The Choir Invisible

J >> James Lane Allen >> The Choir Invisible

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Later, she was kneeling before the red logs of the fireplace with one hand
shielding her delicate face from the blistering heat; in the other holding
the shingle on which richly made and carefully shaped was the bread of
Indian maize that he liked. She did not rise until she had placed it where
it would be perfectly browned; otherwise he would have been disappointed and
the evening would have been spoiled.

IV

JOHN GRAY did not return to town by his straight course through the forest,
but followed the winding wagon-road at a slow, meditative gait. He was
always thoughtful after he had been with Mrs. Falconer; he was unusually
thoughtful now; and the gathering hush of night, the holy expectancy of
stars, a flock of white clouds lying at rest low on the green sky like sheep
in some far uplifted meadow, the freshness of the woods soon to be hung with
dew,--all these melted into his mood as notes from many instruments blend in
the ear.
But he was soon aroused in an unexpected way. When he reached the place
where the wagon-road passed out into the broader public road leading from
Lexington to Frankfort, he came near stumbling over a large, loose bundle,
tied in a blue and white neckerchief.
Plainly it had been lost and plainly it was his duty to discover if possible
to whom it belonged. He carried it to one side of the road and began to
examine its contents: a wide, white lace tucker, two fine cambric
handkerchiefs, two pairs of India cotton hose, two pairs of silk hose, two
thin muslin handkerchiefs, a pair of long kid gloves,--straw colour,--a pair
of white kid shoes, a pale-blue silk coat, a thin, white striped muslin
dress.The articles were not marked. Whose could they be? Not Amy's: Mrs.
Falconer had expressly said that the major was to bring her finery to town
in the gig the next day. They might have been dropped by some girl or by
some family servant, riding into town; he knew several young ladies, to any
one of whom they might belong. He would inquire in the morning; and
meantime, he would leave the bundle at the office of the printer, where lost
articles were commonly kept until they could be advertised in the paper, and
called for by their owners.
He replaced the things, and carefully retied the ends of the kerchief. It
was dark when he reached town, and he went straight to his room and locked
the bundle in his closet. Then he hurried to his tavern, where his supper
had to be especially cooked for him, it being past the early hour of the
pioneer evening meal. While he sat out under the tree at the door, waiting
and impatiently thinking that he would go to see Amy as soon as he could
despatch it, the tavern-keeper came out to say that some members of the
Democratic Society had been looking for him. Later on, these returned. A
meeting of the Society had been called for that night, to consider news
brought by the postrider the day previous and to prepare advices for the
Philadelphia Society against the postrider's return: as secretary, he was
wanted at the proceedings. He begged hard to be excused, but he was the
scholar, the scribe; no one would take his place.
When the meeting ended, the hour was past for seeing Amy. He went to his
room and read law with flickering concentration of mind till near midnight.
Then he snuffed out his candle, undressed, and stretched himself along the
edge of his bed.

It was hard and coarse. The room itself was the single one that formed the
ruder sort of pioneer cabin. The floor was the earth itself, covered here
and there with the skins of wild animals; the walls but logs, poorly
plastered. From a row of pegs driven into one of these hung his clothes--not
many. The antlers of a stag over the doorway held his rifle, his
hunting-belt, and his hat. A swinging shelf displayed a few books, being
eagerly added to as he could bitterly afford it--with a copy of Paley, lent
by the Reverend James Moore, the dreamy, saintlike, flute-playing Episcopal
parson of the town. In the middle of the room a round table of his own
vigorous carpentry stood on a panther skin; and on this lay some copy books
in which he had just set new copies for his children; a handful of
goosequills to be fashioned into pens for them; the proceedings of the
Democratic Society, freshly added to this evening; copies of the Kentucky
Gazette containing essays by the political leaders of the day on the
separation of Kentucky from the Union and the opening of the Mississippi to
its growing commerce--among them some of his own, stately and academic,
signed "Cato the Younger." Lying open on the table lay his Bible; after law,
he always read a little in that; and to-night he had reread one of his
favourite chapters of St.Paul: that wherein the great, calm, victorious
soldier of the spirit surveys the history of his trials, imprisonments,
beatings. In one corner was set a three-cornered cupboard containing his
underwear, his new cossack boots, and a few precious things that had been
his mother's: her teacup and saucer, her prayer-book. It was in this closet
that he had put the lost bundle.

He had hardly stretched himself along the edge of his bed before he began to
think of this.
Every complete man embraces some of the qualities of a woman, for Nature
does not mean that sex shall be more than a partial separation of one common
humanity; otherwise we should be too much divided to be companionable. And
it is these womanly qualities that not only endow a man with his insight
into the other sex, but that enable him to bestow a certain feminine
supervision upon his own affairs when no actual female has them in charge.
If he marries, this inner helpmeet behaves in unlike ways toward the newly
reigning usurper; sometimes giving up peaceably, at others remaining her
life-long critic--reluctant but irremovable. If many a wife did but realize
that she is perpetually observed not only by the eyes of a pardoning husband
but by the eyes of another woman hidden away in the depths of his being, she
would do many things differently and not do some things at all.

The invisible slip of a woman in Gray now began to question him regarding
the bundle. Would not those delicate, beautiful things be ruined, thus put
away in his closet? He got up, took the bundle out, laid it on his table,
untied the kerchief, lifted carefully off the white muslin dress and the
blue silk coat, and started with them toward two empty pegs on the wall. He
never closed the door of his cabin if the night was fine. It stood open now
and a light wind blew the soft fabrics against his body and limbs, so that
they seemed to fold themselves about him, to cling to him. He disengaged
them reluctantly--apologetically.

Then he lay down again. But now the dress on the wall fascinated him. The
moonlight bathed it, the wind swayed it. This was the first time that a
woman's garments had ever hung in his room. He welcomed the mere accident of
their presence as though it possessed a forerunning intelligence, as though
it were the annunciation of his approaching change of life. And so laughing
to himself, and under the spell of a growing fancy, he got up again and took
the little white shoes and set them on the table in the moonlight--on the
open Bible and the speech of St.Paul--and then went back, and lay looking at
them and dreaming--looking at them and dreaming.

His thoughts passed meantime like a shining flock of white doves to Amy,
hovering about her. They stole onward to the time when she would be his
wife; when lying thus, he would wake in the night and see her dress on the
wall and feel her head on his bosom; when her little shoes might stand on
his open Bible, if they chose, and the satin instep of her bare foot be
folded in the hard hollow of his.

He uttered a deep, voiceless, impassioned outcry that she might not die
young nor he die young; that the struggles and hardships of life, now
seeming to be ended, might never begirt him or her so closely again; that
they might grow peacefully old together.
To-morrow then, he would see her; no, not tomorrow; it was long past
midnight now.
He got down on his bare knees beside the bed with his face buried in his
hands and said his prayers.

And then lying outstretched with his head resting on his folded hands, the
moonlight streaming through the window and lighting up his dark-red curls
and falling on his face and neck and chest, the cool south wind blowing down
his warm limbs, his eyes opening and closing in religious purity on the
dress, and his mind opening and closing on the visions of his future, he
fell asleep.
V

WHEN he awoke late, he stretched his big arms drowsily out before his face
with a gesture like that of a swimmer parting the water: he was in truth
making his way out of a fathomless, moonlit sea of dreams to the shores of
reality. Broad daylight startled him with its sheer blinding revelation of
the material world, as the foot of a swimmer, long used to the yielding
pavements of the ocean, touches with surprise the first rock and sand.

He sprang up, bathed, dressed, and stepped out into the crystalline
freshness of the morning. He was glowing with his exercise, at peace with
himself and with all men, and so strong in the exuberance of his manhood
that he felt he could have leaped over into the east, shouldered the sun,
and run gaily, impatiently, with it up the sky. How could he wait to see Amy
until it went up its long slow way and then down again to its setting? A
powerful young lion may some time have appeared thus at daybreak on the edge
of a jungle and measured the stretches of sand to be crossed before he could
reach an oasis where memory told him was the lurking-place of love.

It was still early. The first smoke curled upward from the chimneys of the
town; the melodious tinkle of bells reached his ear as the cows passed from
the milking to the outlying ranges deep in their wild verdure. Even as he
stood surveying the scene, along the path which ran close to his cabin came
a bare-headed, nutbrown pioneer girl, whose close-fitting dress of white
homespun revealed the rounded outlines of her figure. She had gathered up
the skirt which was short, to keep it from the tops of the wet weeds. Her
bare, beautiful feet were pink with the cold dew. Forgotten, her slow fat
cows had passed on far ahead; for at her side, wooing her with drooping
lashes while the earth was still flushed with the morn, strolled a young
Indian fighter, swarthy, lean tall, wild. His long thigh boots of thin
deer-hide, open at the hips, were ornamented with a scarlet fringe and
rattled musically with the hoofs of fawns and the spurs of the wild turkey;
his gray racoonskin cap was adorned with the wings of the hawk and the
scarlet tanager.

The magnificent young, warrior lifted his cap to the school-master with a
quiet laugh; and the girl smiled at him and shook a warning finger to remind
him he was not to betray them. He smiled back with a deprecating gesture to
signify that he could be trusted. He would have liked it better if he could
have said more plainly that he too had the same occupation now; and as he
gazed after them, lingering along the path side by side, the long-stifled
cravings of his heart rose to his unworldly, passionate eyes: he all but
wished that Amy also milked the cows at early morning and drove them out to
pasture.

When he went to his breakfast at the tavern, one of the young Williamsburg
aristocrats was already there, pretending to eat; and hovering about the
table, brisk to appease his demands, the daughter of the taverner: she as
ruddy as a hollyhock and gaily flaunting her head from side to side with the
pleasure of denying him everything but his food, yet meaning to kiss him
when twilight came--once, and then to run.

Truly, it seemed that this day was to be given up to much pairing: as be
thought it rightly should be and that without delay. When he took his seat
in the school-room and looked out upon the children, they had never seemed
so small, so pitiful. It struck him that Nature is cruel not to fit us for
love and marriage as soon as we are born--cruel to make us wait twenty or
thirty years before she lets us really begin to live. He looked with eyes
more full of pity than usual at blear-eyed, delicate little Jennie, as to
whom he could never tell whether it was the multiplication-table that made
her deathly sick, or sickness that kept her from multiplying. His eye lit
upon a wee, chubby-cheeked urchin on the end of a high, hard bench, and he
fell to counting how many ages must pass before that unsuspicious grub would
grow his palpitating wings of flame. He felt like making them a little
speech and telling them how happy he was, and how happy they would all be
when they got old enough to deserve it.

And as for the lessons that day, what difference could it make whether ideas
sprouted or did not sprout in those useless brains? He answered all the hard
questions himself; and, indeed, so sunny and exhilarating was the weather of
his discipline that little Jennie, seeing how the rays fell and the wind
lay, gave up the multiplication-table altogether and fell to drawing
tomahawks.

A remarkable mixture of human life there was in Gray's school. There were
the native little Kentuckians, born in the wilderness--the first wild, hardy
generation of the new people; and there were little folks from Virginia,
from Tennessee, from North Carolina, and from Pennsylvania and other
sources, huddled together, some uncouth, some gentle-born, and all starting
out to be formed into the men and women of Kentucky.
They had their strange, sad, heroic games and pastimes under his guidance.
Two little girls would be driving the cows home about dusk; three little
boys would play Indian and capture them and carry them off; the husbands of
the little girls would form a party to the rescue; the prisoners would drop
pieces of their dresses along the way; and then at a certain point of the
woods--it being the dead of night now and the little girls being bound to a
tree, and the Indians having fallen asleep beside their smouldering
campfires--the rescuers would rush in and there would be whoops and shrieks
and the taking of scalps and a happy return. Or some settlers would be shut
up in their fort. The only water to be had was from a spring outside the
walls, and around this the enemy skulked in the corn and grass. But their
husbands and sweethearts must not perish of thirst. So, with a prayer, a
tear, a final embrace, the little women marched out through the gates to the
spring in the very teeth of death and brought back water in their wooden
dinner-buckets.
Or, when the boys would become men with contests of running and pitching
quoits and wrestling, the girls would play wives and have a quilting, in a
house of green alder-bushes, or be capped and wrinkled grandmothers sitting
beside imaginary spinning-wheels and smoking imaginary pipes.

Sometimes it was not Indian warfare but civil strife. One morning as many
as three Daniel Boones appeared on the playground at the same moment; and at
once there was a dreadful fight to ascertain which was the genuine Daniel.
This being decided, the spurious Daniels submitted to be: the one, Simon
Kenton; the other, General George Rogers Clark.

And there was another game of history--more practical in its bearings--which
he had not taught them, but which they had taught him; they had played it
with him that very morning.
When he had stepped across the open to the school, he found that the older
boys, having formed themselves into a garrison for the defence of the
smaller boys and girls, had barricaded the door and barred and manned the
wooden windows: the schoolhouse had suddenly become a frontier station; they
were the pioneers; he was the invading Indians--let him attack them if he
dared! He did dare and that at once; for he knew that otherwise there would
be no school that day or as long as the white race on the inside remained
unconquered. So had ensued a rough-and-tumble scrimmage for fifteen minutes,
during which the babies within wailed aloud with real terror of the battle,
and he received some real knocks and whacks and punches through the
loop-holes of the stockade: the end being arrived at when the schoolhouse
door, by a terrible wrench from the outside, was torn entirely off its
wooden hinges; and the victory being attributed--as an Indian victory always
was in those days--to the overwhelming numbers of the enemy.

With such an opening of the day, the academic influence over childhood may
soon be restored to forcible supremacy but will awaken little zest. Gray was
glad therefore on all accounts that this happened to be the day on which he
had promised to tell them of the battle of the Blue Licks. Thirteen years
before and forty miles away that most dreadful of all massacres had taken
place; and in the town were many mothers who still wept for their sons, many
widows who still dreamed of their young husbands, fallen that beautiful,
fatal August day beneath the oaks and the cedars, or floating down the
red-dyed river. All the morning he could see the expectation of this story
in their faces: a pair of distant, clearest eyes would be furtively lifted
to his, then quickly dropped; or another pair more steadily directed at him
through the backwoods loop-hole of two stockade fingers.

At noon, then, having dismissed the smaller ones for their big recess, he
was standing amid the eager upturned faces of the others--bareheaded under
the brilliant sky of May. He had chosen the bank of the Town Fork, where it
crossed the common, as a place in which he should be freest from
interruption and best able to make his description of the battle-field well
understood. This stream flows unseen beneath the streets of the city now
with scarce rent enough to wash out its grimy channel; but then it flashed
broad and clear through the long valley of scattered cabins and orchards and
cornfields and patches of cane.

It was a hazardous experiment with the rough jewels of those little minds.
They were still rather like diamonds rolling about on the bottom of
barbarian rivers than steadily set and mounted for the uses of civilization.

He fixed his eyes upon a lad in his fifteenth year, the commandant of the
fort of the morning, who now stood at the water edge, watching him with
breathless attention. A brave, sunny face;--a big shaggy head holding a
mind in it as clear as a sphere of rock-crystal; already heated with vast
ambition--a leader in the school, afterwards to be a leader in the
nation--Richard Johnson.

"Listen!" he cried; and when he spoke in, that tone he reduced everything
turbulent to peace. "I have brought you here to tell you of the battle of
the Blue Licks not because it was the last time, as you know, that an Indian
army ever invaded Kentucky; not because a hundred years from now or a
thousand years from now other school-boys and other teachers will be talking
of it still; not because the Kentuckians will some day assemble on the field
and set up a monument to their forefathers, your fathers and brothers; but
because there is a lesson in it for you to learn now while you are children.
A few years more and some of you boys will be old enough to fight for
Kentucky or for your country. Some of you will be common soldiers who will
have to obey the orders of your generals; some of you may be generals with
soldiers under you at the mercy of your commands. It may be worth your own
lives, it may save the lives of your soldiers, to heed this lesson now and
to remember it then. And all of you--whether you go into battles of that
sort or not--will have others; for the world has many kinds of fighting to
be done in it and each of you will have to do his share. And whatever that
share may be, you will need the same character, the same virtues, to
encounter it victorious; for all battles are won in the same way, all
conquerors are alike. This lesson, then, will help each of you to win, none
of you to lose.

"Do you know what it was that brought about the awful massacre of the Blue
Licks? It was the folly of one officer.

"Let the creek here be the Licking River. The Kentuckians, some on foot and
some on horse, but all tired and disordered and hurrying along, had just
reached the bank. Over on the other side--some distance back--the Indians
were hiding in the woods and waiting. No one knew exactly where they were;
every one knew they counted from seven hundred to a thousand. The
Kentuckians were a hundred and eighty-two. There was Boone with the famous
Boonsborough men, the very name of whom was a terror; there was Trigg with
men just as good from Harrodsburg; there was Todd, as good as either, with
the men from Lexington. More than a fourth of the whole were commissioned
officers, and more fearless men never faced an enemy. There was but one
among them whose courage had ever been doubted, and do you know what that
man did?
"After the Kentuckians had crossed the river to attack, been overpowered,
forced back to the river again, and were being shot down or cut down in the
water like helpless cattle, that man--his name was Benjamin Netherland--did
this: He was finely mounted. He had quickly recrossed the river and had
before him the open buffalo trace leading back home. About twenty other men
had crossed as quickly as he and were urging their horses toward this road.
But Netherland, having reached the opposite bank, wheeled his horse's head
toward the front of the battle, shouted and rallied the others, and sitting
there in full view and easy reach of the Indian army across the narrow
river, poured his volley into the foremost of the pursuers, who were cutting
down the Kentuckians in the river. He covered their retreat. He saved
their lives.

"There was another soldier among them named Aaron Reynolds. He had had a
quarrel some days before with Colonel Patterson and there was bad blood
between them. During the retreat, he was galloping toward the ford. The
Indians were close behind. But as he ran, he came upon Colonel Patterson,
who had been wounded and, now exhausted, had fallen behind his comrades.
Reynolds sprang from his horse, helped the officer to mount, saw him escape,
and took his poor chance on foot. For this he fell into the hands of the
Indians.

"That is the kind of men of whom that little army of a hundred and
eighty-two was made up--the oak forest of Kentucky.
"And yet, when they had reached the river in this pursuit and some twenty of
the officers had come out before the ranks to hold a council of war and the
wisest and the oldest were urging caution or delay, one of
them--McGary--suddenly waved his hat in the air, spurred his horse into the
river, and shouted:

"'Let all who are not cowards follow me!'

"They all followed; and then followed also the shame of defeat, the awful
massacre, the sorrow that lasts among us still, and the loss to Kentucky of
many a gallant young life that had helped to shape her destiny in the
nation.

"Some day perhaps some historian will write it down that the Kentuckians
followed McGary because no man among them could endure such a taunt. Do not
believe him. No man among them even thought of the taunt: it had no meaning.
They followed him because they were too loyal to desert him and those who
went with him in his folly. Your fathers always stood together and fought
together as one man, or Kentucky would never have been conquered; and in no
battle of all the many that they ever fought did they ever leave a comrade
to perish because he had made a mistake or was in the wrong.

"This, then, is your lesson from the battle of Blue Licks: Never go into a
battle merely to show that you are not a coward: that of itself shows what a
coward you are.

"Do not misunderstand me! whether you be men or women, you will never do
anything in the world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the
mind--next to honor. It is your king. But the king must always have a good
cause. Many a good king has perished in a bad one; and this noblest virtue
of courage has perhaps ruined more of us than any other that we possess. You
know what character the old kings used always to have at their courts. I
have told you a great deal about him. It was the Fool. Do you know what
personage it is that Courage, the King, is so apt to have in the Court of
the Mind? It is the Fool also. Lay these words away; you will understand
them better when you are older and you will need to understand them very
well. Then also you will know what I mean when I say to you this morning
that the battle of the Blue Licks was the work of the Fool, jesting with the
King."

He had gone to the field himself one Saturday not long before, walking
thoughtfully over it. He had had with him two of the Lexington militia who,
in the battle, had been near poor Todd, their colonel, while fighting like a
lion to the last and bleeding from many wounds. The recollection of it all
was very clear now, very poignant: the bright winding river, there
broadening at its ford; the wild and lonely aspect of the country round
about. On the farther bank the long lofty ridge of rock, trodden and licked
bare of vegetation for ages by the countless passing buffalo; blackened by
rain and sun; only the more desolate for a few dwarfish cedars and other
timber scant and dreary to the eye. Encircling this hill in somewhat the
shape of a horseshoe, a deep ravine heavily wooded and rank with grass and
underbrush. The Kentuckians, disorderly foot and horse, rushing in
foolhardiness to the top of this uncovered expanse of rock; the Indians,
twice, thrice, their number, engirdling its base, ringing them round with
hidden death. The whole tragedy repossessed his imagination and his
emotions. His face had grown pale, his voice took the measure and cadence of
an old-time minstrel's chant, his nervous fingers should have been able to
reach out and strike the chords of a harp.With uplifted finger he was going
on to impress them with another lesson: that in the battles which would be
sure to await them, they must be warned by this error of their fathers never
to be over-hasty or over-confident, never to go forward without knowing the
nature of the ground they were to tread, or throw themselves into a struggle
without measuring the force of the enemy. He was doing this when a child
came skipping joyously across the common, and pushing her way up to him
through the circle of his listeners, handed him a note. He read it, and in
an instant the great battle, hills, river, horse, rider, shrieks, groans,
all vanished from his mind as silently as a puff of white smoke from a
distant cannon.

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