Part 17 (2/2)
”Sincerely, R. W. GILDER.
”_P.S._--I could write more, but you will not need it from me.”
Truly, I was that other comrade whom Gilder overheard commending him, and it was I who gave him something to eat, I being the one in camp who looked specially after two or three of the youngest to see that they did not starve, and who doctored the invalids.
I here note, with all due diffidence, that Mr. Gilder chiefly remembers me as ”a splendid expressor of our miseries, with a magnificent vocabulary” wherewith to set forth fearful adversities. I have never been habitually loquacious in life; full many deem me deeply reticent and owl-like in my taciturnity, but I ”can hoot when the moon s.h.i.+nes,” nor is there altogether lacking in me in great emergencies a certain rude kind of popular eloquence, which has--I avow it with humility--enabled me invariably to hold my own in verbal encounters with tinkers, gypsies, and the like, among whom ”chaff” is developed to a degree of which few respectable people have any conception, and which attains to a refinement of sarcasm, _originality_, and humour in the London of the lower orders, for which there is no parallel in Paris, or in any other European capital; so that even among my earliest experiences I can remember, after an altercation with an omnibus-driver, he applied to me the popular remark that he was ”blessed if he didn't believe that the gemman had been takin' lessons in language hof a cab-driver, _and set up o' nights to learn_.” But the ingenious American is not one whit behind the vigorous Londoner in ”de elegant fluency of sa.s.s,” as darkies term it, and it moves my heart to think that, after thirty years, and after the marvellous experiences of men who are masters of our English tongue which the editor of the _Century_ must have had, he still retains remembrance of my oratory!
At last we were marched and railroaded back to Philadelphia. I need not say that we were welcome, or that I enjoyed baths, clean clothes, and the blest sensation of feeling decent once more. Everything in life seemed to be _luxurious_ as it had never been before. Luxuries are very conventional. A copy of Praetorius, for which I paid only fifteen s.h.i.+llings, was to me lately a luxury for weeks; so is a visit to a picture gallery. For years after, I had but to think of the Emergency to realise that I was actually in all the chief conditions of happiness.
Feeling that, although I was in superb health and strength, the seeds of typhoid were in me, I left town as soon as possible, and went with my wife, her sister, and two half-nieces, or nieces by marriage, and child- nephew, Edward Robins, to Cape May, a famous bathing-place by the ocean.
One of the little girls here alluded to, a Lizzie Robins, then six years of age, is now well known as Elizabeth Robins Pennell, and ”a writer of books,” while Edward has risen in journalism in Philadelphia. There as I walked often eighteen or twenty miles a day by the sea, when the thermometer was from 90 to 100 degrees in the shade, I soon worked away all apprehension of typhoid and developed muscle. One day I overheard a man in the next bathing-house asking who I was. ”I don't know,” replied the other, ”but if I were he, I'd go in for being a prize-fighter.”
Everybody was poor in those days, so we went to a very cheap though respectable hotel, where we paid less than half of what we had always given at ”The Island,” and where we were in company quite as happy or comfortable as we ever had been anywhere, though the death of her brother weighed sadly on my poor wife, and her dear good mother, whom I always loved tenderly, and with whom I never had a shade of difference of opinion nor a whisper of even argument, and to whom I was always devoted.
I seem to have been destined to differ from other mortals in a few things: one was, that I always loved my mother-in-law with whole heart and soul, and never considered our _menage_ as perfect unless she were with us. She was of very good and rather near English descent, a Callender, and had been celebrated in her youth for extraordinary beauty.
Her husband was related to the celebrated beauty Miss Vining, whom Maria Antoinette, from the fame of her loveliness, invited to come and join her court. At the beginning of this century no great foreigner travelled in America without calling on Miss Vining in Delaware. There is a life of her in Griswold's ”Republican Court.” It is without any ill.u.s.trative portrait. I asked Dr. Griswold why he had none. He replied that none existed. I said to him severely, ”Let _this_ be a lesson to you never to publish anything without submitting it first to _me_. I have a photograph of her miniature.” The Doctor submitted!
This summer at Cape May I made the acquaintance of a very remarkable man named Solomon. He was a Jew, and we became intimate. One evening he said to me: ”You know so much about the Jews that I have even learned something from you about them. But I can teach you something. Can you tell the difference between the _Aschken.a.z.im_ and the _Sephardim_ by their eyes? No! Well, now, look!” Just then a Spanish-looking beauty from New Orleans pa.s.sed by. ”There is Miss Inez Aguado; observe that the corners of her eyes are long with a peculiar turn. Wait a minute; now, there is Miss Lowenthal--Levi, of course--of Frankfort. Don't you see the difference?”
I did, and asked him to which of the cla.s.ses he belonged. He replied--
”To neither. I am of the sect of the ancient Sadducees, who took no part in the Crucifixion.”
Then I replied, ”You are of the _Karaim_.”
”No; that is still another sect or division, though very ancient indeed.
We never held to the Halacha, and we laugh at the Mishna and Talmud and all that. We do not believe or disbelieve in a G.o.d--Yahveh, or the older Elohim. We hold that every man born knows enough to do what is right; and that is religion enough. After death, if he has acted up to this, he will be all right should there be a future of immortality; and if he hasn't, he will be none the worse off for it. We are a very small sect.
We call ourselves the _Neu Reformirte_. We have a place of wors.h.i.+p in New York.”
This was the first agnostic whom I had ever met. I thought of the woman in Jerusalem who ran about with the torch to burn up heaven and the water to extinguish h.e.l.l-fire. Yes, the sect was very old. The Sadducees never denied anything; they only inquired as to truth. Seek or _Sikh_!
I confess that Mr. Solomon somewhat weakened the effect of his grand free- thought philosophy by telling me in full faith of a Rabbi in New York who was so learned in the Cabala that by virtue of the sacred names he could recover stolen goods. Whether, like Browning's sage, he also received them, I did not learn. But _c'est tout comme chez nous autres_. The same spirit which induces a man to break out of orthodox humdrumness, induces him to love the marvellous, the forbidden, the odd, the wild, the droll--even as I do. It is not a fair saying that ”atheists are all superst.i.tious, which proves that a man must _believe_ in something.” No; it is the spirit of nature, of inquiry, of a desire for the new and to penetrate the unknown; and under such influence a man may truly be an atheist as regards what he cannot prove or reconcile with universal love and mercy, and yet a full believer that magic and ghosts may possibly exist among the infinite marvels and mysteries of nature. It is admitted that a man may believe in G.o.d without being superst.i.tious; it is much truer that he may be ”superst.i.tious” (whatever that means) without believing that there is an anthropomorphic _bon Dieu_. However this may be, Mr. Solomon made me reflect often and deeply for many a long year, until I arrived to the age of Darwin.
I also made at Cape May the acquaintance of a very remarkable man, whom I was destined to often meet in other lands in after years. This was Carrol (not as yet General) Tevis. We first met thus. The ladies wanted seats out on the lawn, and there was not a chair to be had. He and I were seeking in the hotel-office; all the clerks were absent, and all the chairs removed; but there remained a solid iron sofa or settee, six feet long, weighing about 600 pounds. Tevis was strong, and a great fencer; there is a famous _botte_ which he invented, bearing his name; perhaps Walter H. Pollock knows it. I gave the free-lance or _condottiero_ a glance, and proposed to prig the iron sofa and lay waste the enemy. It was a deed after his Dugald Dalgetty heart, and we carried it off and seated the ladies.
In the autumn there was a vast Sanitary Fair for the benefit of the army hospitals held in Philadelphia. I edited for it a daily newspaper called _Our Daily Fare_, which often kept me at work for eighteen hours per diem, and in doing which I was subjected to much needless annoyance and mortification. At this Fair I saw Abraham Lincoln.
It was about this time that the remarkable oil fever, or mania for speculating in oil-lands, broke out in the United States. Many persons had grown rich during the war, and were ready to speculate. Its extent among all cla.s.ses was incredible. Perhaps the only parallel to it in history was the Mississippi Bubble or the South Sea speculations, and these did not collectively employ so much capital or call out so much money as this petroleum mania. It had many strange social developments, which I was destined to see in minute detail.
My first experience was not very pleasant. A publisher in New York asked me to write him a humorous poem on the oil mania. It was to be large enough to make a small volume. I did so, and in my opinion wrote a good one. It cost me much time and trouble. When it was done, the publisher _refused to take it_, saying that it was not what he wanted. So I lost my labour or _oleum perdidi_.
I had two young friends named Colton, who had been in the war from the beginning to the end, and experienced its changes to the utmost. Neither was over twenty-one. William Colton, the elder, was a captain in the regular cavalry, and the younger, Baldwin, was his orderly. It was a man in the Captain's company, named Yost, who furnished the type of Hans Breitmann as a soldier. The brothers told me that one day in a march in Tennessee, not far from Murfreesboro', they had found petroleum in the road, and thought it indicated the presence of oil-springs. I mentioned this to Mr. Joseph Lea, a merchant of Philadelphia. He was the father of Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt, who has since become a very distinguished artist, well known in England, being the first lady painter from whom the British Government ever bought a picture. Mr. Lea thought it might be worth some expense to investigate this Tennessee oil. I volunteered to go, if my expenses were paid, and it was agreed to. It is difficult at the present day to give any reader a clear idea of the dangers and trouble which this undertaking involved, and I was fully aware beforehand what they would be. The place was on the border, in the most disorganised state of society conceivable, and, in fact, completely swarming with guerillas or brigands, _sans merci_, who simply killed and stripped everybody who fell into their hands. All over our border or frontier there are innumerable families who have kept up feuds to the death, or _vendettas_, in some cases for more than a century; and now, in the absence of all civil law, these were engaged in wreaking their old grudges without restraint, and a.s.suredly not sparing any stranger who came between them.
I had a friend in C. A. Dana, the a.s.sistant-Secretary of War, and another in Colonel Henry Olcott, since known as the theosophist. The latter had just come from the country which I proposed to visit. I asked him to aid me in getting military pa.s.ses and introductions to officers in command.
He promised to do so, saying that he would not go through what I had before me for all the oil in America. {274} And, indeed, one could not take up a newspaper without finding full proof that Tennessee was at that time an _inferno_ or No-man's Land of disorder.
I went to it with my eyes wide open. After so many years of work, I was as poor as ever, and the seven years of harvest which I had prophesied had come, and I was not gathering a single golden grain. My father regarded me as a failure in life, or as a literary ne'er-do-weel, destined never to achieve fortune or gain an _etat_, and he was quite right. My war experience had made me reckless of life, and speculation was firing every heart. I bought myself a pair of long, strong, overall boots and blanket, borrowed a revolver, arranged money affairs with Mr.
Lea, who always acted with the greatest generosity, intelligence, and kindness, packed my carpet-bag, and departed. It was midwinter, and I was destined for a wintry region, or Venango County, where, until within the past few months, there had been many more bears and deer than human beings. For it was in Venango, Pennsylvania, that the oil-wells were situated, and Mr. Lea judged it advisable that I should first visit them and learn something of the method of working, the geology of the region, and other practical matters.
My brother accompanied me to the station, and I left at about 8 p.m.
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