AN ABIDING LOVE

THE woman who was a critical reader of magazines met her friend, the writer of stories, in the little railroad station at Mullins, in southern Indiana. The writer had just arrived from Indianapolis; the other was waiting the north-bound train.

“What have you come to this dull, lonely, forlorn place for? Not for literary material, surely? My grandmother lives here, and I have known the town all my life. Nothing romantic ever happened to anyone here; there are no incidents, no tragedies, no characters worth studying; the people simply vegetate.”

“I never hunt for ‘material’ anywhere,” replied the woman who wrote. “It comes to me—crowds itself on me. I have been sent for by an invalid cousin, and expect not to think of literary matters; but if I were searching for themes I have no doubt I could find them, even here.”

“I am sure you could not. What, for instance (here the speaker’s voice was lowered), what could you make out of that spiritless, meek, faded-out creature there? She is a resident here; I have seen her often, but she is so colorless I never had the curiosity to ask even her name. I am sure she never had a vivid emotion, never really lived in all her life.”

“Perhaps not,” laughed the writer, “but I believe she has a story. I will find it out and tell it to you.”

This is the story she told a month later:

Martin Davis did not look much like a man with æsthetic sentiment in his soul as he left his plow in the furrow that afternoon in early April and drove his tired horses up the lane. His face was weatherbeaten, his hands rough and hard, his clothing cheap and coarse, his high boots, into which his jeans trousers were tucked, caked with mud. But he was young and vigorous; his eyes were bright and eager, and he felt himself a man to be envied, for had he not a wife waiting for him at the house—a bride of but a few weeks? In the band of his rusty felt hat he had slipped a bunch of yellow violets.

“I knew ye liked posies, Lizzie,” he said as he handed them to her at the kitchen door, “and these are the first I’ve seen this season, ’thout it’s the little white windflowers that wilt while ye’re pickin’ them. These yellow things are way ahead of time. I’ve never found them before earlier than May; they’re not common hereabouts, anyhow, but I know of a spot down in the holler where they always flourish.”

When she put them in a teacup and set them on the supper table he wondered vaguely why he had never known before that flowers made a room look so cheerful—almost as if the sun were shining, though that luminary had sunk behind the western hill. He did not know that the brightness was not of the flowers, but was the light of love reflected from his heart and hers.

It was but a brief time that his happiness lasted. That was the spring of ’61, and the country was even then calling upon her loyal sons. Martin Davis turned his horses into the pasture, left his crops for others to harvest and went unhesitatingly to answer the call. Oh, the heroism of the myriads who thus went out from home, and peace, and love, to the battlefield in those dreadful years! What if they did not know that the ninety days would lengthen until no man could name the end, and that the slain would be like the leaves of the forest for numbers? What if they did go simply from a matter-of-fact sense of duty, and with little feeling of risk and danger, or because the riotous spirit of youth yearned for adventure? The fact remains—the tremendous, immutable fact—that they went by hundreds, by thousands, by tens and hundreds of thousands, and that they offered their lives. Greater love than this hath no man, and yet we, in this frivolous later day, dare sometimes speak lightly of those men and their sacrifices.

It was a monotonous and a hard life for the most part, that of a private soldier in the war for the Union. Its story has been told in fragments at home firesides and by campfires, but never in literature as a whole for the world to know. Perhaps it never will be. The veterans tell of battles and of victories and of stirring events, but they do not, as a class, care to dwell upon their hardships and sufferings. The experience cut deep, and the scars are even yet too sensitive to touch upon.

Martin Davis’s life was not different from the rest. There was the drill and the camp life, the picket duty, the marching, the digging of trenches and building of breastworks, the skirmishing, the expectation of encounters with the enemy—all this for slow and weary months, and at last a great battle.

Lizzie, the young wife at home, waited from week to week and month to month, as women did in those days, with what show of patience and composure they could muster—a proof of courage and patriotism not less than that of going to war. The soldiers’ story may sometimes be told, but where is the historian who shall portray the agony of the women’s waiting hearts, the suffering of uncertainty and suspense? Who shall comprehend the anguish of their tears? Who understand that the strain of constant dread of evil news from husband and brother and lover was greater than that felt by the soldier before the enemy’s guns—that it left unhealed scars that aged them before their time?

Lizzie Davis fared like the other women—hoping and praying, living upon the letters that came at irregular intervals, going about her tasks by day, with heavy heart, and enduring long nights with their visions of war and woe. In the little town from which the flower of the young men had already gone, existence was not gay at the best of times, and was now more monotonous than ever to the women, whose part was to wait. There were few things to distract their minds from their own anxieties; they were not the “new” women, with many and diverse activities, and so they sat at home and thought of what might be. Mrs. Davis did not love her husband more than the other lonely women loved theirs, perhaps; but without him she was quite alone in the world, and it was natural that no event of the war was important in which he had no place. That brawny private, that long-limbed, awkward farmer boy, was all the world to her. No future opened to her vision which he did not share. She was a commonplace little creature, narrow in thought and limited in capacity, but other and greater women have found it all of life to love one man.

Letters came to her from Tennessee now. Martin wrote that it looked as if some fighting would be done very soon that would scatter the rebels and end the war. Then came the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson, and he wrote with still greater certainty that the war was soon to close. Men better informed than he thought so then. After that there was marching across country, transportation by boat up the Tennessee, more marching, with rain and mud and cold as features of the travel—all this described in fragmentary scrawls. One of them, dated April 5th, and written on a scrap of paper while he stood in the rain with his company awaiting orders, said there would be fighting soon, and added: “Here’s a yellow violet; just found it under a bank. Season’s early down here. We’re going to beat the rebs out of their boots. Good-bye.”

This note, and then—silence. There had been a battle; it was Shiloh—bloody Shiloh. On its gory field, when the 7th of April dawned, the dead lay by thousands—the blue and the gray. Oh, Shiloh! the waiting hearts that broke when your victory was won!

Private Davis, of Company D, was numbered among the dead. A comrade wrote to Lizzie, telling her that Martin had died like a hero. A part of his regiment had faced about and retreated, broken in a panic before the Confederates’ furious onslaught; but he had remained, had seized the flag from the hand of the fleeing color-bearer and gone on triumphantly to meet the coming foe. In the thick of the fight he was seen to fall, “and,” said the writer, with no art at softening cruel truth, “he was buried in a trench.”

To the widow a realizing sense of the death did not come. It is often so when those away from home are taken; to their families they seem still temporarily absent and likely to return at any hour. She accepted the situation dumbly, uncomplainingly. She had no longer a keen interest in life, and was without the strength of character to rise above her grief and force herself to accept new interests. She was simply an every-day woman, who had loved her husband and continued to love and to think of him day and night, though he was dead. She sold her farm to a rich neighbor, who took advantage of her ignorance to pay her but half its value, and she was deprived of a large share of the proceeds by a sharper to whom she intrusted them for investment. Then she settled down in the little town and became a neighborhood drudge. She sewed, nursed the sick, took care of the new babies, and was at the beck and call of any housewife who needed her in domestic emergencies.

The years went on with little variety. The war ended, and affairs settled into new grooves. A flood of prosperity swept over the country and affected even this quiet town, but made little difference in Mrs. Davis’s plodding, uneventful existence. No one pitied her especially for her lonely and hard-working life. She was spoken of as “the widow Davis,” but she was only one among many widows the war had created, and, as she made no ado over her woes, no one else thought to do it for her. They had their own troubles to think of. They did say, along at first, that she didn’t take Mart’s death very hard. She “didn’t make no fuss,” they said, and they “’lowed” she was “ruther shaller.” Afterwards they practically forgot him, and assumed that she had done the same. But she never put off her simple mourning garb; her mouth fixed itself in a pathetic little droop; her brown hair faded early. And she would not marry again. Ten years after Shiloh, John Holt, a thrifty widower, attracted by her quiet, industrious ways, sought her as a step-mother for his children.

“No, Mr. Holt,” she said. “I can’t be your wife. Martin Davis is dead and buried, but I can’t make him seem dead nohow; I never have, an’ I don’t reckon I ever can. I feel as if he was gone jest on a trip; an’ I dream of him o’ nights, an’ I’m always glad when night comes, because them dreams come, too. I’ll go along by myself till the time comes for me to go and meet Martin—but it’s long, long!”

And then, her self-repression overcome by the sudden compassion in the man’s eyes, she bowed her head upon the table and sobbed and wept in the utter abandonment of a grief which knows no pretense.

John Holt went away thoughtful, and was afterwards heard to say it was a “sing’lar dispensation o’ Providence that took a man away from a wife like that an’ let other men live whose wives wouldn’t a-mourned for ’em over night if they’d drownded theirselves.”

More years went, until, one day, Mrs. Davis heard of an excursion that filled her patient soul with longing. This was a trip by boat to Shiloh battleground. She had never been further from home than to Cincinnati, fifty miles away, where she had gone once when a girl, but she determined to make this journey. It was a great undertaking, and she got ready for it with an excitement such as had not stirred her for years. She never thought of the South but as the rebels’ country, and, though she knew there were no rebels now, there was down in her heart a dull hatred of all Southerners, because but for them there would have been no war—but for a certain one of them who had fired a fatal shot she would not have been left in loneliness all these long years.

Men and women of the world who, through contact with people of many localities, have gained the ability to judge their fellow-beings dispassionately find it difficult to comprehend the limitations of one who has but a single point of view. Lizzie Davis had had but one great interest in life, and had never been able to consider the outside world in any other than its relation to herself.

The trip down the Ohio river, though novel, aroused no emotion; once on the Tennessee she began to brighten. Martin had made this journey not long before his death. The war, now so far past, was brought close to her. The battle seemed but a little while back. On the wooded bluffs she could almost see rebel skirmishers in hiding. Her meek, feminine soul, which had never before directed a cruel thought toward any individual, suddenly throbbed with fierce resentment; the slow, easy-going natives, who strolled down to the landings and leisurely carried their freight up the bank in primitive fashion, seemed to her to represent a bloodthirsty, murderous people. She eyed them malevolently.

One day the captain of the boat sat down by her side on the deck. He was a middle-aged man of slow, soft speech and gentle manner—as far removed from the typical bluff, gruff, profane, aggressive river man of literature as possible. He had already won Mrs. Davis’s confidence by his deferential courtesy and attentions to which she was a stranger at home. There no one was unkind, but certainly no one was noticeably considerate of the comfort of women, especially those of no particular importance. He narrated to her bits of history about the places along the river, with every foot of which he was familiar, and told anecdotes of the people, half of whom he seemed to know by their Christian names.

“How can you speak so kindly of them, an’ you a soldier, too?” she broke out at last. “Rebels I reckon they were, most of ’em, an’ killed our men, an’ would do it again if they had a chance.”

He turned to her slowly and without a sign of surprise; she was not a new type to him.

“Madam, these people along heah were mostly Union sympathizers during the wah. I was a soldier in the Confede’at ahmy.”

It was a shock. Ex-rebels had found their way to her little village since the war, but a good many sons had gone out from there to fight for the Union, and never to return, and those wanderers from the South were not made welcome, but had mostly drifted on to regions elsewhere in Indiana where were friends and sympathizers. She had never so much as talked with one before.

Then he told her, in a quiet, reminiscent way, some stories of his youth and his far Southern home; of how the South was then all the country he knew, and the North a far-off, cold region, whose people, he was taught, cared only to buy and sell, and to subjugate and rob the South; of how the war broke out and one by one his neighbors joined the army, then his brothers, and then himself, a boy of sixteen—all filled with fierce patriotism and the blind belief that they were fighting for the right; of how his brothers had been slain, and how he had gone home, when at last the conflict was over, to find that home dismantled, the mother who had been its center forever gone, and he, yet a boy in years, lonely, disheartened and forlorn.

It was a revelation to the woman of few ideas that rebels—rebels!—were creatures with loves and sorrows like her own.

And they went on up the shining river, and a little of the peace and beauty of it entered into her soul. It was May, and the fields and forests were in freshest array. The gray-green willows, the rank water maples and the glossy oaks that crowded the river bank were fringed with undergrowth, and their trunks lost in a tangle of honey-suckles, grape-vines and ivy. It was primitive wilderness, such as the Indian must have looked at in his day.

Then came Fort Henry. The boat, which stopped accommodatingly wherever a would-be traveler waived a handkerchief, obligingly made fast while passengers climbed the hill and wandered over the old earthworks that made the walls of that famous fort. In the glamour of the moonlight and the softness of the shadows could almost be seen the soldiers who had once crowded the place—but trees had grown up within the walls since that day, and the soldiers—where were they?

Then Pittsburg Landing and Shiloh, and the woman from the little Indiana town had reached her Mecca.

They wandered over the battlefield, those tourists; they saw it almost as it looked on the fatal Sunday so long ago, only to-day the sun shone, and then the very heavens had wept at the sight below. They saw the place where the fight was fiercest and most furious—the “Hornet’s Nest,” where Union men and Confederates met hand to hand and the slaughter was so great that the dead lay in heaps. They saw the pool whose margin had been red with the blood of wounded men who had dragged themselves there to quench their raging thirst. To-day cattle drank from it undisturbed.

There were houses here and there—primitive structures, hardly more than cabins. Mrs. Davis stopped at the door of one to ask for water. An old woman came out, a woman with a scant calico gown and clumsy shoes, and eyes blurred perhaps with age, possibly with tears, but kindly still. She grew garrulous in response to a timid question.

“Yes, she had lived hereabouts evah since befo’ the wah. She an’ her ole man was Union, but their six boys couldn’t no ways agree, an’ three j’ined the Union ahmy an’ three the Confede’at. An’, yes—yes, it’s all done ended long ago, but some days the time seems yistiddy, an’ it all comes back. Her ole man couldn’t keep out no ways when the boys was gone, an’ he jined, too, when General Sherman come along. An’—yes, the boys was all killed; three at Donelson, two here at Shiloh Church, an’ one at Chattanooga. Their pap didn’t live long after; sort o’ broke down like. An’ if it wasn’t that the boys who died here were buried in a Confede’at trench (did the visitor see the ridge over thataway?) she reckoned she’d disremembah which was Union an’ which wasn’t. Such things didn’t seem to make no difference, nohow, when they alls was gone to rest twel jedgment day.”

The woman who had lost one and the woman who had lost seven looked in each other’s eyes and knew the kinship of grief, and somehow the visitor from the North felt no longer a personal resentment for her loss. Though it might have been a son of this woman who shot her Martin, he had thought he was right and meant no evil.

Then she entered the gates of the National Cemetery, where the Union dead are laid in long lines, with a granite block marking each resting place. The captain of the boat joined her at the gate, and as he passed in he plucked a sprig of cedar. The sun shining through the branches of the great forest trees flecked the grass upon the graves; a soft May breeze scattered the leaves of the early blooming roses. Down between the rows of stones they walked, and the captain, pausing at one bearing the number 1607, lifted his hat reverently and laid the bit of cedar upon it.

“I put a little posy there every time I come,” he said gently; “I reckoned that may be the wife or mother of the boy lying there might like it.”

The man lying there might be her Martin, thought the little widow, and from that moment her heart ceased to cherish animosity toward any man who had fought on the other side.

She stood on the bluff and looked down on the sparkling, glinting river. The panorama of water and sky and hill stretching for miles before her was a vision fair to see. The flag of her country floated from the great staff above; the only sound was the singing of the birds, and the peace of God was over all.

More years went by, and the Widow Davis plodded patiently through them, getting a little more weary as they passed and finding the burden of loneliness none the easier to bear as age crept on. That visit to Shiloh had taught her some things, toleration among the rest, but it had also taken away one thing that had been a secret source of comfort to her. Until that time she had pictured to herself the return of her husband. She was a woman with but scant imaginative power, but where even the dullest mind dwells much upon one subject it weaves about it a network of fancy far different from reality. She had not seen her husband dead; a battle was a vague thing to her; he had simply gone away and had not come back. Perhaps he had been wounded, had lost a leg or an arm, and a prisoner in rebel hands was long in recovering. Then, perhaps—here her fancy took a wild leap—perhaps he was told by some one that she was dead, or that she, thinking him dead, had married again, though she didn’t quite see how he could believe she could marry another man. But such things had happened—she had read of them; and supposing he had believed it, he would wander away and never care to revisit his old home until, at last, he somehow learned the truth and hastened to her with joy. Or it might be that he had escaped from his rebel prison, had reached the sea-coast, had crept on board some foreign vessel, and had been carried to far-off lands, whence he would some day return.

Vain imaginings, but lonely women dream strange things while they go half mechanically about their monotonous daily tasks. Even the happiness of happy women is half in this unreal inner life. After this visit to Shiloh these comforting pictures were conjured up no more in Lizzie’s mind. It was all real now, the battle and the slaughter, and she had seen the graves where the soldiers lay; her thoughts centered about “1607,” where the captain’s tribute rested, and she felt more and more convinced that Martin slept beneath that stone. It was nearly thirty years, a lifetime, since he went, and he would come to her now only after heaven’s gate had opened to let her in. She had mourned her lost love for thirty years. She, a little, commonplace woman of whom no one would have thought as a heroine of romance. She would not have known what the term “grand passion” meant; she had been simply faithful to a memory in a quiet, undemonstrative way; her life had been bound up in a sentiment, that was all.

One day in April—it was the 30th Shiloh anniversary—she was at her little cottage, no neighbor needing her services as nurse or seamstress. It had been an early spring, and she went out in the garden to look at the signs of life among her few cherished flowers. In a sunny corner wild violets grew and had pushed green leaves above the mold, but no buds were yet in sight.

“I remember,” she said, speaking to a neighbor who had paused in passing, “I remember seeing violet flowers as early as this.”

She was thinking of those stuck in the band of Martin’s hat that day so long ago when he came from the field, and as she spoke she looked down the village street, wondering at the unusual boisterousness of the school children. They followed after and jeered at a man who came slowly and hesitatingly along, as if uncertain of his way. His clothing was rough, his shoulders bent and his gait shambling. On his head was a military cap, such as some old soldiers still insist upon wearing, and on its side was something like a decoration on a woman’s bonnet. It was this that made the children jeer. Mrs. Davis put her hand over her eyes and looked at it intently. Hardly knowing what she did, she went out upon the walk and down the street to meet him. When she came closer she saw that the decoration was a bunch of yellow violets. She stopped before the man and looked at him. She had never thought of her husband as other than erect, and strong, and young; this man was feeble, and dim-eyed, and old, but—she knew him.

“Martin!” she said; “Martin!” and reached out her hands, forgetful of watching neighbors and wondering children.

Something like a miracle happened in that moment. The years fell away from her as a garment; the flush in her cheek, the love light in her eyes transfigured her.

“Lizzie!” said the man, the dull, dazed expression clearing from his face. “Lizzie,” and he fumbled at his cap, “I—I thought ye’d like some posies, and came round by the holler and got them.”

She took him by the hand and led him into the house, her face still illumined.

The woman who wrote stories and the other who read them met again on the street of Mullins. Toward them came Lizzie Davis. She was the woman who had been at the station weeks before, but she was like one born again. Her hair was faded, it is true; her complexion gray, her dress old-fashioned and rusty, but her eyes were bright, her bearing erect and proud, her face smiling. She stopped a moment to speak to the woman who wrote.

“Just think, Miss,” she said; “Martin lived over in Jonesboro, just beyond the Ohio line, and not fifty miles from here, for twenty years. I’ve just seen a man from there. Where he had been before that time the Lord knows. The man says that they all knowed something was the matter with his head. Seemed to do his work well on the farm, but every now an’ then he’d get uneasy an’ talk an’ talk about some place he’d ought to go if he could only just think of the name; an’ when he heard any one call ‘Lizzie’ he always got worried and fidgety. Come spring, too, every year, he’d pick flowers an’ wear ’em in his hat. Then at last one day his recollection seemed to come to him sudden, and he up an’ started off, the man said, acting like a crazy lunatic. He found his way here, an’ he’s getting to be more like himself every day, an’ it almost seems as if he’d never been away.”

A glow was on her cheek like the blush of a bride; the thirty years of loneliness were as naught; the children that might have been hers, the happiness and peace she had missed were forgotten. The mother heart in her went out to the broken-down man and was satisfied. He came shuffling down the walk.

“See how well he looks,” she said, as she hastened toward him, with a face through which love shone as it must shine on the faces of the angels in heaven.

“You were wrong, you see,” softly said the woman who wrote, to her friend; “you were wrong when you declared there was no romance here; that the people merely vegetated. That woman has lived.”

“Yes,” said the other, “she has loved.”