Her hand flew to her breast with the old gesture. As the automobile leaped forward, she walked a few steps toward the inn. I turned and watched her: Alexis stared straight in front of him. She wheeled and looked after us, her hand still at her breast, her body swaying from side to side. Then she looked at the inn, and again at the fleeing car. Finally, as we dashed away from the square, I saw her stumbling toward the wretched old man, who still stood in the blazing sunlight which streamed through the open doorway, while the swallows of Diest circled and cried over his hoary head.
XI
PENSIONERS
Wilson belonged emphatically to the genus Homo sapiens; species, Texicana; habitat, southwestern parts of the United States and Antwerp, Belgium. He was tall and lithe and handsome, and also sentimental. He was the only member of the American Commission for Relief in Belgium who flatly refused to fly the American flag from his automobile; he was the only member who publicly declared that he said his prayers every night, but, as he confided to me once in a moment of great emotion, he had never in his life prayed for the President of the United States. The reason for these startling facts was that Wilson was an unreconstructed rebel and wore pinned in his shirt, just over his heart, a little butternut badge which his grandfather had worn in ’63—a symbol of the dead Confederacy and the Lost Cause.
We used to sing him a gay song which ran:
An unreconstructed rebel, that is what I am.
For this fair land of freedom I do not give a damn!
I’m glad we fought against them: I’m sorry that they won,
And I do not ask your pardon for anything I’ve done.
I fit with Stonewall Jackson: of that there is no doubt;
Got wounded in three places a-storming Fort Lookout.
I coched the rheumatism campaigning in the snow,
But I killed a sight o’ Yankees, and I wisht it had been mo’.
I hates the Yankee nation and everything they do.
I hates the Declaration of Independence, too.
I hates the Yankee eagle with all his scream and fuss,
But a lying, thieving Yankee, I hates him wuss and wuss!
We called him “Johnny Reb,” “Tex,” or “Stonewall Jackson,” just as it happened to strike us.