in the supreme kinship that linked him, man to man, with all.

V

It was again April, extremely early in the morning and month, and thickly cold, when Brevet-Major Elim Meikeljohn, burning with the fever of a re-opened old saber wound, strayed away from his command in the direction of Richmond. His thoughts revolved with the rapidity of a pinwheel, throwing off crackling ideas, illuminated with blinding spurts and exploding colors, in every direction. A vague persistent pressure sent him toward the city. It was being evacuated; the Union forces, he knew, were to enter at dawn; but he had stumbled ahead, careless of consequences, oblivious of possible reprisal.

He was, he recognized by the greater blackness ahead, near the outskirts of the city--for Richmond was burning. The towering black ma.s.s of smoke was growing more perceptible in the slowly lightening dawn. Elim Meikeljohn could now hear the low sullen uprush of flames, the faint crackling of timbers, and a hot aromatic odor met him in faint waves.

His scabbard beat awkwardly about his heels, and he impatiently unhooked it and threw it into the gloom of the roadside. The service revolver was still in its holster; but he had forgotten its presence and use. In the multicolored confusion of his mind but one conscious impression remained; and, in its reiteration, he said aloud, over and over, in dull tones, "Two, Linden Row."

The words held no concrete meaning, they constructed no vision, embodied no tangible desire; they were merely the mechanical expression of an obscure and dominating impulse. He was hardly more sensate in his progress than a nail drawn irresistibly by a magnet.

The gray mist dissolved, and his long haggard face grew visible; it had not aged in the past four years of struggle--almost from boyhood it had been marked with somber longitudinal lines--but it had grown keener, more intense, with the expression of a man whose body had starved through a great spiritual conflict. His uniform, creased and stained, and now silvery with dew, flapped about a gaunt ironlike frame; and from under the leather peak of his kepi, even in his fever, his eyes burned steady and compelling.

Scattered houses, seemingly as unsubstantial as shadows, gathered about him; they grew more frequent, joined shoulder to shoulder, and he was in a city street. On the left he caught a glimpse of the river, solid and smooth and unshining; a knot of men pa.s.sed shouting hoa.r.s.ely, and a wave of heat swept over him like a choking cloth. Like the morning, his mind partially cleared, people and scenes grew coherent. The former were a disheveled and rioting rabble; the conflagration spread in lurid waves.

The great stores of the tobacco warehouses had been set on fire, and the spanning flames threatened the entire city. The rich odor of the burning tobacco leaves rolled over the streets in drifting showers of ruby sparks. The groups on the streets resolved into individuals. Elim saw a hulking woman, with her waist torn from grimy shoulders, cursing the retreating Confederate troops with uplifted quivering fists; he saw soldiers in gray joined to shifty town characters furtively bearing away swollen sacks; carriages with plunging frenzied horses, a man with white-faced and despairingly calm women. He stopped hurrying in the opposite direction and demanded:

"Two, Linden Row?"

The other waved a vague arm toward the right and broke away.

The street mounted sharply and Elim pa.s.sed an open s.p.a.ce teeming with hurrying forms, shrill with cries lost in the drumming roar of the flames. Every third man was drunk. He pa.s.sed fights, b.e.s.t.i.a.l grimaces, heard the fretful crack of revolvers. The great storehouses were now below him, and he could see the shuddering inky ma.s.ses of smoke blotting out quarter after quarter. He was on a more important thoroughfare now, and inquired again:

"Two, Linden Row?"

This man e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed:

"The Yankees are here!" The fact seemed to stupefy him, and he stood with hanging hands and mouth.

Elim Meikeljohn repeated his query and was answered by a negro who had joined them.

"On ahead, capt'n," he volunteered; "fourth turn past the capitol and first crossing."

The other regained his speech and began to curse the negro and Elim, but the latter moved swiftly on.

Above him, through the shifting tenebrous banks, he saw a cla.s.sic white building on a patch of incredible greenery, infinitely remote; and then from the center of the city came a deafening explosion, a great sullen sheet of flame, followed by flashes like lightning in the settling blackness.

"The powder magazines," Elim heard repeated from person to person. An irregular file of Confederate soldiers galloped past him, and the echo of their hoofs had hardly died before a troop of mounted Union cavalry, with slanting carbines, rode at their heels. They belonged, Elim recognized, to Kautz' command.

He had now reached the fourth turn beyond the withdrawn vision of the capitol, and he advanced through a black snowing of soot. Flames, fanlike and pallid, now flickered about his feet, streamed in the gutters and lapped the curbs. He saw heaps of broken bottles against the bricks, and the smell of fine spilled wines and liquors hung in his nostrils. His reason again wavered--the tremendous spectacle of burning a.s.sumed an apocalyptic appearance, as if the city had burst spontaneously into flame from the pa.s.sionate and evil spirits engendered and liberated by war.

He stopped at the first crossing and saw before him a row of tall brick houses, built solidly and set behind small yards and a low iron fencing.

They had shallow porticoes with iron grilling, and at this end a towering magnolia tree swept its new glossy greenery against the third-story windows.

"Linden Row," he muttered. "Well--Number Two?"

He swung back a creaking gate and went up a flight of bricked steps to the door. He had guessed right; above a bra.s.s knocker filmed with the floating muck of the air he saw the numeral, Two, painted beneath the fanlight. The windows on the left were blank, curtained. The house rose silent and without a mark of life above the obscene clamor of the city.

He knocked sharply and waited; then he knocked again. Nothing broke the stillness of the facade, the interior. He tried the door, but it was solidly barred. Then a second fact, a memory, joined the bare location in his brain. It was a name--Rose--Rosemary Roselle. He beat with an emaciated fist on the paneling and called, "Roselle! Roselle!"

There was a faint answering stir within; he heard the rattle of a chain; the door swung back upon an apparently empty and cavernous cool hall.

VI

A colored woman, in a crisp white turban, with a strained face more gray than brown, suddenly advanced holding before her in both hands a heavy revolver of an outworn pattern. Elim Meikeljohn could see by her drawn features that she was about to pull the trigger, and he said fretfully:

"Don't! The thing will explode. One of us will get hurt." She closed her eyes, Elim threw up his arm, and an amazingly loud report crashed through the entry. He stood swaying weakly, with hanging palms, while the woman dropped the revolver with a gasp. Elim Meikeljohn began to cry with short dry sobs.... It was incredible that any one should discharge a big revolver directly at his head. He sank limply against a chest at the wall.

"Oh, Indy!" a shaken voice exclaimed. "Do you think he's dying?" The colored woman went reluctantly forward and peered at Elim. She touched him on a shoulder.

"'Deed, Miss Rosemary," she replied, relieved and angry, "that shot didn't touch a hair. He's just crying like a big old nothing." She grasped him more firmly, gave him a shake. "Dressed like a soldier," she proceeded scornfully, "and scaring us out of our wits. What did you want to come here for anyhow calling out names?"

Elim's head rolled forward and back. The hall seemed full of flaming arrows, and he collapsed slowly on the polished floor. He was moved; he was half-conscious of his heels dragging upstairs, of frequent pauses, voices expostulating and directing thinly. Finally he sank into a sublimated peace in, apparently, a floating white cloud.

He awoke refreshed, mentally clear, but absurdly weak--he was lying in the middle of a four-posted bed, a bed with posts so ma.s.sive and tall that they resembled smooth towering trees. Beyond them he could see a marble mantel; a grate filled with softly smoldering coals, and a gleaming bra.s.s hod; a highboy with a dark l.u.s.trous surface; oval gold frames; and muslin curtains in an open window, stirring in an air that moved the fluted valance at the top of the bed. It was late afternoon, the light was fading, the interior wavering in a clear shadow filled with the faint fat odor of the soft coal.

The immaculate bed linen bore an elusive cool scent, into which he relapsed with profound delight. The personality of the room, somber and still, flowed about him with a magical release from the inferno of the past years, the last hours. He heard a movement at a door, and the colored woman in the white turban moved to the side of the bed.

"I told her," she said in an aggrieved voice, "there wasn't nothing at all wrong with you. I reckon now you're all ready to fight again or eat.

Why did you stir things all up in Richmond and kill good folks?"

"To set you free!" Elim Meikeljohn replied.

She gazed at him thoughtfully.

"Capt'n," she asked finally, "are you free?"

"Why, certainly----" he began, and then stopped abruptly, lost in the memory of the dour past. He recalled his father, with a pa.s.sion for learning, imprisoned in the narrow poverty of his circ.u.mstances and surroundings; he remembered Hester, with her wishful gaze in the confines of her invalid chair; his own laborious lonely days. Freedom, a high and difficult term, he saw concerned regions of the spirit not liberated--solved--by a simple declaration on the body. The war had been but the initial, most facile step. The woman had silenced his sounding a.s.sertion, humiliated him, by a word. He gazed at her with a new, less confident interest. The mental effort brought a momentary recurrence of fever; he flushed and muttered: "Freedom ... spirit."

"You're not as wholesome as you appeared," the woman judged. "You can't have nothing beside a gla.s.s of milk." She crossed the room and, stirring the fire, put on fresh coal that ignited with an oily crackle. Again at the door she paused. "Don't you try to move about," she directed; "you stay right in this room. Mr. Roselle, he's downstairs, and Mr. McCall, and--" her voice took on a faint insistent note of warning. He paid little heed to her; he was lost in a wave of weariness.

The following morning, stronger, he rose and tentatively trying the door found it locked. The colored woman appeared soon after with a tray which, when he had performed a meager toilet, he attacked with a pleasant zest.

"The city's just burning right up," she informed him, standing in the middle of the floor; "the boats on the river caught fire and their camions banged into Ca.n.a.l Street." She had a pale even color, a straight delicate nose and sensitive lips.

"Are the Union troops in charge?" he asked.

"Yes, sir. They got some of the fire out, I heard tell. But that's not the worst now--a body can't set her foot in the street, it's so full of drunken roaring trash, black and white. It's good Mr. Roselle and Mr.

McCall and Mr. John are here," she declared again; "they could just finish off anybody that offered to turn a bad hand."

This, Elim felt, was incongruous with his reception yesterday.