FullReads

XVII

In academic walks and studies grave,
In the camp drill and martial occupation,
They helped each other: but just here I crave
Space for the reader’s full imagination,–
The fact is patent, Grey became a slave!
A tool, a fag, a “pleb”! To state it plainer,
All that blue blood and ancestry e’er gave
Cleaned guns, brought water!–was, in fact, retainer
To Jones, whose uncle was a paper-stainer!

XVIII

How they bore this at home I cannot say:
I only know so runs the gossip’s tale.
It chanced one day that the paternal Grey
Came to West Point that he himself might hail
The future hero in some proper way
Consistent with his lineage. With him came
A judge, a poet, and a brave array
Of aunts and uncles, bearing each a name,
Eyeglass and respirator with the same.

XIX

“Observe!” quoth Grey the elder to his friends,
“Not in these giddy youths at baseball playing
You’ll notice Winthrop Adams! Greater ends
Than these absorb HIS leisure. No doubt straying
With Caesar’s Commentaries, he attends
Some Roman council. Let us ask, however,
Yon grimy urchin, who my soul offends
By wheeling offal, if he will endeavor
To find– What! heaven! Winthrop! Oh! no! never!”

XX

Alas! too true! The last of all the Greys
Was “doing police detail,”–it had come
To this; in vain the rare historic bays
That crowned the pictured Puritans at home!
And yet ’twas certain that in grosser ways
Of health and physique he was quite improving.
Straighter he stood, and had achieved some praise
In other exercise, much more behooving
A soldier’s taste than merely dirt removing.

XXI

But to resume: we left the youthful pair,
Some stanzas back, before a lady’s bower;
‘Tis to be hoped they were no longer there,
For stars were pointing to the morning hour.
Their escapade discovered, ill ‘twould fare
With our two heroes, derelict of orders;
But, like the ghost, they “scent the morning air,”
And back again they steal across the borders,
Unseen, unheeded, by their martial warders.

XXII

They got to bed with speed: young Grey to dream
Of some vague future with a general’s star,
And Mistress Kitty basking in its gleam;
While Brown, content to worship her afar,
Dreamed himself dying by some lonely stream,
Having snatched Kitty from eighteen Nez Perces,
Till a far bugle, with the morning beam,
In his dull ear its fateful song rehearses,
Which Winthrop Adams after put to verses.

XXIII

So passed three years of their novitiate,
The first real boyhood Grey had ever known.
His youth ran clear,–not choked like his Cochituate,
In civic pipes, but free and pure alone;
Yet knew repression, could himself habituate
To having mind and body well rubbed down,
Could read himself in others, and could situate
Themselves in him,–except, I grieve to own,
He couldn’t see what Kitty saw in Brown!

XXIV

At last came graduation; Brown received
In the One Hundredth Cavalry commission;
Then frolic, flirting, parting,–when none grieved
Save Brown, who loved our young Academician.
And Grey, who felt his friend was still deceived
By Mistress Kitty, who with other beauties
Graced the occasion, and it was believed
Had promised Brown that when he could recruit his
Promised command, she’d share with him those duties.

XXV

Howe’er this was I know not; all I know,
The night was June’s, the moon rode high and clear;
“‘Twas such a night as this,” three years ago,
Miss Kitty sang the song that two might hear.
There is a walk where trees o’erarching grow,
Too wide for one, not wide enough for three
(A fact precluding any plural beau),
Which quite explained Miss Kitty’s company,
But not why Grey that favored one should be.