The Proud and the Free (30 page)

Look at the day, Jamie, with the sun shining like in summertime. Will you walk with me a little?

If you wish, and if you are not ashamed to walk down the street alongside of Jamie Stuart.

What a thing to say! Now I am not ashamed but proud.

And after we had walked a little way, she said to me, Why should I be ashamed, Jamie Stuart?

Because I am not like the others in this place.

Maybe you are more like them than you think, Jamie Stuart.

No, less like them than you would think, Molly.

We passed out of the village and along the road, walking slowly, side by side, and saying nothing until we had gone quite a way. And then it was Molly Bracken who asked what gnawed inside of me, the way I was.

What way?

Like a stranger, Jamie Stuart, like I had never known you before and there was nothing at all between us of any worth or meaning or reason for remembering. Sometimes, you frighten me.

As I frighten other people, Molly?

Yes …

Tell me why, I said, as gently as I could, for now I realized clearly enough that it was not the difference in herself but in me; and here was a beautiful and womanly person who wanted myself who was nothing and less than nothing, an orphan and a penniless soldier out of the Line; and the bitter sorrow of it was that he did not want her.

I can only tell you part of it, she answered, but you never made to kiss me or to touch me or even to look at me full in the eyes. When you came home that evening, and my father came down and put a kettle onto the fire, and I said to him
Why?
and he told me that Jamie Stuart was upstairs and would wash off the dirt of marching and fighting before he would come before me – and when I heard that, I thought I would faint from gladness, and there was a song in my bosom that said over and over and over again,
Jamie Stuart is back – he is back to stay, and he will never go away again.
See how shameless I am to tell you all of this —

Not shameless at all, Molly Bracken, but tell it to me only if you desire to.

Why am I telling it to you then, and you ask me how are you strange? The winter is gone, Jamie Stuart, but the cold clings to you – do you know that?

I didn't know that, I said unhappily, and if it is true, then God help me.

How can He help you when you don't believe in Him, Jamie Stuart?

You hold that against me?

Oh, I don't hold that against you, Jamie Stuart, but you hold it against yourself, and you have no belief in the people here or in the war or in me either – but only a terrible hatred that makes me afraid when I look at you. What do you hate so?

Many things, I answered her, many things, walking step by step and so slowly, my eyes on the road, kicking stones out of the soft mud as I went along – and wondering what I could tell her, but wanting underneath not to tell her anything, for what was the use of cataloguing hatred when nothing I hated could withstand the scrutiny of my thoughts? It was less the gentry and the village and the pinch-souled cobbler, and the narrow self-concern of these people here and the hypocrisy of their lives, and the limit of their vision and the complacent relationship they had in each of their churches to their God, than the fact that I knew of nothing better than their way. When my comrades and myself took into our own hands the strength of the army, we marched into nowhere; and that was the way my hatred went – into nowhere.

So I said many things, but I could not tell her what the singular of it was. I hated in its wholeness a life that twisted the souls of men, but I knew of no living that did not; and thereby it had come about that I was a stranger wherever I went; but that I could not tell her, and I could not tell her that the only men who were my kind were those men who had marched with me in the brigades – and less could I tell her that I felt a closer bond and a purer sympathy to those poor damned women who had cast in their lot with us, whores though they were by any of her standards, than I did to herself, so young and fine and lovely. None of that could I tell her, but only that I hated many things.

Then God help you, Jamie Stuart, if you do not even know what you hate.

I have never known Him to help me or any other man.

Because you close your heart to Him.

About that I don't know, I said sadly. It may be.

Then we turned around to walk back, and walked on for a time in silence. We were almost back at the village, when she took my hand and held it tightly for a moment.

Jamie Stuart —

Yes?

Jamie Stuart, were you thinking of going away?

I was thinking of that, I answered.

Will you tarry a little while?

If you want me to, I will, I said, but I was afraid it would only make it painful for you and for me both. In some ways now, I am only half a man – and I am no good for myself or for you.

For me, Jamie Stuart, you are good.

But even though I answered her that way, the thought of going never left my mind. As Danny Connell had said, a bird pecked in me, and I tired of the work at the mill, the sameness of it, the boys off the farms who worked alongside of me, with their talk of this girl or that one and never a thought of anything else in their heads – and no curiosity either about the boundless world that stretched away in every direction and only contempt for me who was the child of bondslaves and was five years a soldier with never a penny of hard money to show for it. But when I began to think that they were truly like animals, I would remember that I had been very like them before I went away; but I never ceased to wonder that, at one and the same time, a great war could be going on in the same land where these people lived from day to day, with never a thought of the war in their heads or a care for it either.

Sometimes, I went into Jacob Bracken's study and looked at his books; but there were few among them that could interest me. Most of them were heavy and dry theological tomes, written by serious and outstanding Protestant authorities, and there were various editions of the Bible and commentaries upon them. There was all of Shakespeare, but little enough of it could I understand. And in a book of seven poets, such men as Wilmot and Prior and Pope, I found once these few lines by William Collins, which I said to myself until they lodged in my memory and remain there still:

How sleep the brave, who sink to rest
By all their country's wishes bless'd!
When Spring with dewy fingers cold
Returns to deck their hallowed mould,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than Fancy's feet have ever trod.

It made me dream of what a fine, rich thing it would be to write some poetry of a sort about our own Pennsylvania men and what we had done, but not like this, but rather proud and angry; and this thought, I knew, struck only a cord of lament for my own bereftness. But once, I recall, I was looking through a book of sermons that had been published in Philadelphia, for the use and convenience of men of the cloth, as it said; and therein, written by a Yankee called Jonathan Mayhew, I found something that beat on my mind like a brief flash of light, so that my groping almost found something to hew onto out of these words:

Tyranny brings ignorance and brutality along with it. It degrades men from their just rank into the class of brutes. It damps their spirits. It suppresses arts. It extinguishes every spark of noble ardor and generosity in the breasts of those who are enslaved by it. It makes naturally strong and great minds feeble and little; and triumphs over the ruins of virtue and humanity. This is true of tyranny in every shape. There can be nothing great or good where its influence reaches.…

This above, I read with great excitement, like the key to a door that might open and admit me; and my excitement was such that later I interrupted Jacob Bracken in his work and begged him to listen while I read it aloud.

Yes, he said, that is part of a preachment of Mayhew, and I know it well. It is from a sermon he preached some twenty or thirty years ago. I should have liked to hear him preach. He is said to have been a man with a rich color of speech, but there is nothing new or particularly original in what he says, Jamie.

But there is, I protested. Tyranny
in every shape,
he says. Not one tyranny, not another or this one or that one, but in every shape. Then it means to destroy all tyranny – not only the tyranny of Britain and George III –

It is not to be taken literally, Jamie, he said patiently, for Mayhew himself distinguishes between what is a just and what an unjust tyranny.

How can there be a just tyranny? I demanded. If all men are created free and equal …

Created, Jamie; yes, indeed, created, Pastor Bracken said, his long, sober face expressing a mixture of concern and annoyance, but after the creation there is a natural order of things. One must be master and one must be servant. One must be rich and one must be poor. This is not matter of equality but of the order of life, which is another thing entirely, and man was conceived in sin not in perfection, and it is idle to dream that it could have been any other way or ever will be different. Here are you who have learned to read and to write, and as an educated man, Jamie, you can have a future in something better than running sticks through a watermill. And if you should find grace, Jamie, the ministry is open to you, and I will do all in my power to help you – and indeed I know of no better calling for a man who believes in justice and right. On the other hand, when this unhappy war is over, this will be a country of boundless opportunity, and many a lad like yourself has started in a Philadelphia countinghouse with no more than the coat on his back and found himself a rich and respected merchant. Such men as these are a mighty bulwark in our struggle against the corrupt and insidious Church of England and the decadent and monstrous King who keeps it in power. And sooner or later —

Who taught me to read? I interrupted.

I know what you will say, Jamie, but I assure you, Jamie Stuart, that if I had not taught you, another would have, for the desire to learn and know was within you, and this desire to learn and know will never be within all men. Some are wastrels and others are thoughtless, dull people, and that is why even in so just a war as this one, we are forced to open the prisons and poorhouses to find men to serve —so that we come to understand that in the highest cause, the lowest of men will find a place, not because they love liberty more, but because they are fitted to take orders and thereby fitted into the eternal scheme of things. This is a wisdom beyond our understanding, my boy, but we must accept it. And when we accept it, we find that it is the best of ways.

I see, I said.

I hope, Jamie, that you do not think I meant any reflection upon your comrades in the foreign brigades.

What difference does it make, I said slowly and strangely, since I have left them and gone away, but they are dull and thoughtless and see nothing else but to go on serving without pay and without reward? What difference does it make?

I hope, Jamie, said Pastor Bracken, that you will come to think differently about many of these things …

I came to think less, perhaps; and I did my work, and the days passed; and April came, with the sweet singing and budding springtime of the Pennsylvania hills. Then I would have been far less than human to remain in the same house as Molly Bracken and remain this cold, aloof and self-sufficient thing that I prided myself on having become; for there was a certain bitter perversity in what I did, as if I took some pleasure in my separation from all the natural things of life. And one evening, when her father sat in his study, writing, I entered the kitchen as Molly Bracken was coming out and went head on into her, and then we were in each other's arms and I was covering her face with kisses, while she said:

Jamie, Jamie – how long and how much you hate me!

I love you the way I've never loved anyone.

And she pulled away and smoothed her hair and said, How you've showed me your love, Jamie Stuart!

I could not.

And what now, Jamie Stuart? What is different? Is it the springtime that scents a bitch?

God damn you! I cried. God damn you to hell!

Why, Jamie? she demanded, standing cool and aloof and apparently undisturbed now. Because a parson's daughter talks that way? Do you talk to me like I was a whore because you want a whore?

Shut your mouth! I cried.

No, that I will not do, Jamie Stuart. For long enough I held my peace, while you lived here, hating us and eating our food and taking our shelter –

Because you kept me here! And I offered to pay, but you would not take my pay, so that I would be beholden to you!

And you would not be beholden to anyone, Jamie Stuart? Twenty-two years old you are, and the heart inside of you is like a flint rock that nothing can scrape, and what I said before is true, that wherever you go, the winter cold goes with you! But here I waited five years, dreaming of my fine lad that had gone off to the wars, because whatever you were – and even that first time when I saw you sitting on the cobbler's bench, your hammer in your hand and your mouth full of tacks – there was a purity and a goodness in you. But there's no purity and goodness in you now, Jamie Stuart, and the man I waited for died somewhere.

Then I'll go! I cried. By God, I'll go!

Go on, Jamie Stuart, and see if I keep you here. Go on out and see if you can find the heart and soul of Jamie Stuart wherever you have left it! You should not have come home for somewhere you betrayed yourself and destroyed yourself!

And wasn't five years enough?

She was weeping now as she said, More than enough, more than enough, God help me, if you could have kept your own soul. But this way, Jamie Stuart, you should have stayed where the rest of you is.

I left her, stormed out and paid no heed to her calling after me, and went straightaway down the street to the inn. It was the first time I had been there in my ten weeks in York village, and this night was the first time I was drunk in my ten weeks at York village. But I knew what I wanted, for once; and when Simon Decorman, who kept the place, began to welcome me with,
Well, Jamie, and is it not fine to see you down here with human faces?
I cut him short and told him: I have not come here for companionship or gabble, but for a mug and a pitcher of rum!