Into the invaded city he had rushed at the head of his men and, when the city was being sacked, he demanded riches for his men but took none for himself. For his own portion of the loot he had taken the virginal daughter of the leader of the Federal forces and it was this woman he was now dragging in at the door of our hut.
She was very beautiful and perhaps, had I been older, I should not have blamed father, but at that time the love of right was very strong in me.
When father saw that I had already been born he staggered back for a step and leaned against the wall of the cabin, still however clinging to the hand of his new-found woman. “I had hoped to arrive before or at the very hour of birth, I had counted on that,” he muttered, cursing under his breath.
For a moment he stood looking at mother and myself and both of us looked calmly at him.
“Birth—the birth hour—is the test of womanhood,” he said, taking hold of the shoulder of his new woman and shaking her violently, as though to fix her attention. “I wanted you to see how the women of my own race meet bravely all such trying situations; for, as you must know, by the customs of my country, the woman who marries an American becomes instantly an American, with all the American virtues. It is our climate, I dare say, and it happens to people very quickly.
“At any rate there it is. The woman you see before you I really love, but she has become Anglo-Saxon, through having married me, and is therefore above me, as far above me as the stars.
“I cannot live with her. She is too good, too brave,” said my fanciful father, staggering through the door and dragging his woman after him. Outside the door I heard him still talking loudly to his new woman as they went away. “Our Anglo-Saxon women are the most wonderful creatures in the world,” I heard him saying. “In a few years now they will run the world.”
* * * * *
It was growing dark in the hayloft in the barn in the state of Ohio. Did I, as I lay deeply buried in the warm hay, really imagine the absurd scene depicted above? Although I was very young I had already read many novels and stories.
In any event the whole silly affair has remained in my fancy for years. When I was a lad I played with such fanciful scenes as other boys play with brightly colored marbles. From the beginning there has been, as opposed to my actual life, these grotesque fancies. Later, to be sure, I did acquire more or less skill in bringing them more and more closely into the world of the actual. They were but the raw materials with which the story-writer must work as the worker in woods works with trees cut in a forest.