Near here, we discovered, there was an old soldiers' home—a state home—and this being Saturday afternoon, the streets were full of them. They looked to be a crotchety, cantankerous crew. Later on we saw many of them in the road leading out to their institution—drunk. In order to strike up a conversation with some of the old soldiers, we asked three of them sitting on a bench about a drunken woman who was pirouetting before them in a frowzy, grimy gaiety.
“That,” said one, a little, thin-shouldered, clawy type of man with a high, cracked voice, a clownish expression, and a laugh as artificial and mechanical as any laugh could be, a sort of standard, everyday habit laugh, “Oh, that’s the Pete and Duck.” (I give it as it sounded.)
“The Pete and Duck!” I exclaimed.
“Yes, sir, the Pete and Duck”—and then came the high, cackling, staccato laugh. “That’s what they call her round here, the Pete and Duck. I dunno howsoever they come to call her that, but that’s what they call her, the Pete and Duck, and a drunken old —— she is, too,—just an old drunken girl”—and then he went off into a gale of pointless laughter, slapping his knees and opening his mouth very wide.
"That’s all I’ve ever hearn her called. Ain’t that so, Eddie—he, he! ho, ho! ha, ha! Yes—that’s what they allus call ’er—the Pete and Duck. She’s nothin’ but just a poor old drunken fool like many another in this here toon o' Bath—he, he! ho, ho! ha, ha!
“But then she ain’t the only funny thing in Bath neither. There’s a buildin' they’re puttin' up over there,” he continued, “that has front and back but no sides—the only buildin' in the toon o' Bath that ain’t got no sides but just front and back. He, he! ha, ha! ho, ho!”
We looked in the direction of this building, but it was nothing more than an ordinary store building, being erected between two others by the party wall process. It was a bank, apparently, and the front was being put together out of white marble.
“Yes, sir, the only buildin' in the toon o' Bath that ain’t got no sides, but just front and back,” and he lapsed again into his vacant, idle laughter. Evidently he had been given over to the task of making sport, or trying to, out of the merest trifles for so many years that he had lost all sense of proportion and value. The least thing, where there was so little to be gay over, took on exaggerated lines of the comic. He was full of unconscious[unconscious] burlesque. Suddenly he added with a touch of seriousness, “and they say that the front is goin' to cost seventeen thousand dollars. Jee-hosaphat!” He hung onto the “Jee” with breathless persistence. It was really evident in this case that seventeen thousand dollars represented an immense sum to his mind.
It was pathetic to see him sitting there in his faded, almost ragged clothes, and all these other old lonely soldiers about. I began to feel the undertow of this clanking farce called life. What a boneyard old age seems, anyhow!
There was another old soldier, tall, heavy, oleaginous, with some kind of hip trouble, who explained that he lived in Brooklyn up to the year previous, and had been with Grant before Richmond and in the battle in the Wilderness. These endless, ancient tales seemed a little pale just now beside the heavy storms of battle raging in Europe. And I could not help thinking how utterly indifferent life is to the individual. How trivial, and useless and pointless we become in age! What’s the good of all the clatter and pathos and fuss about war to these ancients? How does patriotism and newspaper bluster and the fighting of other men’s battles avail them, now they are old? Here they were, stranded, wrecked, forgotten. Who cares, really, what becomes of them? Fifty years ago they were fawned upon for the moment as the saviors of their country. And now they hobble about such squares as this, condemned by the smug gentry of small towns, despised for indulging in the one salve to disillusioned minds and meditating on things that are no more. I wanted to leave, and we soon did leave, anxious to feel the soothing waves of change.