According to our creed it was not permissible for a gentleman, drunk or sober, to mention a lady"s name in a place like that. I rose and put my hand across Harry"s mouth, unwilling that a stranger should hear a girl"s name mentioned in the place. No doubt I should have done quite as much for any girl of our country whose name came up in that way. But to my surprise Harry Singleton was just sufficiently intoxicated to resent the act of his best friend. With no word of warning he drew back his hand and struck me in the face with all his force, the blow making a smart crack which brought all the others running from within. Still, I reflected, that this was not the act of Harry Singleton, but only that of a drunken man who to-morrow would not remember what had been done.
"That will be quite enough, Harry," said I. "Come, now, I"ll take you home. Sanderson, go get his horse or wagon, or whatever brought him here."
"Not home!" cried Harry. "First inflict punishment on you for denyin"
Miss Gracie Sheraton pretties" girl whole C"fedrate States America.
Girls like John Cowles too much! Must mash John Cowles! Must mash John Cowles sake of Gracie Sheraton, pretties" girl in whole wide worl"!"
He came toward me as best he might, his hands clenched. I caught him by the wrist, and as he stumbled past, I turned and had his arm over my shoulder. I admit I threw him rather cruelly hard, for I thought he needed it. He was entirely quiet when we carried him into the room and placed him on the leather lounge.
"By Jove!" I heard a voice at my elbow. "That was handsomely done--handsomely done all around."
I turned to meet the outstretched hand of my new friend, Gordon Orme.
"Where did you learn the trick?" he asked.
"The trick of being a gentleman," I answered him slowly, my face red with anger at Singleton"s foolishness, "I never learned at all. But to toss a poor drunken fool like that over one"s head any boy might learn at school."
"No," said my quasi-minister of the gospel, emphatically, "I differ with you. Your time was perfect. You made him do the work, not yourself. Tell me, are you a skilled wrestler?"
I was nettled now at all these things which were coming to puzzle and perturb an honest fellow out for a morning ride.
"Yes," I answered him, "since you are anxious to know, I"ll say I can throw any man in Fairfax except one."
"And he?"
"My father. He"s sixty, as I told you, but he can always beat me."
"There are two in Fairfax you cannot throw," said Orme, smiling.
My blood was up just enough to resent this challenge. There came to me what old Dr. Hallowell at Alexandria calls the "_gaudium certaminis_."
In a moment I was little more than a full-blooded fighting animal, and had forgotten all the influences of my Quaker home.
"Sir," I said to him hotly, "I propose taking you home with me. But before I do that, and since you seem to wish it, I am going to lay you on your back here in the road. Frankly, there are some things about you I do not like, and if that will remedy your conceit, I"m going to do it for you--for any sort of wager you like."
"Money against your horse?" he inquired, stripping to his ruffled shirt as he spoke. "A hundred guineas, five hundred?"
"Yes, for the horse," I said. "He"s worth ten thousand. But if you"ve two or three hundred to pay for my soiling the shoulders of your shirt, I"m willing to let the odds stand so."
He smiled at me simply--I swear almost winningly, such was the quality of the man.
"I like you," he said simply. "If all the men of this country resembled you, all the world could not beat it."
I was stripped by this time myself, and so, without pausing to consider the propriety on either side of our meeting in this sudden encounter in a public street, we went at it as though we had made a rendezvous there for that express purpose, with no more hesitation and no more fitness than two game c.o.c.ks which might fall fighting in a church in case they met there.
Orme came to me with no hurry and no anxiety, light on his feet as a skilled fencer. As he pa.s.sed he struck for my shoulder, and his grip, although it did not hold, was like the cutting of a hawk"s talons. He branded me red with his fingers wherever he touched me, although the stroke of his hand was half tentative rather than aggressive. I went to him with head low, and he caught me at the back of the neck with a stroke like that of a smiting bar; but I flung him off, and so we stepped about, hands extended, waiting for a hold. He grew eager, and allowed me to catch him by the wrist. I drew him toward me, but he braced with his free arm bent against my throat, and the more I pulled, the more I choked. Then by sheer strength I drew his arm over my shoulder as I had that of Harry Singleton. He glided into this as though it had been his own purpose, and true as I speak I think he aided me in throwing him over my head, for he went light as a feather, and fell on his feet when I freed him. I was puzzled not a little, for the like of this I had not seen in all my meetings with good men.
As we stepped about cautiously, seeking to engage again, his eye was fixed on mine curiously, half contemplatively, but utterly without concern or fear of any kind. I never saw an eye like his. It gave me not fear, but horror! The more I encountered him, the more uncanny he appeared. The lock of the arm at the back of the neck, those holds known as the Nelson and the half-Nelson, and the ancient "hip lock," and the ineffectual schoolboy "grapevine"--he would none of things so crude, and slipped out of them like a snake. Continually I felt his hands, and where he touched there was pain--on my forehead, at the edge of the eye sockets, at the sides of my neck, in the middle of my back--whenever we locked and broke I felt pain, and I knew that such a.s.sault upon the nerve centers of a man"s body might well disable him, no matter how strong he was. But, as for him, he did not breathe the faster. It was system with him. I say, I felt not fear only but a horror of him.
By chance I found myself with both hands on his arms, and I knew that no man could break that hold when once set, for vast strength of forearm and wrist was one of the inheritances of all men of the Cowles family. I drew him steadily to me, pulled his head against my chest, and upended him fair, throwing him this time at length across my shoulder. I was sure I had him then, for he fell on his side. But even as he fell he rose, and I felt a grip like steel on each ankle. Then there was a snake-like bend on his part, and before I had time to think I was on my face. His knees were astride my body, and gradually I felt them pushing my arms up toward my neck. I felt a slight blow on the back of my head, as though by the edge of the hand--light, delicate, gentle, but dreamy in its results. Then I was half conscious of a hand pushing down my head, of another hand reaching for my right wrist. It occurred to me in a distant way that I was about to be beaten, subdued--I, John Cowles!
This had been done, as he had said of my own work with Singleton, as much by the momentum of my own fall as by any great effort on his part.
As he had said regarding my own simple trick, the time of this was perfect, though how far more difficult than mine, only those who have wrestled with able men can understand.
For the first time in my life I found myself about to be mastered by another man. Had he been more careful he certainly would have had the victory over me. But the morning was warm, and we had worked for some moments. My man stopped for a moment in his calm pinioning of my arms, and perhaps raised his hand to brush his face or push back his hair. At that moment luck came to my aid. He did not repeat the strange gentle blow at the back of my head--one which I think would have left unconscious a man with a neck less stiff--and as his pressure on my twisted arm relaxed, I suddenly got back my faculties. At once I used my whole body as a spring, and so straightened enough to turn and put my arm power against his own, which was all I wanted.
He laughed when I turned, and with perfect good nature freed my arm and sprang to his feet, bowing with hand upreached to me. His eye had lost its peculiar stare, and shone now with what seemed genuine interest and admiration. He seemed ready to call me a sportsman, and a good rival, and much as I disliked to do so, I was obliged to say as much for him in my own heart.
"By the Lord! sir," he said--with a certain looseness of speech, as it seemed to me, for a minister of the gospel to employ, "you"re the first I ever knew to break it."
""Twas no credit to me," I owned. "You let go your hand. The horse is yours."
"Not in the least," he responded, "not in the least. If I felt I had won him I"d take him, and not leave you feeling as though you had been given a present. But if you like I"ll draw my own little wager as well. You"re the best man I ever met in any country. By the Lord! man, you broke the hold that I once saw an ex-guardsman killed at Singapore for resisting--broke his arm short off, and he died on the table. I"ve seen it at Tokio and Nagasaki--why, man, it"s the yellow policeman"s hold, the secret trick of the Orient. Done in proper time, and the little gentleman is the match of any size, yellow or white."
I did not understand him then, but later I knew that I had for my first time seen the Oriental art of wrestling put in practice. I do not want to meet a master in it again. I shook Orme by the hand.
"If you like to call it a draw," said I, "it would suit me mighty well.
You"re the best man I ever took off coat to in my life. And I"ll never wrestle you again unless"--I fear I blushed a little--"well, unless you want it."
"Game! Game!" he cried, laughing, and dusting off his knees. "I swear you Virginians are fellows after my own heart. But come, I think your friend wants you now."
We turned toward the room where poor Harry was mumbling to himself, and presently I loaded him into the wagon and told the negro man to drive him home.
For myself, I mounted Satan and rode off up the street of Wallingford toward Cowles" Farms with my head dropped in thought; for certainly, when I came to review the incidents of the morning, I had had enough to give me reason for reflection.
CHAPTER IV
WARS AND RUMORS OF WAR
We sent our carriage down to Wallingford that evening and had my new friend, Mr. Orme, out to Cowles" Farms for that night. He was a stranger in the land, and that was enough. I often think to-day how ready we were to welcome any who came, and how easily we might have been deceived as to the nature of such chance guests.
Yet Orme so finely conducted himself that none might criticise him, and indeed both my father and mother appeared fairly to form a liking for him. This was the more surprising on the part of both, since they were fully advised of the nature of his recent speech, or sermon, or what you choose to call it, at the Methodist church, the sentiments of which scarce jumped with their own. Both my parents accepted Orme for what he purported to be, a minister of the gospel; and any singularity of his conduct which they may have noticed they ascribed to his education in communities different from our own quiet one. I remember no acrimonious speech during his visit with us, although the doctrine which he had p.r.o.nounced and which now and again, in one form or another, he renewed, was not in accord with ours. I recall very well the discussions they had, and remember how formally my mother would begin her little arguments: "Friend, I am moved to say to thee"; and then she would go on to tell him gently that all men should be brothers, and that there should be peace on earth, and that no man should oppress his brother in any way, and that slavery ought not to exist.
"What! madam," Orme would exclaim, "this manner of thought in a Southern family!" And so he in turn would go on repeating his old argument of geography, and saying how England must side with the South, and how the South must soon break with the North. "This man Lincoln, if elected,"
said he, "will confiscate every slave in the Southern States. He will cripple and ruin the South, mark my words. He will cost the South millions that never will be repaid. I cannot see how any Virginian can fail to stand with all his Southern brothers, front to front against the North on these vital questions."
"I do not think the South would fight the North over slavery alone. The South loves the flag, because she helped create it as much or more than the North. She will not bear treason to the flag." Thus my father.
"It would be no treason," affirmed Orme, "but duty, if that flag became the flag of oppression. The Anglo-Saxon has from King John down refused to be governed unjustly and oppressively."
And so they went on, hour after hour, not bitterly, but hotly, as was the fashion all over the land at that time. My father remained a Whig, which put him in line, sometimes, with the Northern men then coming into prominence, such as Morrill of New England, and young Sherman from across the mountains, who believed in the tariff in spite of what England might say to us. This set him against the Jefferson clans of our state, who feared not a war with the North so much as one with Europe.
Already England was p.r.o.nouncing her course; yet those were not days of triumphant conclusions, but of doubtful weighing and hard judgment, as we in old Virginia could have told you, who saw neighbors set against each other, and even families divided among themselves.
For six years the war talk had been growing stronger. Those of the South recoiled from the word treason--it had a hateful sound to them--nor have they to this day justified its application to themselves. I myself believe to-day that that war was much one of geography and of lack of transportation. Not all the common folk of the North or of the South then knew that it was never so much a war of principle, as they were taught to think, but rather a war of self-interest between two clashing commercial parties. We did not know that the unscrupulous kings of the cotton world, here and abroad, were making deliberate propaganda of secession all over the South; that secession was not a thing voluntary and spontaneous, but an idea nourished to wrong growth by a secret and shrewd commercial campaign, whose nature and extent few dreamed, either then or afterward. It was not these rich and arrogant planters of the South, even, men like our kin in the Carolinas, men like those of the Sheraton family, who were the pillars of the Confederacy, or rather, of the secession idea. Back of them, enshrouded forever in darkness--then in mystery, and now in oblivion which cannot be broken--were certain great figures of the commercial world in this land and in other lands.
These made a victim of our country at that time, even as a few great commercial figures seek to do to-day, and we, poor innocent fools, flew at each other"s throats, and fought, and slew, and laid waste a land, for no real principle and to no gain to ourselves. Nothing is so easy to deceive, to hoodwink, to blind and betray, as a great and innocent people that in its heart loves justice and fair play.