Then the company had marched off to the camp below the Tennessee border, where the new troops were drilling; and as they marched some watchers wept and others cheered—but the cheering predominated, for it was to be only a sort of picnic anyhow—so everybody agreed. As the orators—who mainly stayed behind—pointed out, the Northern people would not fight. And even if they should fight could not one Southerner whip four Yankees? Certainly he could; any fool knew that much. In a month or two months, or at most three months, they would all be tramping home again, covered with glory and the spoils of war, and then—this by common report and understanding—Miss Sally May Ghoulson and Abner Tilghman would be married, with a big church wedding.
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.