Colonel effinghams raid, p.6
Colonel Effingham's Raid, page 6
And not the least of it all was my two-fifty a week and the possibility that Mr. Hoats might feel that the chances of its being overlooked by our average subscriber had been greatly diminished by the reader-confidence I had stirred up with my shot of the colonel and his faithful canine—
I folded the paper and gently laid it on a corner of Dewey’s desk. I felt a good deal of sympathy for Mr. Hoats; what explanation he was going to offer at the Municipal Building I couldn’t see. He might fire Cousin Willy and repudiate the stand in an editorial, but that might be bad too—
I heard Dewey talking over the phone, though I hadn’t heard it ring. I thought he might be talking to Mr. Hoats and I listened.
“As far as I can determine, ma’am,” Dewey was saying, “it’s an unfounded rumor.… Thank you, ma’am. We’ll certainly do everything we can.… The colonel’s not in the office at the moment. Mr. Hoats is the editor; he’s the man you want to talk to. He’ll appreciate your support.… Just a minute, I’ll connect you.”
Dewey turned to the mail, slitting it open, it seemed to me, as if he thought it was Cousin Willy’s neck; he went about it all, too, as a man returns to his business routine in the wake of some personal tragedy. Still I thought the call had put a glimmer in his eyes, just a glimmer, of a hope I had not seen there before.
“United Daughters of the Confederacy,” he flung out without looking at me. And after a few more envelopes, “Congratulating us!” with a bitter laugh.
I couldn’t think of any comforting words.
“You know this old guy,” he went on as if determined to make me say something, leaning back in his chair and examining me. “What do you make of him? Is he just a nut, or is he—is he just a nut?”
“I think he just doesn’t understand, Dewey.”
“You don’t reckon this is the string, do you? You don’t reckon he offered us this stuff as a war commentary, planning all along to throw something like this at us the first chance he got—”
“No,” I insisted. “He’s just spent all his life in the army and doesn’t understand the world. He’ll catch on; just give him a chance.”
“What are you and I going to use for money while he’s catching on?”
Behind me I heard the well-known squeak of the door hinges. I didn’t turn round; I just glanced at Dewey. Dewey glanced at the door and I could tell by his face who it was.
Mr. Hoats came in with a curious slow saunter. He didn’t reply to our simultaneous greeting, but walked round Dewey’s desk with his lengthy stride and sat down sideways in a chair. He even glanced at his fingernails.
“How’d it get by you, Dewey?” he said, almost sweetly.
It was a mighty question. I looked round on the desk for a pencil or a ruler I could play with.
Then at that moment, the telephone rang, and Dewey and I nearly ran each other down getting at it; his “Hello” was about a tenth of a second ahead of mine.
“You, Mr. Hoats,” Dewey said warmly, putting the receiver with a placating gentleness in Mr. Hoats’s hand. We turned away as if having no further interest in the conversation; but when Mr. Hoats said, “Hello, Mr. Manadue,” I could almost hear Dewey’s ears sitting up.
“Thank you, Mr. Manadue, I appreciate your support.… I don’t think there’s a thing to it. Frankly, Colonel Effingham just went off half cocked, as well as I can make out.… Glad you like it, Mr. Manadue; I figured it was going to make us a nice little feature.… Oh, no. Of course not.” (I guessed that was where Manadue said not to quote him.)
When Mr. Hoats hung up, he didn’t slap the instrument down and swing back to the subject in hand; he laid it down with a certain thoughtfulness and sat there for a minute, silent, looking at it.
“Did the U.D.C. get you, Mr. Hoats?” Dewey inquired solicitously, with a certain constructive wiliness.
Mr. Hoats replied only by laying on Dewey an oblique eye and asking him in a half-mumbled aside if he had heard anything from “round there,”—by which we sometimes referred to the Municipal Building.
“They wouldn’t see it unless it was on the Sports Page.”
“Somebody’ll show it to them.”
“It seems to me, Mr. Hoats,” Dewey said, no doubt thinking he saw a chance of justifying his not having stopped it, “this thing is signed by a special writer, it doesn’t represent the policy of the paper—”
Mr. Hoats interrupted him by getting pensively to his feet, taking a turn to the door of the composing room and back, and then, before our unbelieving eyes, without a word, leaving us.
It seemed like as miraculous a turn of the tide as Kilpatrick being thrown back at Brier Creek. Dewey glanced at me, drew his crooked finger across his forehead and flipped the imaginary cold sweat off on the floor. I didn’t know how to interpret it; the Mr. Hoats who went out of the door was certainly not the Mr. Hoats who had set the telephone wires quivering with his “Where’s Dewey?”
I didn’t know whether he felt that it was too late now to do much about Cousin Willy’s piece and that he must throw himself on that tried and trusted expedient of “letting it blow over,” or whether, possibly, Mr. Manadue’s words had fallen so sweetly on his ears as to undermine his sense of reality.
I guessed it was, on the whole, more of the first. Though he was not a Southerner, he had been round Fredericksville long enough to know that the blow-it-over breeze was in these parts the prevailing current of air and as much to be counted on as a southwest wind in July. It had blown over much more difficult issues than this; the technique, as in any other bombing raid, was to drop prone on the ground and lie still. When, once in the old days, the rumor began to circulate that the equipment in the new water plant was some $50,000 cheaper than the appropriation paid for, everybody hit the ground as one man and didn’t move for a month; at length somebody lifted up his head, looked round, listened, and gave the all-clear,—and sure enough it was all clear.
.… The next morning on my way to the Municipal Building I couldn’t help being impersonal enough to observe that my heels seemed to be dragging a little.
But there was no need for apprehension; nobody mentioned the piece. (The mayor, who had come to us at an early age from South Georgia, later described it as “like finding a rattlesnake in your bureau drawer,” but there was no comment that morning.) I didn’t know whether they hadn’t seen it, or whether their long-nurtured contempt for the written word was standing them in good stead, or whether they were simply prone. Perhaps, also, I didn’t hang round there quite as long as usual, though it seemed like a long time.
Anyway, when I left I was breathing considerably easier. That cleansing breeze had already begun to blow and I thought if Mr. Hoats would explain the delicacy of the situation to Cousin Willy with the right emphasis his attitude might turn out to have been merely a sporadic outburst and not, as I realized now I had feared, something chronic.
When I came within sight of the Leader building, I saw Cousin Willy’s unmistakable figure coming out. I guessed that Mr. Hoats had lost no time in going into the matter; Cousin Willy’s stride didn’t look as if he had been raked over the coals, though I knew an Effingham would not have paraded his burns if he had them.
“Enjoying the column,” I said professionally, as we paused in the shade of a disgusted tree.
“I’ve just been talking to What’s-his-name in there.”
I glanced at him again for wounds but I still didn’t see any. “How does he feel about it?” I said, all innocence.
“Oh, he seems to like it very much,” said Cousin Willy with some satisfaction, as if a little surprised at my question.
“Well,” I said, “that’s fine, that’s fine.” I nodded my head to disguise my incredulity.
“He seems to think people here are more interested in the foreign situation than in local matters. He thought perhaps if I confined my comments to the war I might have more readers.”
“I see.” I started to tell him if he didn’t confine his comments to the war he wouldn’t have even a proof reader.
“But, floods, boy!” cried Cousin Willy. “Are you proposing to fight dictatorships abroad and submit to one in your home town?”
I felt my head shaking slightly, not so much in negation as in a sort of sadness at the resurgence of what I had thought was diminishing. “You ought to tell that to him, not to me—”
“Oh, I did!”
“Oh, you did?”
“There’s no denying that, Albert.—He doesn’t think I am close enough yet to the local situation to understand it. But you don’t have to be close. An American can smell tyranny a long way off.”
“He didn’t put any restrictions on you?”
“Restrictions?”
“Well, I thought—”
“You don’t have to understand the local situation to recognize an assault on a strategic position.”
“But, Colonel, no assault has been made on anybody—”
“Reconnaissance brought to my hand, Albert, information believed to be reliable that an attack was in the final stages of preparation. It was my duty to strike at the concentration, not simply to wait and repel the charge.”
I didn’t know what to make of this kind of talk. I half expected Cousin Willy to break into a smile, even if it was a grim one. But there was no smile. In fact, I think this was the point at which a more serious and far-reaching apprehension entered my mind: could it be possible that Cousin Willy was deficient in humor?
This uncomfortable thought, of course, served to make our future only darker. Most of us in the South, you know, have a very prominent sense of humor; it works as a stabilizer against excesses, supplementing the action of the climate in discouraging us from acting either too quickly or too positively and so laying ourselves open to a sort of social sunstroke. If we get the idea that something we are about to do may seem funny to somebody, the chances are we won’t do it. If it should be true that Cousin Willy’s humor was defective, it opened up the most appalling possibilities; it was like coming over the five-thousand foot pass in the Great Smokies and finding your brakes had gone bad.
However, it was at that time just a bleak suspicion in my mind, hardly even put into words.
CHAPTER IV
1
Now you mustn’t get the idea from all this that we put more importance on Cousin Willy’s column than we did. It possessed a certain attractiveness for us, being a handout and being written locally and all that, but it was a very small part of the paper and we had other things to think about. I had shown Cousin Willy how to mark his copy for the printer and when it came in it was ready for the hook, all pasted up in a four-foot strip, paragraphs all looped, everything in order down to the little crow’s foot at the bottom; he seemed to take to these hieroglyphics as naturally as if they were a military code. One incompleted column he marked “more to kum,” which I felt entitled him to his fraternity pin.—What I am getting at is that, except for curiosity (which we hadn’t much time for) and a need for censorship, there was no necessity for anybody to read the colonel’s copy at all.
After a few days of the blessed breeze, the censorship relaxed again and things began to get back to normal. Dewey revised his editorial slightly to fit the new circumstances, as you might detour round an unexpected bomb crater, and had it set up. It was now to be offered in the spirit of righting a wrong. A certain one of our independent columnists, over whom we took pride in exercising no control and to whom we granted full privilege of expressing his opinions (“we may not agree with what he says,” we cried, “but we will defend to the death his right to say it”), we felt had not done justice to that genial old character, that kindly old citizen and civic leader to whom no friend was too small and none too great, that noblest Roman of them all, Pud Toolen. The touches about the Roman and the right to speak were added by Mr. Hoats with his thick pencil,—necessitating the resetting of six inches of type, though of course it was worth it.
We set it in the forms for our Sunday edition, which we published in the morning, and I read it over my sausage and hominy in the Manhattan Café while little groups of hypothetical voters in tighter shoes than usual hurried along past the closed stores toward the high bells ringing somewhere behind my left shoulder. I saw Mr. Doc Buden go by, with a little of that same self-consciousness at being publicly surrounded by his women-folk as a young husband in pushing a new baby carriage; I thought he glanced at the window which framed me and my hominy like a surrealist painting, but as I nodded he looked away and I reckoned he hadn’t seen me on account of the reflections in the glass.
By the time I started on my second cup of coffee (which Sadie brought me unbidden every Sunday morning, setting it down on the paved table with a motherly solicitude that sent a sort of jerk through my neural network for its subtle counterpoint of sacred and profane love), and lighted my weekly indulgence of a five-cent cigar, the church bells had stopped ringing and the streets looked like an illuminated three A. M. I glanced at the other editorials and then, as if by chance, so completely had I forgotten Cousin Willy in the pleasant glow of Dewey’s full-measured retribution, my eye fell on the 36-point Bodoni of “On the Firing Line.” I settled back, full of hominy and coffee and good will, settled back with a benignant smile for Cousin Willy and all my kin,—settled back to catch up on the war.
“On another occasion,” began Cousin Willy, “I have pointed out the relative value for purposes of memorial of a certain Mr. Toolen and our Confederate dead—”
Everything faded out a little for me; the cigar began to taste as if it were getting ready to burn up one side.
“A community’s history is its family tree,” said Cousin Willy. “You and I are descendants of our fathers, but Fredericksville is the descendant of the Battle of Kettle Creek where Elijah Clarke broke the British hold on upper Georgia, of the Battle of the Sand Bar Ferry which saved Fredericksville a second time from Sherman’s torch, of Jeb Stuart’s cavalry and General Lee’s barefoot columns. The spiritual soil of Fredericksville is rich today because yesterday its Citizens ploughed into it their toil and their blood. Fredericksville did not spring like a mushroom overnight out of the molded earth; it was wrested by steady hand and steady eye from the reluctant wilderness, wrested from the British King’s tyranny, wrested from Sherman, wrested from the noxious mire of defeat and reparations.—Can it be that this seventh generation of warriors is so faint of heart as to surrender intact this fortress we have built to the birds of prey—”
“Anything the matter with the coffee, Al?”
I shook my head absentmindedly, the cigar tasting worse and worse, the hominy getting heavier and heavier on my chest.
“This plan to change the name of our honored square is a trifling with our sturdy history. We shall not submit to it; the Sons of Liberty once gathered in the Long Room of Tondee’s Tavern and we shall find gathering places for them today. Yet it is not enough that we stand to the defense and hold the name of the square as it has been for near a century; let us move through the sally ports to the field. Let us improve the square as a memorial to the Lost Cause. Picture, if you will, in a circle about that shaft of Georgia marble, thirteen live-oak trees, one for each member of that glorious alliance—”
Sadie brought me a hot cup of coffee. “Everything all right, Al?”
“Have you seen this?” I said.
She leaned over the table and looked at the column. “He wants to plant trees round the monument,” I explained. “Thirteen trees—”
“I read that,” she said. “That would be nice; nice shade. It’s nice to see leaves blowing in the summertime—”
I couldn’t help slapping my forehead. “But every year or two somebody brings up trees—”
“Well, Gee! Where would we be without trees?”
“Do you want this place to look like a country town?—And anyhow they’re not going to do it and what’s the use in bringing it all up again and trying to embarrass everybody—”
“Well, Gee! I never heard of a tree embarrassing anybody—”
“Everything going right, Al?” said Jimmy, the boss, leaving his cigar counter and shooing Sadie away with his folded paper. Jimmy was a Greek whose name had been reforged under the heat of our democracy into James Economy; he was also the man who told the down-and-outer who ate the Manhattan’s Number 5 Dinner and then couldn’t pay for it, “All right, but just don’t give me all your business.”
I turned away and looked at the window and the back side of that curious shape which, seen from the sidewalk, was recognizable to the imaginative as a beaver hat in consideration of the second syllable of Manhattan. That hat was Jimmy’s pride and whenever I happened to see it after a couple of drinks on Saturday night, I was likely to become philosophical in my best undergraduate manner and argue that in ordering that hat for his sign you had proof that Mr. Economy was an artist; there was no art in the hat, but, in the fact that Jimmy had wanted a sign that was a little bit more than merely explanatory, you saw the seed of the art instinct, from the Parthenon down.
“Tell me, Jimmy,” I said, when he had whipped a chair up to the end of my table and seated himself voluminously upon it. “Do you ever see this little piece we run sometimes called ‘On the Firing Line’?”
“Yeah, yeah, sure.”
“You do? Well, tell me, Jimmy, what do you make of it?”
“I think that guy’s got something; some nice trees out there round the monument—”
“But, Jimmy—”
“A little something spent for beauty, Al, is a good buy.”
“But, Jimmy, the trees wouldn’t grow, for one thing, and they cost money, for another, and for another—tell me, Jimmy, did you read what this column said the other day about changing the name of the square?”
