Murther and Walking Spirits Read online

  Mrs. Gage is not so confident. She is not English. She was Anna Vermuelen before she met and fell deeply in love with the Major, and her Old New York Dutch blood sometimes runs a little coldly in her veins when she talks with her Dutch gossips over the morning coffee, for they hear things the British seem not to hear, or at any rate to heed. Downstairs in the parlour there is a fine print of King George III, splendidly uniformed and supremely confident, and the children respect it almost as a holy image, but Anna knows from her un-British cronies that there are rumours that the King is concerned about what his ministers are doing in the American Colonies, and that there is a substantial pro-American faction in London, and even in Parliament, which urges that the grievances of the Colonies be heard.

  Of course many of the grievances are all my eye and Betty Martin (Anna has picked up this soldiers’ phrase from her husband and likes to use it to show how thoroughly British she has become) and were stirred up by rogues like the notorious smuggler John Hancock and that untrustworthy lawyer Sam Adams, But there are other grievances that are not so easily set aside.

  (5)

  THERE IS NOT much open talk of these grievances or what ill-will they are causing among the New York people the Gages know, until one Sunday morning when the Reverend Cephas Willoughby speaks of them from the pulpit of Trinity Church, which is the foremost English church in New York. The Gages have a pew and on Sunday mornings they make quite a procession as they go there; the two older children, Roger and Elizabeth, walk first, trying to move as their dancing master instructs, erect yet easy, and with a somewhat duck-like placing of the feet; after them come the Major and his handsome wife, a splendid pair whose deportment is a joy to those who are connoisseurs of such matters; then come the two black women, Emmeline and Chloe, the latter carrying baby Hannah – she is three – in a handsome Turkey shawl; and bringing up the rear the footman, porter and odd-job man James, in a good brown coat (formerly the Major’s) and carrying all the prayer-books. When they reach the portico of Trinity they greet any friends in subdued, Sunday tones, before they go to their pew, a box-like affair in which they can enjoy some privacy, and are to be seen with ease only by the clergyman when he mounts his pulpit. There are many of these boxes, and they command a respectable yearly rental; poorer folk sit further back in the church, in free seats. The church is eminently respectable, eminently English, eminently Tory, and the service it offers is bland and the music excellent. But today the parson is anything but bland.

  He takes his text from Jude, the sixteenth verse: These are murmurers, complainers, walking after their own lusts; and their mouth speaketh great swelling words, having men’s persons in admiration because of advantage. The Reverend Cephas Willoughby makes no bones about the modern exemplars of this wickedness; they are Bostonians, almost to a man. And Boston is a high-stomached city. Their pretensions are noble, but their trade is treachery. Some among them are well-known smugglers, whose wealth lifts them above easy criticism; some are lawyers who would twist the law to their own advantage. They are the filthy dreamers who despise dominion and speak evil of dignities. They would rouse the good people of the American Colonies against the King and the King’s laws – yes, and the King’s taxes, which have repeatedly been shown to be just imposts, meant to pay the cost of protecting the Colonies against many enemies. These speak evil of things which they know not – or rather, which they pretend they know not; but what they know naturally – which is to say from the impulses of their own dark and greedy hearts – they know as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves – and would corrupt those whose ignorance disposes them to such corruption.

  As a preacher, the Reverend Cephas Willoughby labours under a weight of scholarship which sometimes rests heavily on his parishioners; he has been known to harangue them for two long hours, measured by the sand-glass which stands upon his pulpit, on some obscure point of doctrine. But today he is brief and vehement and his flock are all ears. Can Mr. Willoughby truly be speaking of what, from the pulpit, should surely be unspeakable, so long as it can be kept in the realm of whispered confidence and familiar gossip? Indeed that is what Mr. Willoughby is doing. The Church intervening in politics? Is it proper?

  Having made it plain that he intends to talk about the revolutionary discontent that everybody fears, but which has so far not appeared openly in New York, Mr. Willoughby takes a deep and indignant breath as he settles to his task.

  What lies behind these murmurings, which are now growing to the pitch of clamourings? Rebellion? Certainly. But rebellion must have a cause, and its cause is not complaint against taxes, and the cost of England’s standing army of seventeen regiments in the American Colonies. It is not the popular cry of No Taxation Without Representation. It is not the cost of maintaining the various colonial governors, for without them who would mediate between our own elected representatives and our King in London? These are the matters the murmurers and complainers talk of so impudently and contentiously, but the real cause lies deeper.

  It lies in the heart of man, where many evil things have their abode and where for a time they may prevail, when the Prince of Darkness gains a supremacy. It was in the heart of Cain that the Evil Prince found a foothold, when Cain rebelled and struck down his worthy brother Abel. And was not Cain abundant in excuses, saying Am I my brother’s keeper? Do not these wicked men who seek to mislead us say the same? Am I to give my help in Britain’s wars with France and Spain? What are they to me? Am I not sufficient unto myself? Dearly beloved, it is not the murmurers and complainers who speak from their own hearts in their tempestuous words. It is the voice of Cain, and through Cain, the Dark Angel himself. It is the Dark Angel who in our America would set brother against brother, and subject against King.

  Dearly beloved, I speak a terrible truth unto you: Cain is raised in our midst! Cain is raised, and until Cain is laid again we shall know no peace, in this land which our God has so richly framed for peace. Cain is raised, I say to you! Cain is raised!

  The sermon was a great subject of talk at Sunday dinner tables, and not only among Mr. Willoughby’s own parishioners. News of it spread through New York so rapidly that by Sunday evening Presbyterians and Lutherans, yes, even Quakers, were thinking of Cain. For it was better to blame Cain, who was not known in New York, than to blame Patrick Henry, who was, and who had said for anyone to hear that Caesar had his Brutus, and Charles I his Cromwell, and that George III might learn from their example. True, King George was in London, and Patrick Henry was in Virginia, and something must be attributed to the professional loud mouth of the lawyer, but such talk was evil and an incitement to simple folk who did not understand statesmanship. The spectre of Cain seemed to enclose and explain so many things that were whispered of at the coffee meetings. Good wives like Anna were not expected to understand them, but they understood Cain, or thought they did.

  “Mamma, what is a bloody-back?” asks Elizabeth when her father is not in the room.

  “It is a wicked name for a soldier, my darling, because of his red coat.”

  “They call them lobsters, and red herrings, too,” said Roger.

  “You must not heed them. They will be glad to see the red coat when the Indians come. As they may at any minute, if you do not go to your beds at once.”

  But Roger knows that “bloody-back” means also the soldier who is strapped to the triangle made of four halberds, and flogged for some misdemeanour. Twenty lashes is common; three hundred lashes had been heard of, laid on by a stout drummer. Before the offender is released a pail of brine from the cookhouse is thrown over his bleeding back, to cleanse and heal the cuts. A first-rate soldier, apt for promotion, bears no marks of the cat-o’-nine-tails, but a ruffian, fit for nothing but the lowest service, might have a back that was as rough and furrowed as a farmer’s field. The brutality of this punishment is turned against the soldiers by the colonists, whose own choice of correction is tarring and feathering.

  As I watch this, I understand that the film-
makers, whoever they may be, are taking their acknowledged liberty of compressing the action of months and years into a few scenes. But now actions appear that have a date. Here is the Boston Massacre, as long ago as 1770, but the bitterness has grown with time; the British had fired into an unarmed mob – which they should not have done, but which armed men with nervous officers have done since the invention of fire-arms, and will do again – and although the damage was slight, and only five people were killed, one was the egregious Crispus Attucks, and their funeral was a great occasion of rebellious feeling. Indeed, the British captain was tried for murder, and acquitted, for many people had the uneasy feeling that they might behave no better, if they were in the accused man’s shoes. But feeling in Boston is very bad, and it is there, in 1775, that real fighting breaks out.

  (6)

  BEFORE THE Major marched off to fight at Breed’s Hill (which should have been Bunker Hill if William Prescott had not chosen the other one, a choice which the voice of popular history has since reversed) he enjoyed one night of especial pleasure, the sort of pleasure he truly relished. For, although he was an excellent family man and did his family duty with satisfaction, the Major liked nothing better than an evening among his fellow officers, where there was plenty to eat and drink, plenty of the kind of conversation that most refreshed him, and often some entertainment of the sort that military men most enjoy.

  It is thus I see him the night before his regiment leaves New York for Boston; he goes to the King’s Arms in Maiden Lane where, in an upper room, more than fifty fellow officers are gathered for a supper of oysters, lobsters, clams, roast beef (of course), roast mutton, and such trifles as hare and pigeon pie, and turkey, with everything that such dishes demand in the way of garnish, to be washed down with claret, iced hock, Madeira and port, which were probably smuggled, though the officers do not care to hear about it.

  It is a great evening, given particular savour by the thought that at last British troops will be getting some serious work, and will undoubtedly vanquish the American greenhorns. They will not hurt them more than may be necessary, but certainly they will show the rebels that high-stomached Boston is no match for men raised on true British beef and beer. Just as they had shown the French at Quebec. They remember the song of that time:

  With lantern jaw and croaking gut

  See how the starveling Frenchmen strut

  And call us English dogs.

  But we shall show those braggart foes

  That beef and beer give heavier blows

  Than soup and roasted frogs.

  They had shown the Mounseers who was who and what was what, and it had cost Old England many millions of pounds to do it. And for what? To protect ungrateful Boston and let the Redskins know the true rulers of America. Let them pay their score, and stop their plagued whining about Stamp Tax, and Sugar Tax. What is the Stamp Tax? An ingenious fellow has worked out that it costs the two million Americans about a penny apiece each month. Can safety come cheaper? This is the tenor of the talk of these happy officers, and they play their familiar tunes over and over without ever tiring of them.

  The Major sits at the head of the table, for though his seniority might have been questioned, his name is Gage, and in some mystical way he seems to figure as the Commander-in-Chief. At the other end of the table – Mr. Vice to his Mr. President – sits Major Featherstone, a much decorated officer and a wit in the military understanding of the term.

  Toasts are drunk, with less formality than if it had been a fully regimental occasion. It is Gage’s privilege to propose the loyal toast: “His Majesty King George the Third,” and bumpers are emptied. To Featherstone falls the honour of proposing the toast to Queen Charlotte, which would not have been the case if the officers had been in the mess. No lady’s name must be mentioned in the mess. But here the Queen’s name is woven by Featherstone into a rhapsody to Woman, or, as he says frequently, The Sex. Without The Sex man’s life is but vain, his valour without an inspiration, his hours of ease without sweetness. Without The Sex Mars’s sword is unavailing, and Apollo’s lyre unstrung. He gives them The Sex. And the officers drink to The Sex with loud acclaim; a retired Colonel, who is not going to Boston on the morrow, falls under his chair from the weight of his emotion, and has to be picked up by a couple of waiters.

  A great evening! Oh, a memorable evening, and when everything has been eaten and there is still much to be drunk, some entertainment has been promised. Ensign Larkin is present; although his rank is inferior to that of the other guests his voice is indispensable. It is a very high tenor, a male alto, and he is an adept at florid ornamentation. Furthermore, he is a dab at the spinet and a good spinet stands at one end of the room. It is the object of many excellent jokes, for above the keyboard it is inscribed Harris of Boston, and it is both paradoxical and very proper that it should supply music for those who will shortly show Boston who is who and what is what.

  Larkin, who is a pretty youth, sings as prettily as he looks and, although the officers do not know it, I the onlooker know that when he sings the popular air “Anacreon in Heaven” the tune is the one which will later become famous as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But this evening it is only one of many favourites, not as rapturously received as “When forc’d from dear Hebe to go,” the verses of which Larkin ornaments so richly that the tune is almost wholly obscured. The pathos of the final line –

  If Hebe approves of my lay

  Go poets and envy my song

  – brings tears to the eyes of several scarred veterans who, like so many men of war, are touched to the heart by the songs of peace.

  But Featherstone and the gifted Larkin have a surprise for the company, and as they are settling to an evening of drinking and singing – several attempts have been made to lure Larkin into “Rule, Britannia” – the door opens and an extraordinary figure appears: a raw-boned gandershanks of a boy with one foot bare and the other thrust into a decayed soldier’s boot, his breeches out at the seat, so that a tail of his red shirt hangs almost to the ground, wearing a tricorne hat with the flaps unbuttoned, but with a huge bunch of ribbon stuck to it, like a cockade. At his side dangles a monstrous sabre that clanks upon the ground; he carries a rifle that cannot be identified, but which might have been meant to shoot squirrels, with an immensely elongated barrel and a bayonet made from a rusted scythe. He leers slowly at the company, taking them all in with a looby stare, before he spits a good half-pint of tobacco juice on the floor, allowing some of it to dribble down his chin.

  “Aw, here ye be, sirries,” he cries, in a raucous version of the Colonial accent. “I wuz expectin’ ye to Bahston, but ye never come yit. We’re a-waitin’ fur ye, to be sure. But so’s I found ye, I’ll sing ye a little song.”

  By now he has made his way up the room, where he salutes farcically toward Major Gage, and then goes on to the spinet. Larkin strikes up a tune, unfamiliar to most of the officers, and with words that they have never heard.

  Me and feyther went to camp

  Along ’ith Captain Goodin’

  And there we seen the men and boys

  As thick as hasty puddin.’

  And here the scarecrow breaks into a clownish dance –

  Yankee Doodle, kep it up

  Yankee Doodle Dandy,

  Mind the music, mind the step

  And with the girls be handy

  Several verses follow, some of them so scurrilous that a few of the officers wonder if they should laugh, concluding –

  In Bahston was a shoal o’ men

  A-diggin’ graves they told me

  So ’tarnal long, so ’tarnal deep

  They ’tended they should hold me.

  Then, in clod-hopping retreat –

  It skeert me so I hooked it off,

  Nor stopped as I remember,

  Nor turned about till I got home

  Locked up in mother’s chamber.

  By this time the officers have mastered the chorus, and “Yankee Doodle” is sung again
and again, as the actor – a junior officer who had gained some reputation as a comic countryman in regimental theatricals – goes through a drill of arms, in which he drops his sword, tumbles over his shirt-tail, and at last discharges his absurd gun, from which shoots a mass of chicken feathers.

  Yankee Doodle is the hit of the evening. The officers are transported. This is the enemy as they think of him. He is toasted as a mighty fellow, and plied with wine, which he drinks after he has impaled his quid of tobacco on his bayonet, until he pretends to fall in a stupor.

  Anything after this is anticlimax, even the rousing rendition of “Rule, Britannia,” in which Larkin almost destroys the Boston spinet.

  It is not many days later that the British vanquish Yankee Doodle at Breed’s Hill, without heavy losses. But one who does not survive the battle is Major Gage. So ’tarnal long, so ’tarnal deep, the grave is not all for Yankee Doodle.

  Perhaps the Major had been expected to bear too much responsibility, because of the accident that his name was the same as that of the British Commander-in-Chief. Such follies do happen, in war and everywhere else; a name is more important than unimaginative people suppose. But the Major is dead, and the family in John Street, New York, sees the face of Cain in its desolating loss.

  (7)

  IT APPEARS WE are to have an intermission, for The Spirit of ’76 has come to a rowdy conclusion with George Washington, and the Stars and Stripes, and a young woman who is probably meant to represent Freedom all tumbled together in a mélange which film buffs like Going greet with excitement as a very early use of this technique. They talk about it in the foyer, where the inevitable collation has been prepared, and every ticket-holder is entitled to one drink of very thin white wine and one very thin white sandwich, as long as they last. But these early films are brief affairs of a few reels, and as soon as the food has been devoured the audience huddles back into the smelly auditorium to see another retrieved classic about revolution, which is the theme of the day. It is familiar to many of those present, for it is the famous Battleship Potemkin of 1925, which the truly knowing ones like Going call Bronenosets Potemkin. He pronounces it slushily in what he believes to be a truly Russian manner.