Part 25

In New York and Washington there were receptions and banquets in his honor, and around him gathered high officials of the army and navy and the Government, and men who were leaders in civilian life. It was with impetuous enthusiasm that the people crowded the sidewalks to greet him as he passed along the streets--the worn service uniform, the color of his hair, the calm face that showed exposure to stress and hardships, set in the luxurious leathers of an automobile, surrounded by men so different in personal attire and appearance, marked him as the man they sought. There is something in the man that creates the desire in others to express outwardly their approval of him. At the New York Stock Exchange business was suspended as the members rode him upon their shoulders over the floor of the Exchange where visitors are not allowed. In Washington the House of Representatives stopped debate and the members arose and cheered him when he appeared in the gallery.

There were ovations for him at the railroad stations along his way to Fort Oglethorpe, near Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he was mustered out of service.

And in the midst of all of these mental-distracting demonstrations Alvin York was put to the test. He was offered a contract that guaranteed him $75,000 to appear in a moving picture play that would be staged in the Argonne in France and would tell the story of his mountain life. There was another proposition of $50,000. There were offers of vaudeville and theatrical engagements that ranged up to $1,000 a week, and totaled many thousands. On these his decision was reached on the instant they were offered. The theater was condemned by the tenets of his church, and all through his youth the ministers of the gospel, whom he had heard, preached against it. The theater in any form was, as he saw it, against the principles of religion to which he had made avowal.

Then up to the surface among those who were crowding around him there wormed men who saw in Sergeant York's popularity the opportunity for them to make money for themselves. Some of the propositions that were made to him were sound, some whimsical, others strangely balanced upon a business idea--but back of all of them ran the same motive. The past in Sergeant York's life had been filled with hard work and hardships, the present was new, the future uncharted, but to him there was something in the voices of the people who were acclaiming him that was not for sale.

When he left Fort Oglethorpe for his home, the people of his mountain country, in automobiles, on horseback, upon mules, whole families riding in chairs in the beds of farm wagons, met him along the roadway as he traveled the forty-eight miles over the mountains from the railroad station to Pall Mall, and they formed a procession as they wound their way toward the valley.

Only a few months before, when Alvin had returned home on a furlough which he secured while in training at Camp Gordon, he had "picked up" a wagon ride over the thirty-six miles from the railroad station to Jamestown, and had walked the twelve miles from "Jimtown" to Pall Mall, carrying his grip.

His mother was among those who met him at Jamestown. They rode together, and the last of the long shadows had faded from the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" when they reached their cabin home.

The next morning, while it was not yet noon, the Sergeant and Miss Gracie Williams met on "the big road" near the Rains' store. Those sitting on the store porch--and there was to be but little work done on the farms that day--saw the two meet, bow and pass on. Pall Mall is but little given to gossip. Yet there was a strange story to be carried back to the woman-folk in the homes in the valley and on the mountainsides.

Only the foxhound, that moved slowly behind his newly returned master, knew of an earlier meeting that day between Sergeant York and his sweetheart, and of a walk down a tree-shaded path that had given the hound time to explore every fence-rail corner and verify his belief that nothing worth while had been along that road for days.

But a quiet, uneventful life in the valley was not to return to Sergeant York.

The Sunday following was Tennessee's Decoration Day. From the mountains for miles around the people came to Pall Mall. During the ceremonies, while the flowers were being placed upon the graves in the little cemetery, they wanted Alvin to talk to them. He and Gracie were seated in the empty bed of an unhitched wagon down at the edge of the grove of forest trees that surrounds the church. He came to the cemetery, and his talk was the untrammelled outpouring of his heart for all that had been done for him. The spirit of the day, with his own people around him, his experiences and the changes that had come into his life since the last decoration services he had attended there, seemed to move him deeply, and here was first displayed a power of oratory which he was so rapidly to develop.

The people of Tennessee began to gather gifts for him before he left France, and the Tennessee Society of New York City entertained him when he left his troop-ship. The people of the South had always remembered with added reverence that Robert E. Lee had declined to commercialize his military fame, while some of the other generals of the Confederacy had sacrificed their reputations upon the altar of expediency. So when it became known that Sergeant York, with no knowledge of history to guide him, but acting from principle, had refused to capitalize the record of the few brief months he had spent in the service of his country, there was nothing within the gift of the people he could not have had.

His welcome home by the State of Tennessee was to be held at the capital on June 9th. But Sergeant York, before he went to war, had given an option--one over which he was showing deep concern. His mountain sweetheart was to "have him for the taking when he got back." So it was mutually--amicably--arranged that the foreclosure proceedings should take place in Pall Mall on June 7th, and their bridal tour would be to Nashville.

It was an out-of-door wedding so that all of the guests in Pall Mall for that day could be present, and they came not only from all parts of Tennessee but from neighboring States. The altar was the rock ledge on the mountainside, above the spring, under the beech trees that arched their boughs into a verdant cathedral dome. It had been their meeting-place when he was an unknown mountain boy and she a golden-haired school-girl. As the sunlight flickered on the trunks of those trees it showed scars of knife carvings that carried the dates of other meetings there.

The swaying boughs were draped with flags and flowers. The ceremony was performed by Governor Roberts of Tennessee, assisted by Rev. Rosier Pile, the pastor of the church in the valley, and Rev. W. T. Haggard, chaplain-general of the Governor's staff. The bridesmaids were Miss Ida Wright, Miss Maud Brier and Miss Adelia Darwin, and Sergeant York's best man was Sergeant Clay Brier, of Jamestown. Their friendship had been proved upon the fields of France. The wedding march was the wind among the laurels and the pines.

The "Welcome Home" for him, at Nashville, by the people of Tennessee, will long be remembered among the public demonstrations of the State. Tennessee has always been proud of the fact that the conduct of her sons in those times when the nation went to war had entitled her to the name of "The Volunteer State." That one of her sons should come back from the World War, having done, in the sum of its accomplishment, that which the Commander of the Armies of the Allies called the greatest feat of valor, while fighting solely on his own resources, of any soldier of all of the armies of Europe, made the welcome one that sprang joyously from the hearts of the people. And that this soldier, while poor and still facing the possibility of a life filled with the deprivation of poverty, with no assurance but the continued labor of his hands, should turn down the offers of fortunes because, to him, they were prompted by a motive that was unworthy--opened the very inner sanctuary of their hearts and the people came with gifts, that he should sustain no loss of opportunity and should never be in need. The offerings were not in money. They were presents from the people. There were fertile acres that he could till, as that was his selection of the life he wished to follow. There was a model, modern house in which he could live, and furnishings for it. There were blooded fowls and stock and farming implements, down to the files for his scythe. The donors were individuals, organizations and communities. Waiting for him was the state's medal which bears the device "Service Above Self." He was appointed a member of the Governor's staff and upon him was conferred the rank of Colonel. This was the wedding trip of Sergeant York and his bride.

To Nashville, in the bridal party, to see and hear the honors to be paid her son went Mrs. York, the mother. It was the first time she had ever seen a railroad-train. And, now, it was Mrs. York's turn. She, too, faced a battalion. Wearing her calico sunbonnet she came suddenly upon the gorgeous social battalion--so fully equipped with the bayonets of class and the machine guns of curiosity. And she captured it! As her son had never seen the man or crowd of men of whom he was afraid, she, with her philosophy of life, looked upon everyone as worthy of friendship and the meeting with them a pleasure and not an occasion for disconcertment. If they approached her with a greeting of wit, her answer was quick and gentle, and as playful as a mountain stream. If their mood was serious, she immediately impressed them with her frankness and her common sense. She went everywhere the program provided, and enjoyed every moment of it. As she was preparing to return home her appreciation was expressed in her declaration that she "intended to come again, when she could go quietly about and really see things--when policemen would not have to make way for her."

Alvin was beginning life anew, decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross and the rare Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest award of his country to a soldier; the Medaille Militaire and the Croix de Guerre with Palm, of France; the Croca di Guerra, of Italy; the War Medal of Montenegro; the Legion of Honor; medals for gallantry from Tennessee and the Methodist Centenary, and the Commonwealth of Rhode Island was beckoning to him, to decorate him with the medal the State's legislature had voted. There were the gifts the people of Tennessee had given him, and others that began to come from all sections of the Union. The mountaineers of the State of Georgia clubbed together and sent a remembrance--and presents came from the far West.

Several cities offered him a home if he would come to live among their people. Communities, wanting him, selected their most desirable farming sites and tendered them. But the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" was home to him, and while in France he had said he wished to live "nowhere but at Pall Mall." So the Rotary Clubs, headed by the Nashville organization, raised the fund for the "York Home" through public subscription, and there has been given to him four hundred acres of the "bottom land" of the Valley of the Wolf and one of the timbered mountainsides--land that had been homesteaded and first brought into cultivation by "Old Coonrod" Pile, his pioneer ancestor--land that had remained in the possession of his family until lost in the vicissitudes of the days following the Civil War.

As his residence on his new farm was yet to be built for him, he carried his bride back to the valley and to the little two-room cabin that had been his mother's and his home.

It was impossible for Sergeant York to accept all of the invitations he received to visit cities and address conventions, and he had often to disappoint delegations who traveled the long, rough mountain road to urge in person his acceptance. And he could not, with a slow-moving pen upon a table of pine, answer all the communications that came. Before the war two letters for him in half a year was an occasion worthy of comment. Now each day, over the mountains upon a pacing roan, the postman came, and the mail-pouches, swung as saddle-bags, swayed in unison with the horse's step. Most of the letters were for the York home.

The public mind pays tribute to its heroes in ways that are odd. In the growing mass of mail that was kept in a wide wooden box under the bed--letters that in number "had got away" from the Sergeant's ability to answer--there were displayed many mental idiosyncrasies and an abundance of advice, and there were many strange requests. Some of them were pathetic begging letters, as tho the Sergeant were a rich man; some came from prison-cells, asking his influence to secure a pardon; some from those still desirous of securing a business partnership with him. Among them were even belated matrimonial proposals, describing the writers' attractive qualities. These the big Sergeant teasingly turned over to the golden-haired girl who, herself, had come but recently into that home, and they may safely be classed among those letters the Sergeant could never answer.

While he was at home, which was now only for brief intervals between trips in answer to the invitations he had accepted, it was noted that he was unusually quiet. Often he would sit for an hour or more upon the door-step, looking out past the arbor of honeysuckle, over the acres of land that had been given him, gazing on to the mountains. But he kept his own counsel. Some of those who lived in the valley, who saw him sitting, thinking, wondered if there had come a longing into Alvin's heart to be out in the world again.

But his problem was far from that. He had asked himself two questions: "What was the great need of the people who live far back in the mountains?" "What--since the world had been so generous to him, and lifted from his shoulders the trials of living--could he do for his people?" He was trying to answer them. Subconsciously, a great and a genuine appreciation of all that had been done for him was pushing him onward.

Unaided, he had solved the first. It was education. How keenly, within the few months that had passed, had he realized his own need!

But at that time he did not appreciate how rapidly he was building for himself a bridge over that shortcoming.

The second problem he found more difficult. He recognized he could do a greater good and his efforts would be more lasting and far-reaching if he proved to be an aid to the younger generation. In his effort to reach a practical plan he went as far as he could, with his limited knowledge of organization, before he sought counsel.

Then he asked that no other gifts be made to him, but instead the money be contributed to a fund to build simple, primary schools throughout the mountain districts where there were no state or county tax appropriations available for the purpose. Of the fund, not a dollar was to be for his personal use, nor for any effort he might put forth in its behalf.