Part 36

In those days I saw the Courier-Journal to press, turning night into day, and during a dozen years I took my twelve o’clock supper there. It was thus and from these beginnings that the casual acquaintance between us ripened into intimacy, and that I gradually came into a knowledge of the reserves behind The Major’s buoyant optimism and occasional gasconnade.

He ate and drank sparingly; but he was not proof against the seduction of good company, and he had plenty of it, from William Preston to Joseph Jefferson, with such side lights as Stoddard Johnston, Boyd Winchester, Isaac Caldwell and Proctor Knott, of the Home Guard—very nearly all the celebrities of the day among the outsiders—myself the humble witness and chronicler. He secured an excellent chef, and of course we lived exceedingly well.

The Major’s most obvious peculiarity was that he knew everything and had been everywhere. If pirates were mentioned he flowered out at once into an adventure upon the sea; if bandits, on the land. If it was Wall Street he had a reminiscence and a scheme; if gambling, a hard-luck story and a system. There was no quarter of the globe of which he had not been an inhabitant.

Once the timbered riches of Africa being mentioned, at once the Major gave us a most graphic account of how “the old house”—for thus he designated some commercial establishment, which either had no existence or which he had some reason for not more particularly indicating—had sent him in charge of a rosewood saw mill on the Ganges, and, after many ups and downs, of how the floods had come and swept the plant away; and Rudolph Fink, who was of the party, immediately said, “I can attest the truth of The Major’s story, because my brother Albert and I were in charge of some fishing camps at the mouth of the Ganges at the exact date of the floods, and we caught many of those rosewood logs in our nets as they floated out to sea.”

Augustine’s Terrapin came to be for a while the rage in Philadelphia, and even got as far as New York and Washington, and straightway, The Major declared he could and would make Augustine and his terrapin look “like a monkey.” He proposed to give a dinner.

There were great preparations and expectancy. None of us ate much at luncheon that day. At the appointed hour, we assembled at The Brunswick. I will dismiss the decorations and the preludes except to say that they were Parisian. After a while in full regalia The Major appeared, a train of servants following with a silver tureen. The lid was lifted.

“Voilà!” says he.

The vision disclosed to our startled eyes was an ocean that looked like bean soup flecked by a few strands of black crape!

The explosion duly arrived from the assembled gourmets, I, myself, I am sorry to say, leading the rebellion.

“I put seeks terrapin in zat soup!” exclaimed The Frenchman, quite losing his usual good English in his excitement.

We reproached him. We denounced him. He was driven from the field. But he bore us no malice. Ten days later he invited us again, and this time Sam Ward himself could have found no fault with the terrapin.

Next afternoon, when I knew The Major was asleep, I slipped back into the kitchen and said to Louis Garnier, the chef: “Is there any of that terrapin left over from last night?”

All unconscious of his treason Louis took me into the pantry and triumphantly showed me three jars bearing the Augustine label and the Philadelphia express tags!

On another occasion a friend of The Major’s, passing The Brunswick and observing some diamond-back shells in the window said, “Major, have you any real live terrapins?”

“Live!” cried The Frenchman. “Only this morning I open the ice box and they were all dancing the cancan.”

“Major,” persisted the friend, “I’ll go you a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, you cannot show me an actual living terrapin.”

“What do you take me for—confidence man?” The Major retorted. “How you expect an old sport like me to bet upon a certainty?”

“Never mind your ethics. The wager is drink, not money. In any event we shall have the wine.”

“Oh, well,” says The Frenchman, with a shrug and a droll grimace, “if you insist on paying for a bottle of wine come with me.”

He took a lighted candle, and together they went back to the ice box. It was literally filled with diamond backs, and my friend thought he was gone for sure.

“Là!” says The Major with triumph, rummaging among the mass of shells with his cane as he held the candle aloft.

“But,” says my friend, ready to surrender, yet taking a last chance, “you told me they were dancing the cancan!”

The Major picked up a terrapin and turned it over in his hand. Quite numb and frozen, the animal within made no sign. Then he stirred the shells about in the box with his cane. Still not a show of life. Of a sudden he stopped, reflected a moment, then looked at his watch.

“Ah,” he murmured. “I quite forget. The terrapin, they are asleep. It is ten-thirty, and the terrapin he regularly go to sleep at ten o’clock by the watch every night.” And without another word he reached for the Veuve Cliquot!

For all his volubility in matters of romance and sentiment The Major was exceeding reticent about his immediate self and his own affairs. His legends referred to the distant of time and place. A certain dignity could not be denied him, and, on occasion, a proper reserve; he rarely mentioned his business—though he worked like a slave, and could not have been making much or any profit—so that there rose the query how he contrived to make both ends meet. Little by little I came into the knowledge that there was a money supply from somewhere; finally, it matters not how, that he had an annuity of forty thousand francs, paid in quarterly installments of ten thousand francs each.

Occasionally he mentioned “the Old House,” and in relating the famous Sophonisba episode late at night, and only in the very fastnesses of the wine cellar, as it were, at the most lachrymose passage he spoke of “l’Oncle Célestin,” with the deepest feeling.

“Did you ever hear The Frenchman tell that story about Sophonisba?” Doctor Stoic, whom on account of his affectation of insensibility we were wont to call Old Adamant, once asked me. “Well, sir, the other night he told it to me, and he was drunk, and he cried, sir; and I was drunk, and I cried too!”

I had known The Frenchman now ten or a dozen years. That he came from Marseilles, that he had served on the Confederate side in the Trans-Mississippi, that he possessed an annuity, that he must have been well-born and reared, that he was simple, yet canny, and in his money dealings scrupulously honest—was all I could be sure of. What had he done to be ashamed about or wish to conceal? In what was he a black sheep, for that he had been one seemed certain? Had the beautiful woman, his wife—a tireless church and charity worker, who lived the life of a recluse and a saint—had she reclaimed him from his former self? I knew that she had been the immediate occasion of his turning over a new leaf. But before her time what had he been, what had he done?