The Gold Brick by Brand Whitlock - HTML preview

THAT BOY

IT must have been sometime in the winter or spring of 1891 that I first saw him. I had just been elected to the legislature. It was the famous Reform Session, you will remember, that proved to be of such benefit to stenographers and space writers. During the six months that general assembly lasted I lived at the St. James hotel. It is probable that I first saw the boy behind the counter of the cigar stand in the lobby of the hotel. It is probable that I had seen and spoken to him many times before I gave him any especial notice. What first arrested my attention was a law book. I had stopped at the cigar stand one evening after dinner to get some cigars, and as he rose to attend upon my wants, he took the book from his lap and laid it down upon the counter. While he was under the counter getting out a box of the brand I wished—for I never relish, somehow, cigars taken from a show case—I turned the book over and idly looked at its title. I remember very well that it was Reeves’ History of the English Law. It struck me as rather odd that a boy behind a cigar stand should be reading such a book. It was not a book that law students, in my state, at any rate, generally read. I know that I never read it (through) and probably never shall read it, although it is, of course, a wise and ancient book. I asked him why he read it.

“Why,” he said, “I’m studying law!”

As I lighted a cigar, I looked at the boy. He was tall and overgrown, and thin with his overgrowth, with spare wrists that thrust themselves out of frayed cuffs. His face was sallow, and he was not good to look upon. His clothes were worn bare to the threads. He had every appearance of being poor, almost hungry. I fancy I disliked him.

“When do you expect to be admitted?” I asked casually.

“Oh,” he replied, blithely enough, “in two or three years. Then I go into politics.”

This, I have said, was in 1891. If anything impressed me, it was the hopelessness of it all.

In 1893, early in the summer, I went down to the capital to argue a case at the June term of the supreme court. In the evening, after a hard day in court, I strolled out Lafayette Street to mollify my nerves. Toward the edge of the town I saw a thin youth walking with a girl. The girl wore a white dress. The evening was balmy. The moon was shining. The lilacs were in bloom, and their odor was on the air. As we passed each other, the youth’s appearance struck me as familiar. At the time I thought that he was the boy who used to tend the cigar stand in the St. James, and read Reeves’ History of the English Law, whom I had naturally forgotten.

In the spring of 1898—I remember the time, not, of course, because it has anything to do with the boy but because we were then engaged in the track elevation cases—I went over to the Gregory Building one morning to see Judge Goodman, in order to get him to consent to the Updegraff case going over the term. That was a case which involved the doctrine of merger, and I needed some additional time for preparation.

As I entered the offices of Goodman, Peck, Gilmore and Eckhart, I turned to the office boy, who was sitting near the door at the futile little desk all office boys occupy, and on which they scribble mysterious things, to ask whether the judge was in. When I spoke to the boy he looked up and smiled and called me by name. He seemed to be, for some reason, glad to see me, as if I had been some one from home. In fact, he said:

“Have you been down lately?”

I examined him quite attentively for an instant. He had half risen from his chair, and stood, or hung, in an awkward attitude over his desk. Presently I recognized him as the boy who used to tend the cigar stand in the hotel at the state capital, and read Reeves’ History of the English Law. I asked him what he was doing in the city.

“Why,” he said, in apparent surprise at my question, “I’m practising law!”

His eyes, in his pale face, dilated with a childish pride, until they were large and round and brilliant. He had drawn himself quite erect, and now he waved his hand toward the wall, and there I saw, in a new oak frame, the old familiar law license the supreme court issues to poor devils with illusions. There it was, bearing the seal of the court and the signatures of the seven justices. I read the boy’s name, written on the imitation parchment. It was the first time I had ever known what he called himself. I was amused by his having had his license framed.

“So you are in Judge Goodman’s office, are you?” I said, rather ineptly, to be sure, but merely to have something to say.

He made the obvious reply, and spoke of Judge Goodman’s kindness to him. I asked him how he was getting along.

“Well,” he replied, “rather slowly, of course—just at first, you know. But then I think if I can stick it out a while—say five or six years—I’ll be all right.”

I kept on looking at the old familiar law license, and thinking of my own. I have not seen it for years. I think my wife has it somewhere, in a tin tube with the diplomas and our marriage certificate and her father’s discharge from the army and other family charters, if it is not lost.

Then—for I felt that I should say something—I asked him how everybody was in the capital.

“I don’t get down any more,” he said; “it costs, you know.”

And then he was silent, and I did not care to look in his eyes. I noticed that the black cravat he had on was very old, and worn through in places. Also that he was actually out at the elbows, as to the right arm at least, for there, in the sleeve, was a ragged hole that showed the soiled lining of his coat. Presently the boy said:

“When you go down, tell them you saw me, won’t you?”

Of course it was presumptuous in him, but I thought of those five or six years. In that time he would learn—that and other things. Just then Judge Goodman stuck his head out of his private room.

I happened to go to the capital in May of that year. We were then at war, you will remember. I told the man who kept the cigar stand in the lobby of the St. James that I had seen the boy in the city, that he was practising law there, and wished to be remembered to his friends. I think I told him, also, that the boy was doing well, and already making a favorable impression upon many of the older and more prominent members of the bar. But the man shook his head and responded:

“Why, haven’t you heard? He’s gone to war—enlisted in the First Infantry!”

I hid my surprise from the man, and told him I had heard that, of course, but that the bar regarded his absence as merely temporary.

That summer I got into the habit of scanning the lists of sick and disabled soldiers who were at Chickamauga and the other fever camps, or in Cuba. I was especially likely to do this where the First Regiment was concerned. It was a practice foolish in a way, because it took up time in the morning, and was only a meaningless list of names, anyway. But then, we were rather proud of the First in the city that summer, for it was our crack regiment, you know, and my wife had one or two acquaintances among the young officers, who reflected a certain glory upon her, and gave a color to her conversation.

A friend of mine at the capital, a lawyer, often sent me, two or three times a week, perhaps, copies of the local papers, and these frequently published little bits of personal gossip about boys from that town who had gone to “the front,” as they put it. The country papers gave a more personal tone to their war articles than did the city papers. These latter seemed to think that a war is got up especially for the officers. Doubtless they were about right.

After a while, the First went to Cuba. The regiment got there too late for active fighting in the operations about Santiago, but not too late for duty in the trenches, with their freshly upturned earth, damp and saturated with malaria. Nor did they get there too late for the fever. Many of them contracted it, and some died of it. I used to read the lists of the sick and dead, to see if the names of any of my wife’s acquaintances in the field, line or staff, were among them.

Once in a while I would observe that some young soldier had died of something or other and homesickness. One morning I happened upon a name that impressed me as being familiar. After studying it a while, I finally recognized it as the same name that had been upon the law license that was framed in oak and hanging above the desk of the office boy. There was printed after the name:

“Pernicious malaria and nostalgia.”

In the spring of the following year (1899) the bodies of several hundred soldiers who had died in Cuba were brought home for final interment. I happened to be in the capital again and heard that there was to be a military funeral that afternoon. I had some curiosity to see a military funeral, and so, having nothing else to do, went to the church where it was to be held. You can imagine my surprise when I was told that it was the funeral of the boy who had once tended the cigar stand in the lobby of the St. James and read Reeves’ History of the English Law, the boy who had afterward gone to the city to practise law, and, later, enlisted in the First Infantry to die in Cuba. There were not many at the funeral, for, of course, he was only a private. There was a woman there in black, probably his aunt, or mother, for she appeared to weep, and some girl. Out at the cemetery—Oak Wood, where a general is buried—there were few persons besides the clergyman, and the woman and the girl. A local militia company had sent a firing squad, and it fired the salute prescribed for a private over the grave, and a bugler stood at the head and blew taps, the soldier’s good night. Happening to have a rose or two with me, I threw them into the grave. The coffin, of course, had a flag over it, but that was about all there was of the military funeral—hardly enough, indeed, to reward one’s curiosity.

This, I believe, is all. The story hardly seems worth the telling, now that it is written, but I fancied that I detected one or two coincidences in my haphazard relations with the boy, like my reading of his death in the paper, and my happening to be in the capital on the day of his funeral, and so I set them down.

I forgot to say that I happened to have his law license with me that day at the funeral. After he had enlisted in the First, perhaps I should explain, I noticed it one day in the offices of Goodman, Peck, Gilmore and Eckhart, where it was evidently in the way. So I let it hang in my office all that summer and all the next winter, but in the spring we needed the wall space for some new bookcases, and I took it down. I think the girl who was at the funeral that day, whoever she is, has it now.

THE END