CHAPTER V — GENERAL ALISON TO MERCEDES
She has been with us a good nice long time, now. You are troubled about your sprite because this is such a wild frontier, hundreds of miles from civilization, and peopled only by wandering tribes of savages? You fear for her safety? Give yourself no uneasiness about her. Dear me, she’s in a nursery! and she’s got more than eighteen hundred nurses. It would distress the garrison to suspect that you think they can’t take care of her. They think they can. They would tell you so themselves. You see, the Seventh Cavalry has never had a child of its very own before, and neither has the Ninth Dragoons; and so they are like all new mothers, they think there is no other child like theirs, no other child so wonderful, none that is so worthy to be faithfully and tenderly looked after and protected. These bronzed veterans of mine are very good mothers, I think, and wiser than some other mothers; for they let her take lots of risks, and it is a good education for her; and the more risks she takes and comes successfully out of, the prouder they are of her. They adopted her, with grave and formal military ceremonies of their own invention — solemnities is the truer word; solemnities that were so profoundly solemn and earnest, that the spectacle would have been comical if it hadn’t been so touching. It was a good show, and as stately and complex as guard-mount and the trooping of the colors; and it had its own special music, composed for the occasion by the bandmaster of the Seventh; and the child was as serious as the most serious war-worn soldier of them all; and finally when they throned her upon the shoulder of the oldest veteran, and pronounced her “well and truly adopted,” and the bands struck up and all saluted and she saluted in return, it was better and more moving than any kindred thing I have seen on the stage, because stage things are make-believe, but this was real and the players’ hearts were in it.
It happened several weeks ago, and was followed by some additional solemnities. The men created a couple of new ranks, thitherto unknown to the army regulations, and conferred them upon Cathy, with ceremonies suitable to a duke. So now she is Corporal-General of the Seventh Cavalry, and Flag-Lieutenant of the Ninth Dragoons, with the privilege (decreed by the men) of writing U.S.A. after her name! Also, they presented her a pair of shoulder-straps — both dark blue, the one with F. L. on it, the other with C. G. Also, a sword. She wears them. Finally, they granted her the salute. I am witness that that ceremony is faithfully observed by both parties — and most gravely and decorously, too. I have never seen a soldier smile yet, while delivering it, nor Cathy in returning it.
Ostensibly I was not present at these proceedings, and am ignorant of them; but I was where I could see. I was afraid of one thing — the jealousy of the other children of the post; but there is nothing of that, I am glad to say. On the contrary, they are proud of their comrade and her honors. It is a surprising thing, but it is true. The children are devoted to Cathy, for she has turned their dull frontier life into a sort of continuous festival; also they know her for a stanch and steady friend, a friend who can always be depended upon, and does not change with the weather.
She has become a rather extraordinary rider, under the tutorship of a more than extraordinary teacher — BB, which is her pet name for Buffalo Bill. She pronounces it beeby. He has not only taught her seventeen ways of breaking her neck, but twenty-two ways of avoiding it. He has infused into her the best and surest protection of a horseman — confidence. He did it gradually, systematically, little by little, a step at a time, and each step made sure before the next was essayed. And so he inched her along up through terrors that had been discounted by training before she reached them, and therefore were not recognizable as terrors when she got to them. Well, she is a daring little rider, now, and is perfect in what she knows of horsemanship. By-and-by she will know the art like a West Point cadet, and will exercise it as fearlessly. She doesn’t know anything about side-saddles. Does that distress you? And she is a fine performer, without any saddle at all. Does that discomfort you? Do not let it; she is not in any danger, I give you my word.
You said that if my heart was old and tired she would refresh it, and you said truly. I do not know how I got along without her, before. I was a forlorn old tree, but now that this blossoming vine has wound itself about me and become the life of my life, it is very different. As a furnisher of business for me and for Mammy Dorcas she is exhaustlessly competent, but I like my share of it and of course Dorcas likes hers, for Dorcas “raised” George, and Cathy is George over again in so many ways that she brings back Dorcas’s youth and the joys of that long-vanished time. My father tried to set Dorcas free twenty years ago, when we still lived in Virginia, but without success; she considered herself a member of the family, and wouldn’t go. And so, a member of the family she remained, and has held that position unchallenged ever since, and holds it now; for when my mother sent her here from San Bernardino when we learned that Cathy was coming, she only changed from one division of the family to the other. She has the warm heart of her race, and its lavish affections, and when Cathy arrived the pair were mother and child in five minutes, and that is what they are to date and will continue. Dorcas really thinks she raised George, and that is one of her prides, but perhaps it was a mutual raising, for their ages were the same — thirteen years short of mine. But they were playmates, at any rate; as regards that, there is no room for dispute.
Cathy thinks Dorcas is the best Catholic in America except herself. She could not pay any one a higher compliment than that, and Dorcas could not receive one that would please her better. Dorcas is satisfied that there has never been a more wonderful child than Cathy. She has conceived the curious idea that Cathy is twins, and that one of them is a boy-twin and failed to get segregated — got submerged, is the idea. To argue with her that this is nonsense is a waste of breath — her mind is made up, and arguments do not affect it. She says:
“Look at her; she loves dolls, and girl-plays, and everything a girl loves, and she’s gentle and sweet, and ain’t cruel to dumb brutes — now that’s the girl-twin, but she loves boy-plays, and drums and fifes and soldiering, and rough-riding, and ain’t afraid of anybody or anything — and that’s the boy-twin; ‘deed you needn’t tell me she’s only one child; no, sir, she’s twins, and one of them got shet up out of sight. Out of sight, but that don’t make any difference, that boy is in there, and you can see him look out of her eyes when her temper is up.”
Then Dorcas went on, in her simple and earnest way, to furnish illustrations.
“Look at that raven, Marse Tom. Would anybody befriend a raven but that child? Of course they wouldn’t; it ain’t natural. Well, the Injun boy had the raven tied up, and was all the time plaguing it and starving it, and she pitied the po’ thing, and tried to buy it from the boy, and the tears was in her eyes. That was the girl-twin, you see. She offered him her thimble, and he flung it down; she offered him all the doughnuts she had, which was two, and he flung them down; she offered him half a paper of pins, worth forty ravens, and he made a mouth at her and jabbed one of them in the raven’s back. That was the limit, you know. It called for the other twin. Her eyes blazed up, and she jumped for him like a wild-cat, and when she was done with him she was rags and he wasn’t anything but an allegory. That was most undoubtedly the other twin, you see, coming to the front. No, sir; don’t tell me he ain’t in there. I’ve seen him with my own eyes — and plenty of times, at that.”
“Allegory? What is an allegory?”
“I don’t know, Marse Tom, it’s one of her words; she loves the big ones, you know, and I pick them up from her; they sound good and I can’t help it.”
“What happened after she had converted the boy into an allegory?”
“Why, she untied the raven and confiscated him by force and fetched him home, and left the doughnuts and things on the ground. Petted him, of course, like she does with every creature. In two days she had him so stuck after her that she — well, you know how he follows her everywhere, and sets on her shoulder often when she rides her breakneck rampages — all of which is the girl-twin to the front, you see — and he does what he pleases, and is up to all kinds of devilment, and is a perfect nuisance in the kitchen. Well, they all stand it, but they wouldn’t if it was another person’s bird.”
Here she began to chuckle comfortably, and presently she said:
“Well, you know, she’s a nuisance herself, Miss Cathy is, she is so busy, and into everything, like that bird. It’s all just as innocent, you know, and she don’t mean any harm, and is so good and dear; and it ain’t her fault, it’s her nature; her interest is always a-working and always red-hot, and she can’t keep quiet. Well, yesterday it was ‘Please, Miss Cathy, don’t do that’; and, ‘Please, Miss Cathy, let that alone’; and, ‘Please, Miss Cathy, don’t make so much noise’; and so on and so on, till I reckon I had found fault fourteen times in fifteen minutes; then she looked up at me with her big brown eyes that can plead so, and said in that odd little foreign way that goes to your heart,
“‘Please, mammy, make me a compliment.”
“And of course you did it, you old fool?”
“Marse Tom, I just grabbed her up to my breast and says, ‘Oh, you po’ dear little motherless thing, you ain’t got a fault in the world, and you can do anything you want to, and tear the house down, and yo’ old black mammy won’t say a word!’”
“Why, of course, of course — I knew you’d spoil the child.”
She brushed away her tears, and said with dignity:
“Spoil the child? spoil that child, Marse Tom? There can’t anybody spoil her. She’s the king bee of this post, and everybody pets her and is her slave, and yet, as you know, your own self, she ain’t the least little bit spoiled.” Then she eased her mind with this retort: “Marse Tom, she makes you do anything she wants to, and you can’t deny it; so if she could be spoilt, she’d been spoilt long ago, because you are the very worst! Look at that pile of cats in your chair, and you sitting on a candle-box, just as patient; it’s because they’re her cats.”
If Dorcas were a soldier, I could punish her for such large frankness as that. I changed the subject, and made her resume her illustrations. She had scored against me fairly, and I wasn’t going to cheapen her victory by disputing it. She proceeded to offer this incident in evidence on her twin theory:
“Two weeks ago when she got her finger mashed open, she turned pretty pale with the pain, but she never said a word. I took her in my lap, and the surgeon sponged off the blood and took a needle and thread and began to sew it up; it had to have a lot of stitches, and each one made her scrunch a little, but she never let go a sound. At last the surgeon was so full of admiration that he said, ‘Well, you are a brave little thing!’ and she said, just as ca’m and simple as if she was talking about the weather, ‘There isn’t anybody braver but the Cid!’ You see? it was the boy-twin that the surgeon was a-dealing with.
“Who is the Cid?”
“I don’t know, sir — at least only what she says. She’s always talking about him, and says he was the bravest hero Spain ever had, or any other country. They have it up and down, the children do, she standing up for the Cid, and they working George Washington for all he is worth.”
“Do they quarrel?”
“No; it’s only disputing, and bragging, the way children do. They want her to be an American, but she can’t be anything but a Spaniard, she says. You see, her mother was always longing for home, po’ thing! and thinking about it, and so the child is just as much a Spaniard as if she’d always lived there. She thinks she remembers how Spain looked, but I reckon she don’t, because she was only a baby when they moved to France. She is very proud to be a Spaniard.”
Does that please you, Mercedes? Very well, be content; your niece is loyal to her allegiance: her mother laid deep the foundations of her love for Spain, and she will go back to you as good a Spaniard as you are yourself. She has made me promise to take her to you for a long visit when the War Office retires me.
I attend to her studies myself; has she told you that? Yes, I am her school-master, and she makes pretty good progress, I think, everything considered. Everything considered — being translated — means holidays. But the fact is, she was not born for study, and it comes hard. Hard for me, too; it hurts me like a physical pain to see that free spirit of the air and the sunshine laboring and grieving over a book; and sometimes when I find her gazing far away towards the plain and the blue mountains with the longing in her eyes, I have to throw open the prison doors; I can’t help it. A quaint little scholar she is, and makes plenty of blunders. Once I put the question:
“What does the Czar govern?”
She rested her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand and took that problem under deep consideration. Presently she looked up and answered, with a rising inflection implying a shade of uncertainty,
“The dative case?”
Here are a couple of her expositions which were delivered with tranquil confidence:
“Chaplain, diminutive of chap. Lass is masculine, lassie is feminine.”
She is not a genius, you see, but just a normal child; they all make mistakes of that sort. There is a glad light in her eye which is pretty to see when she finds herself able to answer a question promptly and accurately, without any hesitation; as, for instance, this morning:
“Cathy dear, what is a cube?”
“Why, a native of Cuba.”
She still drops a foreign word into her talk now and then, and there is still a subtle foreign flavor or fragrance about even her exactest English — and long may this abide! for it has for me a charm that is very pleasant. Sometimes her English is daintily prim and bookish and captivating. She has a child’s sweet tooth, but for her health’s sake I try to keep its inspirations under cheek. She is obedient — as is proper for a titled and recognized military personage, which she is — but the chain presses sometimes. For instance, we were out for a walk, and passed by some bushes that were freighted with wild goose-berries. Her face brightened and she put her hands together and delivered herself of this speech, most feelingly:
“Oh, if I was permitted a vice it would be the gourmandise!”
Could I resist that? No. I gave her a gooseberry.
You ask about her languages. They take care of themselves; they will not get rusty here; our regiments are not made up of natives alone — far from it. And she is picking up Indian tongues diligently.