Read Ebook: Les Jeunes-France: romans goguenards; suivis de Contes humoristiques by Gautier Th Ophile

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 275 lines and 34877 words, and 6 pages

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by TICKNOR AND FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved to the end of the article.

THE SURGEON'S ASSISTANT.

The sickness of the nation not being unto death, we now begin to number its advantages. They will not all be numbered by this generation; and as for story-tellers, essayists, letter-writers, historians, and philosophers, if their "genius" flags in half a century with such material as hearts, homes, and battle-fields beyond counting afford them, they deserve to be drummed out of their respective regiments, and banished into the dominion of silence and darkness, forever to sit on the borders of unfathomable ink-pools, minus pen and paper, with fool's-caps on their heads.

I know of a place which you may call Dalton, if it must have a name. At the beginning of our war,--for which some true spirits thank Almighty God,--a family as wretched as Satan wandering up and down the earth could wish to find lived there, close beside the borders of a lake which the Indians once called--but why should not your fancy build the lowly cottage on whatsoever green and sloping bank it will? Fair as you please the outside world may be,--waters pure as those of Lake St. Sacrament, with islands on their bosom like those of Horicon, and shores beautifully wooded as those of Lake George,--but what delight will you find in all the heavenly mansions, if love be not there?

"I'll enlist," said the master of this mansion of misery in the midst of the garden of delight, one day.

"I would," replied his wife.

They spoke with equal vigor, but neither believed in the other. The instant the man dropped the book he had been reading, he was like Samson with his hair shorn, for his wife couldn't tell one letter from another; and when she saw him sit down on the stone wall which surrounded their potato-field, overgrown with weeds, she marched out boldly to the corner of the wood-shed, where never any wood was, and attacked him thus:--

"S'pose you show fight awhile in that potato-patch afore you go to fight Ribils. Gov'ment don't need you any more than I do. May be it'll find out getting ain't gaining!"

She had no answer. The man was thinking, when she interrupted him, as she was always doing, that, if he could secure the State and town bounty, that would be some provision for the woman and child. As for himself, he was indifferent as to where he was sent, or how soon. But if he went away, they might look for him to come again. Gabriel's trumpet, he thought, would be a more welcome sound than his wife's voice.

He enlisted. The bounties paid him were left in the hands of a trusty neighbor, and were to be appropriated to the supply of his family's needs; and he went away along with a boat-load of recruits,--his own man no longer. Even his wife noticed the change in him, from the morning when he put on his uniform and began to obey orders, for she had time to notice. Several days elapsed after enlistment before the company's ranks were complete, and the captain would not report at head-quarters, he said, until his own townsfolk had supplied the number requisite.

Nearly a year had passed away, and this woman was leaning over the rail fence which surrounded a barren field, and listening, while she leaned, to the story of Ezra Cramer, just home from the war. She listened well, even eagerly, to what he had to tell, and seemed moved by the account in ways various as pride and indignation.

"I wish I had him here!" she said, when he had come to the end of his story,--the story of her husband's promotion.

Ezra looked at her, and thought of the pretty girl she used to be, and wondered how it happened that such a one could grow into a woman like this. The vindictiveness of her voice accorded well with her person,--expressed it. Where were her red cheeks? What had become of her brown hair? She was once a free one at joking with, and rallying the young men about; but now how like a virago she looked! and her tongue was sharp as a two-edged sword.

Ezra was sorry that he had taken the trouble to ascertain in the village where Nancy Elkins lived. Poor fellow! While enduring the hardships of the past year, his imagination had transformed all the Dalton women into angels, and the circuit of that small hamlet had become to his loving thought as the circuit of Paradise.

Some degree of comprehension seemed to break upon him while he stood gazing upon her, and he said: "O well, Miss Nancy, he's got his hands full, and besides he didn't know I was coming home so quick. I didn't know it myself till the last minute. He would 'a' sent some message,--course he would!"

"We've been slow to get our pay down where we was," said Ezra. "It's been a trouble to me all the while, having nothing to show for the time I was taking from father."

The woman looked at the young fellow who had spoken so seriously, and her eyes and her voice softened.

At this threat, the soldier, who knew something about WAR, straightened himself, and with a cheery laugh limped off towards the road. "I'll see ye ag'in, Miss Nancy, afore you start," said he, looking back and nodding gayly at her. Things weren't so bad as they seemed about her, he guessed. He was going home, and his heart was soft. Happiness is very kind; but let it do its best it cannot come very near to misery.

If it were not for this Jenny, my story would be short. Is it not for the future we live? For the children the world goes on.

Does this little girl--she might be styled a beauty by a true catholic taste, but oh! I fear that the Boston Convention "ORTHODOX," lately convened to settle all great questions concerning the past, present, and future, would never recognize her, on any showing, as a babe of grace!--does she, as she runs down the hill and along the crooked street of Dalton, look anything like a messenger of Heaven to your eyes? Must, the angels show their wings before they shall have recognition?

Going past the blacksmith's shop she was hailed by the blacksmith's self, with the blacksmith's own authority. "See here, Jenny!" At the call, she stood at bay like a fair little fawn in the woods.

"I'm writing a letter to my boy," he continued. "Step in here. Did you know Ezra Cramer had come back?"

"I saw him just now," she answered. "He told us about father." She said it with a pride that made her young face shine.

"So! what about him, I wonder?" asked the blacksmith.

And that he really did wonder, Jenny could not doubt. She heard more in his words than she liked to hear, and answered with a tremulous voice, in spite of pride, "O, he's been promoted."

"I don't know," she said, and for the first time she wondered.

"Where is he, though?" asked the blacksmith.

"I don't know,--in the war."

"That's 'cute. Well, see here, sis, we'll find that out,--you and me will." The angry voice of the blacksmith became tender. "You sit down there and write him a letter. My son, he'll find out if your pa is alive. As for Ezra, he don't know any more 'n he did when he went away; but, poor fellow, he's been mostually in the hospertal, instead of fighting Ribils, so p'r'aps he ain't to blame. You write to yer pa, and I'll wage you get an answer back, and he'll tell you all about his permotion quick enough."

Jenny stood looking at the blacksmith for a moment, with mouth and eyes wide open, so much astonished by the proposition as not to know what answer should be made to it. She had never written a line in her life, except in her old copy-book. If her hand could be made to express what she was thinking of, it would be the greatest work and wonder in the world. But then, it never could!

The blacksmith, elated by his own success that morning in the very difficult business of letter-writing, was mightily pleased to have under direction this little disciple in the work of love, and forthwith laid his strong hands on the bench and brought it out into the light, setting it down with a force that said something for the earnestness of his purpose in regard to Miss Jenny.

When he wrote his own letter, he did it in retirement and solitude, having sought out the darkest corner of his shop for the purpose. A mighty man in the shoeing of horses and the handling of hammers, he shrank from exposing his incompetence in the management of a miserable pen, even to the daylight and himself.

His big account-book placed against his forge, with a small sheet of paper spread thereon, his pen in Jenny's hands, and the inkstand near by, there was nothing for him to do but to go away and let her do her work.

She was doing her work well. Any one who had ever seen the girl before must have asked with wonder what had happened to her,--it was so evident that something had happened which stirred heart and soul to the depths.

So, even so, unconsciously, love sometimes works out the work of a lifetime, touches the key-note of an anthem of everlasting praise,--does it with as little ostentation as the son of science draws yellow gold from the quartz rock which tells no tale on the face of it concerning its "hid treasure." So, wisely and without ostentation, work the true agents, the apostles of liberty in this world.

"O dear papa! my dear papa!" she wrote, "Ezra has come home, and he says you are promoted! But he couldn't tell for what it was, or where you were, or anything. And O, it seems as if I couldn't wait a minute, I want to hear so all about it." When she had written thus far the spirit of the mother seemed to stir in the child. She sat and mused for a moment. Her eyes flashed. Her right hand moved nervously. Strange that her father had not sent some word by Ezra; but then he didn't know, of course, that Ezra was coming. Ay! that was a lucky thought. What she had written seemed to imply some blame. So, with many a blot and erasure, her loving belief that all was right must make itself evident.

At the end of the two hours she found herself at the bottom of the page the blacksmith had spread before her. Twice he had come into the shop and assured himself that the work was going on, and smiled to see the progress she was making. The third time he came he was under considerable excitement.

"Ready!" he shouted. "The stage 'll be along now in ten minutes."

When she had made the last emphatic pen-stroke, she turned towards him, flushed and smiling. "There!" she said.

He looked over her shoulder.

"Good!" said he. "But you haven't writ his name out. Give me the pen here, quick!" Then he took the quill and wrote her father's name up in one blank corner, and dried the ink with a little sand, and put the note into the envelope containing his own, and the great work was done.

Do you know how great a work, you dingy old Dalton blacksmith?

In a few minutes after the letter was inscribed and sealed, the stage came rattling along, and Jenny stood by and saw the blacksmith give it to the driver, and heard him say: "Now be kerful about that ere letter. It's got two inside. One's my boy's, as ye'll see by the facing on it; t' other's this little girl's. She's been writin' to her pa. So be kerful."

They stood together watching the stage till it was out of sight, then the blacksmith nodded at Jenny as if they had done a good day's work, and proceeded to light his pipe. That was not her way of celebrating the event. She remembered now that she had promised a little girl, Miss Ellen Holmes indeed, that she would some time show her where the red-caps and fairy-cups grew, and there was yet time, before sunset, for a long walk in the woods.

Going out of quiet and beautiful green Dalton, and into the hospital of Frere's Landing, 't is a wonderful change we make.

The silence of one place is as remarkable as the silence of the other, perhaps. That of the hospital does not resemble that of the hamlet, however. At times it grows oppressive and appalling, being the silence of anguish or of death. A stranger reaching Dalton in the night might wonder in the morning if there were in reality any passage out of it, for there the lake, on one of whose western slopes is the "neighborhood," seems locked in completely by the hills, and an ascent towards heaven is apparently the only way of egress. Yet there's another way; for I am not writing this true story among celestial altitudes for you. I returned from Dalton by a mundane road.

Through the wards of this well-ordered hospital a lady passed one night, and, entering a small apartment separated from the others, advanced with noiseless step to a bedside, and there sat down. You may guess if her heart was beating fast, and whether it was with difficulty that she kept her gray eyes clear of tears. There were about her traces of long and hurried journeying.

Under no limitations of caution had she passed so noiselessly through the wards. Involuntary was that noiselessness,--involuntary also the surprise with which one and another of the more wakeful patients turned to follow her, with hopeless, weary eyes, as she passed on. Now and then some feeble effort was made to attract her attention and arrest her progress, but she went, absorbed beyond observation by the errand that constrained her steps and thoughts.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet