“Ah, but Shakespeare couldn’t have been thinking of champagne,” said Kendricks.
“I suppose, sir,” Colonel Woodburn interposed, with lofty courtesy, “champagne could hardly have been known in his day.”
“I suppose not, colonel,” returned the younger man, deferentially. “He seemed to think that sack and sugar might be a fault; but he didn’t mention champagne.”
“Perhaps he felt there was no question about that,” suggested Beaton, who then felt that he had not done himself justice in the sally.
“I wonder just when champagne did come in,” said March.
“I know when it ought to come in,” said Fulkerson. “Before the soup!”
They all laughed, and gave themselves the air of drinking champagne out of tumblers every day, as men like to do. Dryfoos listened uneasily; he did not quite understand the allusions, though he knew what Shakespeare was, well enough; Conrad’s face expressed a gentle deprecation of joking on such a subject, but he said nothing.
The talk ran on briskly through the dinner. The young men tossed the ball back and forth; they made some wild shots, but they kept it going, and they laughed when they were hit. The wine loosed Colonel Woodburn’s tongue; he became very companionable with the young fellows; with the feeling that a literary dinner ought to have a didactic scope, he praised Scott and Addison as the only authors fit to form the minds of gentlemen.
Kendricks agreed with him, but wished to add the name of Flaubert as a master of style. “Style, you know,” he added, “is the man.”
“Very true, sir; you are quite right, sir,” the colonel assented; he wondered who Flaubert was.
Beaton praised Baudelaire and Maupassant; he said these were the masters. He recited some lurid verses from Baudelaire; Lindau pronounced them a disgrace to human nature, and gave a passage from Victor Hugo on Louis Napoleon, with his heavy German accent, and then he quoted Schiller. “Ach, boat that iss peaudifool! Not zo?” he demanded of March.
“Yes, beautiful; but, of course, you know I think there’s nobody like Heine!”
Lindau threw back his great old head and laughed, showing a want of teeth under his mustache. He put his hand on March’s back. “This poy—he wass a poy den—wass so gracy to pekin reading Heine that he gommence with the tictionary bevore he knows any crammar, and ve bick it out vort by vort togeder.”
“He was a pretty cay poy in those days, heigh, Lindau?” asked Fulkerson, burlesquing the old man’s accent, with an impudent wink that made Lindau himself laugh. “But in the dark ages, I mean, there in Indianapolis. Just how long ago did you old codgers meet there, anyway?” Fulkerson saw the restiveness in Dryfoos’s eye at the purely literary course the talk had taken; he had intended it to lead up that way to business, to Every Other Week; but he saw that it was leaving Dryfoos too far out, and he wished to get it on the personal ground, where everybody is at home.
“Ledt me zee,” mused Lindau. “Wass it in fifty-nine or zixty, Passil? Idt wass a year or dwo pefore the war proke oudt, anyway.”
“Those were exciting times,” said Dryfoos, making his first entry into the general talk. “I went down to Indianapolis with the first company from our place, and I saw the red-shirts pouring in everywhere. They had a song,
‘Oh, never mind the weather, but git over double trouble,
For we’re bound for the land of Canaan.’
The fellows locked arms and went singin’ it up and down four or five abreast in the moonlight; crowded everybody else off the sidewalk.”
“I remember, I remember,” said Lindau, nodding his head slowly up and down. “A coodt many off them nefer gome pack from that landt of Ganaan, Mr. Dryfoos?”
“You’re right, Mr. Lindau. But I reckon it was worth it—the country we’ve got now. Here, young man!” He caught the arm of the waiter who was going round with the champagne bottle. “Fill up Mr. Lindau’s glass, there. I want to drink the health of those old times with him. Here’s to your empty sleeve, Mr. Lindau. God bless it! No offence to you, Colonel Woodburn,” said Dryfoos, turning to him before he drank.
“Not at all, sir, not at all,” said the colonel. “I will drink with you, if you will permit me.”
“We’ll all drink—standing!” cried Fulkerson. “Help March to get up, somebody! Fill high the bowl with Samian Apollinaris for Coonrod! Now, then, hurrah for Lindau!”
They cheered, and hammered on the table with the butts of their knife-handles. Lindau remained seated. The tears came into his eyes; he said, “I thank you, chendlemen,” and hiccuped.
“I’d ’a’ went into the war myself,” said Dryfoos, “but I was raisin’ a family of young children, and I didn’t see how I could leave my farm. But I helped to fill up the quota at every call, and when the volunteering stopped I went round with the subscription paper myself; and we offered as good bounties as any in the State. My substitute was killed in one of the last skirmishes—in fact, after Lee’s surrender—and I’ve took care of his family, more or less, ever since.”
“By the way, March,” said Fulkerson, “what sort of an idea would it be to have a good war story—might be a serial—in the magazine? The war has never fully panned out in fiction yet. It was used a good deal just after it was over, and then it was dropped. I think it’s time to take it up again. I believe it would be a card.”
It was running in March’s mind that Dryfoos had an old rankling shame in his heart for not having gone into the war, and that he had often made that explanation of his course without having ever been satisfied with it. He felt sorry for him; the fact seemed pathetic; it suggested a dormant nobleness in the man.
Beaton was saying to Fulkerson: “You might get a series of sketches by substitutes; the substitutes haven’t
