V.
The home-life of Mr. Grady was peculiarly happy. He was blessed, in the first place, with a good mother, and he never grew away from her influence in the smallest particular. When his father was killed in the war, his mother devoted herself the more assiduously to the training of her children. She molded the mind and character of her brilliant son, and started him forth on a career that has no parallel in our history. To that mother his heart always turned most tenderly. She had made his boyhood bright and happy, and he was never tired of bringing up recollections of those wonderful days. On one occasion, the Christmas before he died, he visited his mother at the old home in Athens. He returned brimming over with happiness. To his associates in the Constitution office he told the story of his visit, and what he said has been recorded by Mrs. Maude Andrews Ohl, a member of the editorial staff.
“Well do I remember,” says Mrs. Ohl, “how he spent his last year’s holiday season, and the little story he told me of it as I sat in his office one morning after New Year’s.
“He had visited his mother in Athens Christmas week, and he said: ‘I don’t think I ever felt happier than when I reached the little home of my boyhood. I got there at night. She had saved supper for me and she had remembered all the things I liked. She toasted me some cheese over the fire. Why, I hadn’t tasted anything like it since I put off my round jackets. And then she had some home-made candy, she knew I used to love and bless her heart! I just felt sixteen again as we sat and talked, and she told me how she prayed for me and thought of me always, and what a brightness I had been to her life, and how she heard me coming home in every boy that whistled along the street. When I went to bed she came and tucked the covers all around me in the dear old way that none but a mother’s hands know, and I felt so happy and so peaceful and so full of tender love and tender memories that I cried happy, grateful tears until I went to sleep.’
“When he finished his eyes were full of tears and so were mine. He brushed his hands across his brow swiftly and said, laughingly: ‘Why, what are you crying about? What do you know about all this sort of feeling!’
“He never seemed brighter than on that day. He had received an ovation of loving admiration from the friends of his boyhood at his old home, and these honors from the hearts that loved him as a friend were dearer than all others. It was for these friends, these countrymen of his own, that his honors were won and his life was sacrificed.”
From the home-life of his boyhood he stepped into the fuller and richer home-life that followed his marriage. He married the sweetheart of his early youth, Miss Julia King, of Athens, and she remained his sweetheart to the last. The first pseudonym that he used in his contributions to the Constitution, “King Hans,” was a fanciful union of Miss King’s name with his, and during his service in Florida, long after he was married, he signed his telegrams “Jule.” In the office not a day passed that he did not have something to say of his wife and children. They were never out of his thoughts, no matter what business occupied his mind. In his speeches there are constant allusions to his son, and in his conversation the gentle-eyed maiden, his daughter, was always tenderly figuring. His home-life was in all respects an ideal one; ideal in its surroundings, in its influences, and in its purposes. I think that the very fact of his own happiness gave him a certain restlessness in behalf of the happiness of others. His writings, his speeches, his lectures—his whole life, in fact—teem with references to home-happiness and home-content. Over and over again he recurs to these things—always with the same earnestness, always with the same enthusiasm. He never meets a man on the street, but he wonders if he has a happy home—if he is contented—if he has children that he loves. To him home was a shrine to be worshiped at—a temple to be happy in, no matter how humble, or how near to the brink of poverty.
One of his most successful lectures, and the one that he thought the most of, was entitled “A Patchwork Palace: The story of a Home.” The Patchwork Palace still exists in Atlanta, and the man who built it is living in it to-day. Mr. Grady never wrote out the lecture, and all that can be found of it is a few rough and faded notes scratched on little sheets of paper. On one occasion, however, he condensed the opening of his lecture for the purpose of making a newspaper sketch of the whole. It is unfinished, but the following has something of the flavor of the lecture. He called the builder of the Palace Mr. Mortimer Pitts, though that is not his name:
Mr. Mortimer Pitts was a rag-picker. After a patient study of the responsibility that the statement carries, I do not hesitate to say that he was the poorest man that ever existed. He lived literally from hand to mouth. His breakfast was a crust; his dinner a question; his supper a regret. His earthly wealth, beyond the rags that covered him, was—a cow that I believe gave both butter-milk and sweet-milk—a dog that gave neither—and a hand-cart in which he wheeled his wares about. His wife had a wash-tub that she held in her own title, a wash-board similarly possessed, and two chairs that came to her as a dowry.
In opposition to this poverty, my poor hero had—first, a name (Mortimer Pitts, Esq.) which his parents, whose noses were in the air when they christened him, had saddled upon him aspiringly, but which followed him through life, his condition being put in contrast with its rich syllables, as a sort of standing sarcasm. Second, a multitude of tow-headed children with shallow-blue eyes. The rag-picker never looked above the tow-heads of his brats, nor beyond the faded blue eyes of his wife. His world was very small. The cricket that chirped beneath the hearthstone of the hovel in which he might chance to live, and the sunshine that crept through the cracks, filled it with music and light. Trouble only strengthened the bonds of love and sympathy that held the little brood together, and whenever the Wolf showed his gaunt form at the door, the white faces, and the blue eyes, and the tow-heads only huddled the closer to each other, until, in very shame, the intruder would take himself off.
Mr. Pitts had no home. With the restlessness of an Arab he flitted from one part of the city to another. He was famous for frightening the early market-maids by pushing his white round face, usually set in a circle of smaller white round faces, through the windows of long-deserted hovels. Wherever there was a miserable shell of a house that whistled when the wind blew, and wept when the rain fell, there you might be sure of finding Mr. Pitts at one time or another. I do not care to state how many times my hero, with an uncertain step and a pitifully wandering look—his fertile wife, in remote or imminent process of fruitage—his wan and sedate brood of young ones—his cow, a thoroughly conscientious creature, who passed her scanty diet to milk to the woeful neglect of tissue—and his dog, too honest for any foolish pride, ambling along in an unpretending, bench-legged sort of way,—I do not care to state, I say, how many times this pale and melancholy procession passed through the streets, seeking for a shelter in which it might hide its wretchedness and ward off the storms.
During these periods of transition, Mr. Pitts was wonderfully low-spirited. “Even a bird has its nest; and the poorest animal has some sort of a hole in the ground, or a roost where it can go when it is a-weary,” he said to me once, when I caught him fluttering aimlessly out of a house which, under the influence of a storm, had spit out its western wall, and dropped its upper jaw dangerously near to the back of the cow. And from that time forth, I fancied I noticed my poor friend’s face growing whiter, and the blue in his eye deepening, and his lips becoming more tremulous and uncertain. The shuffling figure, begirt with the rag-picker’s bells, and dragging the wobbling cart, gradually bended forward, and the look of childish content was gone from his brow, and a great dark wrinkle had knotted itself there.
And now let me tell you about the starting of the Palace.
One day in the springtime, when the uprising sap ran through every fibre of the forest, and made the trees as drunk as lords—when the birds were full-throated, and the air was woven thick with their songs of love and praise—when the brooks kissed their uttermost banks, and the earth gave birth to flowers, and all nature was elastic and alert, and thrilled to the core with the ecstasy of the sun’s new courtship—a divine passion fell like a spark into Mr. Mortimer Pitts’s heart. How it ever broke through the hideous crust of poverty that cased the man about, I do not know, nor shall we ever know ought but that God put it there in his own gentle way. But there it was. It dropped into the cold, dead heart like a spark—and there it flared and trembled, and grew into a blaze, and swept through his soul, and fed upon its bitterness until the scales fell off and the eyes flashed and sparkled, and the old man was illumined with a splendid glow like that which hurries youth to its love, or a soldier to the charge. You would not have believed he was the same man. You would have laughed had you been told that the old fellow, sweltering in the dust, harnessed like a dog to a cart, and plying his pick into the garbage heaps like a man worn down to the stupidity of a machine, was burning and bursting with a great ambition—that a passion as pure and as strong as ever kindled blue blood, or steeled gentle nerves was tugging at his heart-strings. And yet, so it was. The rag-picker was filled with a consuming fire—and as he worked, and toiled, and starved, his soul sobbed, and laughed, and cursed, and prayed.
Mr. Pitts wanted a home. A man named Napoleon once wanted universal empire. Mr. Pitts was vastly the more daring dreamer of the two.
I do not think he had ever had a home. Possibly, away back beyond the years a dim, sweet memory of a hearthstone and a gable roof with the rain pattering on it, and a cupboard and a clock, and a deep, still well, came to him like an echo or a dream. Be this as it may, our hero, crushed into the very mud by poverty—upon knees and hands beneath his burden—fighting like a beast for his daily food—shut out inexorably from all suggestions of home—embittered by starvation—with his faculties chained down apparently to the dreary problem of to-day—nevertheless did lift his eyes into the gray future, and set his soul upon a home.
This is a mere fragment—a bare synopsis of the opening of what was one of the most eloquent and pathetic lectures ever delivered from the platform. It was a beautiful idyll of home—an appeal, a eulogy—a glimpse, as it were, of the passionate devotion with which he regarded his own home. Here is another fragment of the lecture that follows closely after the foregoing:
After a month’s struggle, Mr. Pitts purchased the ground on which his home was to be built. It was an indescribable hillside, bordering on the precipitous. A friend of mine remarked that “it was such an aggravating piece of profanity that the owner gave Mr. Pitts five dollars to accept the land and the deed to it.” This report I feel bound to correct. Mr. Pitts purchased the land. He gave three dollars for it. The deed having been properly recorded, Mr. Pitts went to work. He borrowed a shovel, and, perching himself against his hillside, began loosening the dirt in front of him, and spilling it out between his legs, reminding me, as I passed daily, of a giant dirt-dauber. At length (and not very long either, for his remorseless desire made his arms fly like a madman’s) he succeeded in scooping an apparently flat place out of the hillside and was ready to lay the foundation of his house.
There was a lapse of a month, and I thought that my hero’s soul had failed him—that the fire, with so little of hope to feed upon, had faded and left his heart full of ashes. But at last there was a pile of dirty second-hand lumber placed on the ground. I learned on inquiry that it was the remains of a small house of ignoble nature which had been left standing in a vacant lot, and which had been given him by the owner. Shortly afterwards there came some dry-goods boxes; then three or four old sills; then a window-frame; then the wreck of another little house; and then the planks of an abandoned show-bill board. Finally the house began to grow. The sills were put together by Mr. Pitts and his wife. A rafter shot up toward the sky and stood there, like a lone sentinel, for some days, and then another appeared, and then another, and then the fourth. Then Mr. Pitts, with an agility born of desperation, swarmed up one of them, and began to lay the cross-pieces. God must have commissioned an angel especially to watch over the poor man and save his bones, for nothing short of a miracle could have kept him from falling while engaged in the perilous work. The frame once up, he took the odds and ends of planks and began to fit them. The house grew like a mosaic. No two planks were alike in size, shape, or color. Here was a piece of a dry-goods box, with its rich yellow color, and a mercantile legend still painted on it, supplemented by a dozen pieces of plank; and there was an old door nailed up bodily and fringed around with bits of board picked up at random. It was a rare piece of patchwork, in which none of the pieces were related to or even acquainted with each other. A nose, an eye, an ear, a mouth, a chin picked up at random from the ugliest people of a neighborhood, and put together in a face, would not have been odder than was this house. The window was ornamented with panes of three different sizes, and some were left without any glass at all, as Mr. Pitts afterwards remarked, “to see through.” The chimney was a piece of old pipe that startled you by protruding unexpectedly through the wall, and looked as if it were a wound. The entire absence of smoke at the outer end of this chimney led to a suspicion, justified by the facts, that there was no stove at the other end. The roof, which Mrs. Pitts, with a recklessness beyond the annals, mounted herself and attended to, was partially shingled and partially planked, this diversity being in the nature of a plan, as Mr. Pitts confidentially remarked, “to try which style was the best.”
Such a pathetic travesty on house-building was never before seen. It started a smile or a tear from every passer-by, as it reared its homely head there, so patched, uncouth, and poor. And yet the sun of Austerlitz never brought so much happiness to the heart of Napoleon as came to Mr. Pitts, as he crept into this hovel, and, having a blanket before the doorless door, dropped on his knees and thanked God that at last he had found a home.
The house grew in a slow and tedious way. It ripened with the seasons. It budded in the restless and rosy spring; unfolded and developed in the long summer; took shape and fullness in the brown autumn; and stood ready for the snows and frost when winter had come. It represented a year of heroism, desperation, and high resolve. It was the sum total of an ambition that, planted in the breast of a king, would have shaken the world.
To say that Mr. Pitts enjoyed it would be to speak but a little of the truth. I have a suspicion that the older children do not appreciate it as they should. They have a way, when they see a stranger examining their home with curious and inquiring eyes, of dodging away from the door shamefacedly, and of reappearing cautiously at the window. But Mr. Pitts is proud of it. There is no foolishness about him. He sits on his front piazza, which, I regret to say, is simply a plank resting on two barrels, and smokes his pipe with the serenity of a king; and when a stroller eyes his queer little home curiously, he puts on the air that the Egyptian gentleman (now deceased) who built the pyramids might have worn while exhibiting that stupendous work. I have watched him hours at a time enjoying his house. I have seen him walk around it slowly, tapping it critically with his knife, as if to ascertain its state of ripeness, or pressing its corners solemnly as if testing its muscular development.
Here ends this fragment—a delicious bit of description that only seems to be exaggerated because the hovel was seen through the eyes of a poet—of a poet who loved all his fellow men from the greatest to the smallest, and who was as much interested in the home-making of Mr. Pitts as he was in the making of Governors and Senators, a business in which he afterwards became an adept. From the fragments of one of his lectures, the title of which I am unable to give, I have pieced together another story as characteristic of Mr. Grady as the Patchwork Palace. It is curious to see how the idea of home and of home-happiness runs through it all:
One of the happiest men that I ever knew—one whose serenity was unassailable, whose cheerfulness was constant, and from whose heart a perennial spring of sympathy and love bubbled up—was a man against whom all the powers of misfortune were centered. He belonged to the tailors—those cross-legged candidates for consumption. He was miserably poor. Fly as fast as it could through the endless pieces of broadcloth, his hand could not always win crusts for his children. But he walked on and on; his thin white fingers faltered bravely through their tasks as the hours slipped away, and his serene white face bended forward over the tedious cloth into which, stitch after stitch, he was working his life—and, with once in a while a wistful look at the gleaming sunshine and the floating clouds, he breathed heavily and painfully of the poisoned air of his work-room, from which a score of stronger lungs had sucked all the oxygen. And when, at night, he would go home, and find that there were just crusts enough for the little ones to eat, the capricious old fellow would dream that he was not hungry; and when pressed to eat of the scanty store by his sad and patient wife, would with an air of smartness pretend a sacred lie—that he had dined with a friend—and then, with a heart that swelled almost to bursting, turn away to hide his glistening eyes. Hungry? Of course he was, time and again. As weak as his body was, as faltering as was the little fountain that sent the life-blood from his heart—as meagre as were his necessities, I doubt if there was a time in all the long years when he was not hungry.
Did you ever think of how many people have died out of this world through starvation. Thousands! Not recorded in the books as having died of starvation,—ah, no? Sometimes it is a thin and watery sort of apoplexy—sometimes it is dyspepsia, and often consumption. These terms read better. But there are thousands of them, sensitive, shy gentlemen—too proud to beg and too honest to steal—too straightforward to scheme or maneuver—too refined to fill the public with their griefs—too heroic to whine—that lock their sorrows up in their own hearts, and go on starving in silence, weakening day after day from the lack of proper food—the blood running slower and slower through their veins—their pulse faltering as they pass through the various stages of inanition, until at last, worn out, apathetic, exhausted, they are struck by some casual illness, and lose their hold upon life as easily and as naturally as the autumn leaf, juiceless, withered and dry, parts from the bough to which it has clung, and floats down the vast silence of the forest.
But my tailor was cheerful. Nothing could disturb his serenity. His thin white face was always lit with a smile, and his eyes shone with a peace that passed my understanding. Hour after hour he would sing an asthmatic little song that came in wheezes from his starved lungs—a song that was pitiful and cracked, but that came from his heart so freighted with love and praise that it found the ears of Him who softens all distress and sweetens all harmonies. I wondered where all this happiness came from. How gushed this abundant stream from this broken reed—how sprung this luxuriant flower of peace from the scant soil of poverty? From these hard conditions, how came this ever-fresh felicity?
After he had been turned out of his home, the tailor was taken sick. His little song gave way to a hectic cough. His place at the work-room was vacant, and a scanty bed in wretched lodgings held his frail and fevered frame. The thin fingers clutched the cover uneasily, as if they were restless of being idle while the little ones were crying for bread. The tired man tossed to and fro, racked by pain,—but still his face was full of content, and no word of bitterness escaped him. And the little song, though the poor lungs could not carry it to the lips, and the trembling lips could not syllable its music, still lived in his heart and shone through his happy eyes. “I will be happy soon,” he said in a faltering way; “I will be better soon—strong enough to go to work like a man again, for Bessie and the babies.” And he did get better—better until his face had worn so thin that you could count his heart-beats by the flush of blood that came and died in his cheeks—better until his face had sharpened and his smiles had worn their deep lines about his mouth—better until the poor fingers lay helpless at his side, and his eyes had lost their brightness. And one day, as his wife sat by his side, and the sun streamed in the windows, and the air was full of the fragrance of spring—he turned his face toward her and said: “I am better now, my dear.” And, noting a rapturous smile playing about his mouth, and a strange light kindling in his eyes, she bended her head forward to lay her wifely kiss upon his face. Ah! a last kiss, good wife, for thy husband! Thy kiss caught his soul as it fluttered from his pale lips, and the flickering pulse had died in his patient wrist, and the little song had faded from his heart and gone to swell a divine chorus,—and at last, after years of waiting, the old man was well!
There was nothing strained or artificial in the sentiment that led him to dwell so constantly on the theme of home and home happiness. The extracts I have given are merely the rough lecture notes which he wrote down in order to confirm and congeal his ideas. On the platform, while following the current of these notes, he injected into them the quality of his rare and inimitable humor, the contrast serving to give greater strength and coherence to the pathos that underlay it all. I do not know that I have dwelt with sufficient emphasis on his humor. He could be witty enough on occasion, but the sting of it seemed to leave a bad taste in his mouth. The quality of his humor was not greatly different from that of Charles Lamb. It was gentle and perennial—a perpetual wonder and delight to his friends—irrepressible and unbounded—as antic and as tricksy as that of a boy, as genial and as sweet as the smile of a beautiful woman. Mr. Grady depended less on anecdote than any of our great talkers and speakers, though the anecdote, apt, pat, and pointed, was always ready at the proper moment. He depended rather on the originality of his own point of view—on the results of his own individuality. The charm of his personal presence was indescribable. In every crowd and on every occasion he was a marked man. Quite independently of his own intentions, he made his presence and his influence felt. What he said, no matter how light and frivolous, no matter how trivial, never failed to attract attention. He warmed the hearts of the old and fired the minds of the young. He managed, in some way, to impart something of the charm of his personality to his written words, so that he carried light, and hope, and courage to many hearts, and when he passed away, people who had never seen him fell to weeping when they heard of his untimely death.