Captains and The Kings (25 page)

just a twinkling shadow in the distance. He did not even know the name of the town he had passed. He saw the bell on the wall near his bed, and he pulled it. In a moment or two one of the young Negroes entered, saying, "Sir?" "That town we just passed-what is its name?" The Negro looked beyond him through the window. "I don't know, sir. We never stop there. Perhaps just a junction." His voice did not possess the slow music of Mr. Montrose's voice, so Joseph knew he had never lived in the South. "I heard," the steward continued, "that there is an Army encampment there, for the wounded troops." "Would Mr. Montrose know?" The Negro's eyes looked baffled. "I don't think so, sir. We never stopped there. We were just put on another track so that troop train could use ours. Is there anything else?" "No." Joseph was angrily embarrassed, and he was enraged at this evidence of his new vulnerability. He tried to relax on his bed. He was an imbecile. The girl was nothing to him; he would never know her; he did not want to know her. His bare life was enough for him, austere and orderly. It needed no permanent woman, but only a transient one of no account and no meaning. But he could not suppress that mysterious throbbing and incandescent heat in him, the curious hot excitement, the yearning, the wild anxiety to hold and press, the desperate and insistent hunger. He had no absolute words for all this, no explanation. He had come under an enchantment, not a happy one, but terrible and driving. " He awoke in the grayish twilight preceding dawn. The train was not f moving, and Joseph had the feeling that it had not moved for some time. They were standing on a track near a depot, and he suddenly saw the sign: WINFIELD In that uncertain light the depot was almost deserted, though it was hung with bunting and with flags just stirring in the dawn's faint wind. I However, there were many wooden boxes and crates on the platform and §a few yawning men were unloading more from the freight cars. Their I voices came, muffled, to Joseph. The engine was spitting languidly, and X steam rolled up from the wheels. Beyond the depot Joseph could see the 4 dreary town and a few of its gritty streets. If Joseph thought, I have not seen my brother and my sister for years. Is it possible that I could see them now? He rang the bell and the steward came f in. "How long are we staying in this town?" Joseph asked him. "I reckon we're leaving soon, sir. We've been here nearly two hours. Delay on the tracks. Troop trains, I think." If I had woken only an hour ago I could have seen them, thought Joseph. Regina thinks of me, but she can't remember me, surely, as a brother and a person. I have grown dim to Sean, too. His self-control had been broken last night, disastrously, and now it was broken again, and he smiled with disgust at himself. But the empty longing and urgent hunger were mauling him and once more he felt horror and dread at being assaulted by something he thought had long been buried and subdued. He sat up and covered his window again with the draperies, and then by, rigid, fighting himself, shouting inwardly at himself, ridiculing himself, cursing himself. The train began to move; bells rang; steam shrilled; whistles blew. It was too late to see Sean and Regina. Thank God, thought Joseph. He fell asleep again when the train gained speed. When he awoke the spring sun was glinting through the draperies. He was wet with sweat, and trembling with weakness. But he clenched his teeth and went to the bathroom to wash and dress. He could not look at himself even with indifference. He averted his eyes. Mr. Montrose was waiting for him in the dining room. The older man was surprised at the appearance of the younger, for Joseph's usually gaunt and pallid face was streaked, as if bruised or chapped, with a harsh crimson, narrow and sharply defined, on the hard cheekbones. He looks, thought Mr. Montrose, as if he had slept with a woman in the night, and Mr. Montrose was amused. He was even more amused when he saw that Joseph's fingers were faintly tremulous and his look uncertain, as if he were embarrassed or had been humiliated or had indulged himself in an unspeakable manner. "Long travel is wearisome," said Mr. Montrose. "Did you sleep well?" "Very well." "These war-time delays are very tedious," said Mr. Montrose. "There was another troop train a few hours ago. My steward brought me a newspaper. There are very bad riots in New York, against the draft. It is rumored that over eight men were killed on the streets last night by the police and the military. Do you think, then, that the rioters are in sympathy with the South, and so desire not to serve?" "I never thought about it," said Joseph. "Be sure they were not in sympathy," said Mr. Montrose, "or they would have rioted over two years ago, in protest. They are only afraid to fight, afraid of death. When others fought, and died, it was nothing to these protesters, but when the demand was made to them they went berserk. Now, they shout, it is an 'unjust' war. It is 'Lincoln's War.' They scream that he is a dictator, a man on horseback. They demand his impeachment. It is an un-Constitutional war, they proclaim with placards. What they truly mean is that they do not want to serve their country, that they have no love for their country, and wish only to be let alone to enjoy the fruits of others' deaths and sacrifices, and to bask in the security of a war prosperity and to make money and pursue their own interests." Joseph forgot his own turmoil and looked with the first focused curiosity at Mr. Montrose. He hesitated. Questions were not encouraged by Mr. Healey's men. But Joseph heard himself saying, "Pardon me, Mr. Montrose, but I was always under the impression that you were a Southerner, from your accent and your manners. If I am correct, do you have no sympathy for the Confederacy?" Mr. Montrose lifted his yellow brows. He carefully cut off the end of one of his cheroots, then lit it. He studied the end thoughtfully for a few moments. Then he smiled, his feline smile, as if Joseph were a trifle absurd but he had decided to indulge him. "Mr. Francis," he said, "I have no allegiances, and never had, either to God or man or country. It was not that I was an object of their famous ferocity, nor had I suffered because of them. I never wanted, was never robbed, never betrayed, never made to suffer. Therefore, I am not vengeful. Therefore, I am not defenseless. I chose my way of life calmly. I never permitted myself to owe any other man, nor have I permitted others to be in debt to me. I live only for my own life, and I enjoy it immensely and would have no other. Does that answer your question?" Joseph did not reply. He was considering and weighing every one of Mr. Montrose's words, and he was a little confused. He suddenly realized that he had believed that Mr. Healey's men were like himself, at war with the world for grim and disastrous reasons, reasons in some way similar to his own. Is it possible, he thought, that if I had had this man's hinted life I would be what I am, or someone entirely different? Are circumstances always our driver, our jailer, our motives, and are we molded from without or from within? Do we choose to become what we are-or are we forced into that becoming? Are we victims, or masters? He was again mortified in that he had not thought of this before, but had assumed that men were only victims of calamity and that their response to it was not their fault or of their choosing, and that if anyone was to be blamed it was "God" or arrogant and stronger men. Mr. Montrose, in his elegant way, was at war with a world which had never harmed him, had never tortured him or bereaved him, had never ridiculed him. He was superbly compact. He would never be ripped by upheavals, torn by circumstance. No one would ever be able to touch him. He did not know fear, and had never known it. If he struck back at the world it would not be out of rage and injustice, but out of self-interest and self-protection. And it would be done without vengefulness and without hatred or emotion. As if he had heard what Joseph was thinking Mr. Montrose said, "We all choose what we wish to be. No one impels or compels us. We may delude ourselves that it is so, but it is not. The same wind which blows a ship on the rocks could blow it into safe harbor. In short, it is not the wind, it is the set of the sail. A man who denies that is a weakling who wishes to blame others for his life." He smiled a little. "When I was a boy an old illiterate Negro said to me, "Young Master, remember this surely: The Recording Angel will not accept your excuse that others made you what you are, and that you are blameless.' I never forgot that, Mr. Francis." Joseph, with rough impulsiveness, said, "But there are those who were born in slavery, those who were born into misfortune-" Mr. Montrose shook his handsome head. "And there are those who refuse to be slaves in their hearts or their minds or their souls, whichever you wish to call it, and there are those who use misfortune to educate and elevate themselves. It is still your choice, Mr. Francis. If I believed in any Deity I would thank and bless Him for this liberty of choice, for otherwise we would be slaves indeed." "I did not choose-" said Joseph. Mr. Montrose arched his eyebrows again, coquettishly, at Joseph. "Did you not, sir? The sooner you ask yourself that question the sooner you will be safe from the world. A thousand choices are daily open to ever)' man, and we make our choices. No one, for instance, is compelling you to go on this mission, Mr. Francis. No force has been used on you; you are not helpless. If you desire, you can leave this train at the next stop and none there will be who will dispute you." "If others are dependent on you, Mr. Montrose-?" "There," said Mr. Montrose, "you descend into sentimentality. A truly strong man is never sentimental. He never considers others. He never fights for others. He considers and fights only for himself. All the rest is weakness."
Chapter 17
Something sick and nagging lingered in Joseph's mind, and would linger for the rest of his life. Remembering what Mr. Montrose had said to the end of his days, Joseph became more merciless without understanding the reason: That other men also make their choices, and should not accuse him, Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh. "No man corrupts another. He corrupts only himself, and therefore he should not plead for compassion." In one day Joseph became much older and much more relentless. They stopped briefly, near midnight, at Philadelphia, not leaving the coach, which was shifted to another train, and looking only at the vast grayness of the gaslighted station filled with moving troops and smoke and flags and banners and martial music and the uproar of voices and the howl of other leaving or entering trains. They waited, in semidarkness, the lamps of their coach wavering and flickering. They waited, in quiet luxury, not part of the turmoil outside, the crowds of weeping girls and women, the crowds of young men in blue uniforms. Mr. Montrose watched it all tranquilly, smoking and reading, apart and only vaguely interested. Joseph watched it without tranquillity and with another turmoil in himself. He thought, for the first time vividly, of the contraband munitions in the port of New York. He said to himself-though not without a dim inner protest: We are our own destiny. If we are victims at all, or conquerors, we have done it in our minds and our will, or with our faulty judgments or our illusions. If we permit others to exploit us, in private life or in government, we chose it. Or we made the fatal error of acquiescence, and for that we should be condemned. The world forgives everything but weakness and submission. It forgives everyone but a victim. For there is always battle, even if you die in it. In any event death came to all men. How you died was your own choice, fighting or submitting. Joseph thought of the woman he had seen in the coach opposite him, and he clenched down on the memory and refused to think of her, and thought he had banished her for all time, for she was irrelevant to him and there was no place for her in his life. It was not his fault or of his choosing that lie dreamt of her that night, beseeching, gentle, full of pity and sorrow, not only for those she tended but for him. They arrived in New York in the early morning. Joseph had watched the red morning light on the peaceful Hudson River and on the green Palisades with their white and gray mansions and great gardens overhung by enormous glistening trees. The river was full of steamboats and small sailing vessels and flatboats, their reflections gliding with them on the water, so still was it. It is a beautiful world, thought Joseph, with that mystic deep melancholy of his which had no name. He sat by his window and waited until he heard Mr. Montrose go into the dining room, and then he followed him. They had an early breakfast, for they would soon be arriving. "I do not like New York," said Mr. Montrose. "It has become a polyglot city, far worse than Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. As it is on an island one feels crowded, and so do the inhabitants, and crowds are always hysterical and womanish. They are happy, the New Yorkers, when there is an opportunity for uproar, and if that opportunity does not come often enough they will create it. You have never been there?" , Joseph said, "No," and thought of the harbor those years ago and the wet black wharfs and the multitude of rocking ships and rain and snow and despair. "As so many of them have come-brought in by cattleboat and steerage- from the oppressed and semi-enslaved countries of Europe, they carry with them both a hatred and a fawning towards all government, even American. They will occasionally riot, as they did in their old countries, but it is an instinctive rioting and not based on an awareness of where they really are now. The next day they will cringe before the most contemptible politician for his favors, remembering the headman of their village and his whip, or the ruler of their province, or their vicious mayor. They came to what they knew was a free country, but their impulses still govern them and they respond to their new freedom with the old cunning subservience, fear, suspicion, and truckling." "The Irish have been persecuted and beaten and killed, too," said Joseph, and the red stain was on his cheekbones again. "But though they do, still, band together in America, I have heard, they are not fawners nor trucklers nor arc they suspicious and cowering." "Ah, yes, you were born in Ireland, were you not?" said Mr. Montrose. "My grandfather came from there, from County Galway, I believe. He settled-" He stopped and frowned through the window. "Ah, I see we are arriving." He looked at Joseph. "Some men are born free even in ghettos, even, under persecution, even in slaverj'. I should think it is a matter of split." The station in New York at 26th Street and Fourth Avenue was even more tumultuous than the stations in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and far larger. The noise of bells, whistles, voices, and trundling carts and leaving and departing trains was overpowering. Joseph saw a vast welter of confusion, of running men, of lanterns, of gaslight, and the sides of coaches sliding past his window, rumbling and squealing. And, as usual these days, troops were climbing into standing trains, and hordes of young girls and women and older men, smiling, cheering, reaching up hands to windows, clasping young hands they might never touch again, trying to laugh, to joke, to send sons and husbands and lovers and brothers away with the lighthearted feeling that they were on an adventure but would soon be home. The women smiled widely under April bonnets of velvet and silk and lace, trimmed with curling plumes and bright flowers. They wore brilliant shawls over their shoulders or small velvet capelets or jackets, and their many-colored swinging hoops collided with each other and revealed pantalettes and little black slippers. Their gloved hands held up wrapped gifts to the young men teeming at the opened windows, and though the women smiled or flirted or cooed, their eyes were filled with tears. Beside them stood fathers and husbands in tall silk hats, and in respectable city clothing of black broadcloth or fine brown wool, with watch chains decorously spread over decorous brocaded waistcoasts of black or brown or gray. Their bearded faces were fixed in determined smiles, like the smiles on the faces of corpses, and they blew their noses as they tilted their heads to the youthful ones above them and spoke in slow, full and reassuring voices as if they were only bidding goodbye to sons on the way to visit beloved relatives or to enter a university. They swung ebony or Malacca canes with gold or silver handles, and sometimes slapped their calves with them, or held them out quickly to guard a lady against a new surge of people hurrying along the platforms. The station platforms were heaped with wooden boxes and cartons and luggage, and men in crude workmen's clothing sweated them onto flat wagons and struggled with larger pieces. Steam gushed from the wheels of trains, screaming thinly. Smoke from stacks billowed in black gushes through the station. Somewhere a bugle sounded, then a rattle of drums, and somewhere a whole group of people laughed, or there was a sharp uncontrollable cry, or a called message. Everywhere hung the red, blue, and white bunting, and the limp lengths of flags, sluggishly stirring in the wind created by movement of trains and people. Now, through far distant doors the morning brightened and with it entered unseasonable heat on an almost visible wave of soot-speckled air. And always the hurrying groups, entering or leaving, the thrusting heads, the portmanteaus, the wicker suitcases, the scurrying carts filled with anonymous objects, the shouting of porters, and the sudden splitting howl of a train on the move. As detached as inhabitants of another earth Joseph and Mr. Montrose left the train to be met at once by a uniformed coachman who touched his hat and took their luggage. His face was heavily pocked and swollen by old smallpox. Mr. Montrose seemed to have expected him. He led them outside on Fourth Avenue to a hot and pounding and blazing welter of sun, blasts of heat from brick walks and cobbled streets, multitudes of glittering carriages, vans, wagons, hacks, cabs, victorias, drays, buggies, and surreys, and endless surging crowds of people who appeared to trot and half-run rather than walk. The side streets, filled with tall chocolate- colored attached houses, three stories tall, were hardly less quiet, and every flight of brown steps was vivacious with ladies in fashionable clothing and children and bustling men, and the curbs were littered with vehicles. The roar of wagons and the voices of people and the rattle of wheels on cobblestones made a heated confusion in the air. Though every street was lined with newly blooming trees and though little lawns were greening before the brownstone houses and on Fourth Avenue, the swirling air was choked with yellow dust and a pervading stench of sewers and manure and simmering stone. Horses clopped or trotted, hoofs striking fire on brick and cobbles, and drivers yelled from vans and wagons and drays and whips cracked. Joseph had seen other cities but not such an intense and blinding and noisy and driven city as this..* Everywhere hung flags and banners and again there was a burst of martial music from a little distance. A fine closed carriage awaited the two men from Titusville. The coachman disposed of their luggage and they climbed into the carriage. The windows were dusty even this early in the day and the fastidious Mr. Montrose rolled them up. "Better to suffocate in quiet and clean air than to be smothered to death," he said. Joseph was already sweating but Mr. Montrose was as serene ai\d cool and scented as a white gardenia in some hidden and shadowed garden. Heat, apparently, was familiar to him. The coachman fought his way to Fifth Avenue with lashings of a whip and the strong menace of his two huge black horses. Mr. Montrose lit a cheroot and leaned back on crimson leather cushions. The harness of the horses was so polished and so brilliant in the sun that it shot back lances of light into the carriage and Joseph's eyes smarted. Then they turned into Fifth Avenue, "as famous, in its way, as the Strand in London," said Mr. Montrose. Though the windows were closed Joseph could hear the unresting bellow of the city and its traffic. Then he could see up the length of Fifth Avenue, cobblestoned and with endless marches of trees and small lawns enclosed in bronze railings, and the ranks of elegant white and graystone mansions with scintillating polished windows and grilled doors and whitened steps and the pouring traffic between curbs and the flagged walks filled with seething crowds. Above them all leapt the many steeples of many churches, the tallest structures in the city, their crosses and their pointed towers catching the almost tropic sun and intruding into the white-hot sky. So tall were they that the buildings about them were diminished. "The street of the new millionaires, the glorious entrepreneurs, the gilded and revered thieves, the true rulers of America, the commanders of governors and Presidents and government," said Mr. Montrose. "The Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Goulds-the new aristocracy of wealth, the new patricians from old gutters. In Europe, because of their enterprises, they would be hanged, but in America they are adored. Look at the opulence of their mansions, fit for princes, filled with servants of far better ancestry-honest, at least. Yet, when they visit the capitals of their forebears in Europe they are received by kings and emperors. Has this war sobered their greed, quieted their avidity, darkened their vast and gold rooms and polished floors? Not in the least. It is only an occasion for importance and profit and excitement. Their sons buy substitutes for the battlefield, though I admit their ladies are engaged in lively bazaars and dances and theatricals to make money for those they call 'our boys.'" Mr. Montrose spoke without bitterness and even mirthfully. "I heard," said Joseph, "that the cities are filled with gloom and shortages of food and clothing." "Not in New York, Mr. Francis. At least, not on these streets. There are possibly regions of the slums here and the dwellings of the poor and the perpetually indigent, who find it almost impossible to buy bread or meat or vegetables even with the little they earn. The clergy insist it is no crime to be poor but no one believes that. Wars do not devastate the fortunate. Devastation is for those who have no money, either in the cities or in battle." He puffed contentedly, and his excellent profile, so delicately drawn and attenuated, showed no rancor. "It was always so," he said, and thought: Luane. Luane. The respectful and watching police were everywhere with their long blue coats, belts, helmets, and mustaches, carrying their clubs openly, for none knew when, even here, the draft riots might break out and ragged rascals attack these great houses. Joseph could see their wet and heat- reddened faces and recognized them as Irish, a well-fed if not respected Irish. In Ireland they fought arrogance and power. In America, they guarded it. Am I to quarrel with them? thought Joseph. Do I not wish that I lived behind those bronze carved doors and those silk-hung windows? As Joseph had made no remark Mr. Montrose glanced sideways and he thought, I have a sapling his age. Did my father sell him-and Luane? Or did my mother-incredible!-for once open her foolish mouth and defy my father? Where are they now, my son, and my Luane, my darling? He smiled as if his thoughts were peaceful and not grinding. When they arrived at the ostentatious pile of the Fifth Avenue Hotel at 2jrd Street, Mr. Montrose left the carriage with the agility of a youth and Joseph followed, bending his angular body from his lean waist. Grandeur had a fascination for him, even the grandeur made by men. He looked up at the whitish grayness of the building, and at the steps swarming with yellow-coated servants busy with the unloading of many carriages drawing up and with the assisting of gentlemen and ladies to alight. The ladies laughed and fanned themselves with dainty little fans or perfumed kerchiefs, and the gentlemen also laughed and pushed their silk hats back on their wet ridged foreheads. The high twitterings and dainty laughter were totally alien to Joseph and though he hated himself he felt like a ploughboy among these elegants, these insouciant young men with canes and jewelry, these assured creatures who had never known want or despair. The women's bright faces were even brighter than their silks and their satins and their fluttering colorful mantles. Among them were