A slightly cracked voice, yet a huskily tuneful one,
was lifted quaveringly on the air from the roadside,
where an old man and a yellow dog sat in the dust
together, the latter reprieved at the last moment,
his surprised head rakishly garnished with a hasty
wreath of dog-fennel daisies.
“John Brown’s body lies
a-mouldering in the ground,
While we go marching on!”
Three-quarters of an hour later, the inhabitants of
the Cross-Roads, saved, they knew not how; guilty;
knowing nothing of the fantastic pendulum of opinion,
which, swung by the events of the day, had marked the
fatal moment of guilt, now on others, now on them,
who deserved it—these natives and refugees,
conscious of atrocity, dumfounded by a miracle, thinking
the world gone mad, hovered together in a dark, ragged
mass at the crossing corners, while the skeleton of
the rotting buggy in the slough rose behind them against
the face of the west. They peered with stupified
eyes through the smoky twilight.
From afar, faintly through the gloaming, came mournfully
to their ears the many-voiced refrain—fainter,
fainter:
“John Brown’s body lies
a-mouldering in the ground, John Brown’s
body lies a-mouldering in the ground. John
Brown’s body lies—mould—
. . . . . we go march . . . . on.”
JERRY THE TELLER At midnight a small brougham stopped
at the gates of the city hospital in Rouen.
A short distance ahead, the lamps of a cab, drawn up
at the curbing, made two dull orange sparks under
the electric light swinging over the street.
A cigarette described a brief parabola as it was tossed
from the brougham, and a short young man jumped out
and entered the gates, then paused and spoke to the
driver of the cab.
“Did you bring Mr. Barrett here?”
“Yes, sir,” answered the driver; “him
and two other gentlemen.”
Lighting another cigarette, from which he drew but
two inspirations before he threw it away, the young
man proceeded quickly up the walk. As he ascended
the short flight of steps which led to the main doors,
he panted a little, in a way which suggested that
(although his white waistcoat outlined an ellipse
still respectable) a crescendo of portliness was playing
diminuendo with his youth. And, though his walk
was brisk, it was not lively. The expression
of his very red face indicated that his briskness
was spurred by anxiety, and a fattish groan he emitted
on the top step added the impression that his comfortable
body protested against the mental spur. In the
hall he removed his narrow-brimmed straw hat and presented
a rotund and amiable head, from the top of which his
auburn hair seemed to retire with a sense of defeat;
it fell back, however, not in confusion, but in perfect
order, and the sparse pink mist left upon his crown
gave, by a supreme effort, an effect of arrangement,
so that an imaginative observer would have declared
