A Fool's Errand & Bricks without Straw Read online

  Table of Contents

  A Fool's Errand. By One of the Fools

  Bricks Without Straw (A Sequel)

  A Fool's Errand. By One of the Fools

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  LETTER TO THE PUBLISHERS

  CHAPTER I THE GENESIS OF FOLLY

  CHAPTER II LE PREMIER ACCÈS

  CHAPTER III SORROW COMETH WITH KNOWLEDGE

  CHAPTER IV FROM BAD TO WORSE

  CHAPTER V THE ORACLE IS CONSULTED

  CHAPTER VI ALL LOST BUT HONOR

  CHAPTER VII AN OLD "UNIONER"

  CHAPTER VIII "THEIR EXITS AND THEIR ENTRANCES"

  CHAPTER IX THE NEW KINGDOM

  CHAPTER X POOR TRAY

  CHAPTER XI A CAT IN A STRANGE GARRET

  CHAPTER XII COMPELLED TO VOLUNTEER

  CHAPTER XIII A TWO-HANDED GAME

  CHAPTER XIV MURDER MOST FOUL

  CHAPTER XV "WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?"

  CHAPTER XVI THE EDGE OF HOSPITALITY DULLED

  CHAPTER XVII THE SECOND MILE POST

  CHAPTER XVIII CONGRATULATION AND CONDOLENCE

  CHAPTER XIX CITIZENS IN EMBRYO

  CHAPTER XX OUT OF DUE SEASON

  CHAPTER XXI HOW THE WISE MEN BUILDED

  CHAPTER XXII COCK-CROW

  CHAPTER XXIII THE DIE IS CAST

  CHAPTER XXIV "WISDOM CRIETH IN THE STREETS"

  CHAPTER XXV A GRUMBLER'S FORECAST

  CHAPTER XXVI BALAK AND BALAAM

  CHAPTER XXVII A NEW INSTITUTION

  CHAPTER XXVIII A BUNDLE OF DRY STICKS

  CHAPTER XXIX FOOTING UP THE LEDGER

  CHAPTER XXX A THRICE-TOLD TALE

  CHAPTER XXXI THE FOLLY OF WISDOM

  CHAPTER XXXII "OUT OF THE ABUNDANCE OF THE HEART"

  CHAPTER XXXIII "LOVE ME, LOVE MY DOG"

  CHAPTER XXXIV THE HARVEST OF WISDOM

  CHAPTER XXXV AN AWAKENING

  CHAPTER XXXVI A RACE AGAINST TIME

  CHAPTER XXXVII THE "REB" VIEW OF IT

  CHAPTER XXXVIII "AND ALL THE WORLD WAS IN A SEA"

  CHAPTER XXXIX "LIGHT SHINETH IN DARKNESS"

  CHAPTER XL PRO BONO PUBLICO

  CHAPTER XLI "PEACE IN WARSAW"

  CHAPTER XLII A FRIENDLY MEDIATION

  CHAPTER XLIII UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER

  CHAPTER XLIV PRIDE OVERMATCHING PRIDE

  CHAPTER XLV WISDOM AND FOLLY MEET TOGETHER

  CHAPTER XLVI HOME AT LAST

  CHAPTER XLVII MONUMENTUM

  VARR. SERV. Thou art not altogether a fool.

  FOOL. Nor thou altogether a wise man: as much foolery As I have, so much wit thou lackest. Timon of Athens.

  Dedication

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  TO THE

  ANCIENT AND HONORABLE FAMILY OF

  FOOLS

  THIS BOOK IS RESPECTFULLY AND LOVINGLY

  DEDICATED

  BY ONE OF THEIR NUMBER.

  LETTER TO THE PUBLISHERS

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  GENTLEMEN, — Your demand that I should write a "Preface" to the book you have printed seems to me utterly preposterous. It is like a man introducing himself, — always an awkward, and generally a useless piece of business. What is the use of the "prologue to the epic coming on,"anyhow, unless it be a sort of advertisement? and in that case you ought to write it. Whoever does that should be

  "Wise enough to play the fool;

  And to do that well craves a sort of wit."

  That is not the kind of Fool I am. All such work I delegate to you, and hereby authorize and empower you to say what you please of what I have written, only begging you keep in mind one clear distinction. There are two kinds of Fools. The real Fool is the most sincere of mortals: the Court Fool and his kind — the trifling, jesting buffoon — but simulate the family virtue, and steal the family name, for sordid purposes.

  The life of the Fool proper is full of the poetry of faith. He may run after a will-o'-the-wisp, while the Wise deride; but to him it is a veritable star of hope. He differs from his fellow-mortals chiefly in this, that he sees or believes what they do not, and consequently undertakes what they never attempt. If he succeed in his endeavor, the world stops laughing, and calls him a Genius: if he fail, it laughs the more, and derides his undertaking as A FOOL'S ERRAND.

  So the same individual is often both fool and genius, — a fool all his life and a genius after his death, or a fool to one century and a genius to the next, or a fool at home and a prodigy abroad. Watt was a fool while he watched the tea-kettle, but a genius when he had caught the imp that tilted the lid. The gentle Genoese who wrested half the world from darkness was a fool to the age which sought for the Fountain of Youth; yet every succeeding one but multiplies his praises. These are but types. The poet has incorporated the recognized principle in the lines, —

  "Great wits to madness, sure, are near allied,

  And thin partitions do their walls divide."

  It is, however, only in the element of simple, undoubting faith, that the kinship of genius and folly consists. One may be an unquestioned Fool without any chance of being taken for a Seer. This is, indeed, the case with most of the tribe. It is success alone that transforms the credulity of folly into acknowledged prophetic prevision.

  Noah was one of the earliest of the Fools thus vindicated. The Wise Men of his day sat around on the dry-goods boxes, and whittled and whistled, and quizzed the queer craft on which he kept his sons and sons-in-law at work, till the keel was as old as the frigate "Constitution" before he was ready to lay her upper decks. If the rain had not come at last, they would never have got over laughing at his folly. The Deluge saved his reputation, and made his Ark a success. But it is not often that a Fool has a heavenly voice to guide him, or a flood to help him out.

  This little tale is the narrative of one of Folly's failures. The hero can lay no claim to greatness. A believing Noah there is in it, a well-built ark, and an indubitable flood. But the waters prevailed, and the Fool went down, and many of the family with him. The Wise Men looked on and laughed.

  The one merit which the story claims is that of honest, uncompromising truthfulness of portraiture. Its pictures are from life. And even in this which he boasts as a virtue may be found, perhaps, the greatest folly yet committed by

  ONE OF THE FOOLS

  SEPTEMBER 1879.

  CHAPTER I

  THE GENESIS OF FOLLY

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  THE Fool's patronymic was Servosse; his Christian name, Comfort. His father was descended from one of those Gallic families who abandoned the luxuries of la belle France for an Arcadia which in these later days has become synonymous with bleakness, if not sterility. It is supposable that his ancestors, before they adventured on the delights of Canadian winters in exchange for the coast of Normandy or the plains of Bordeaux, may have belonged to some noble family, who drew their blood, clear and blue, from the veins of a Martelian progenitor.

  It is, perhaps, but fair to presume that the exchange of skies was made only for the glory of our gallant and good King Louis, and the advancement of the holy Catholic faith in the New World, rather than for the peace and quiet of the immediate vicinage in which the ancestor dwelt. However this may be, a later ancestor was among those, who, with that mixture of courage and suavity which enabled the voyageurs of that day so successfully to secure and hold the good will of the unsophisticated red-skin, pushed westward along the Great Lakes until they came to the Straits, where so many advantages of a trading-post were combined, that Detroit was there located and christened.

  The mutations of government, the lapse of time, and the anglicization of their surroun
dings had robbed the descendants of the original Servosse of every trace of their Gallic ancestry except the name; and it is only mentioned here for the benefit of some curious student of mental phenomena with credence in hereditary traits, who may believe that an ancestor who could voluntarily abandon the champagnes of Burgundy for the Heights of Abraham, by whatever enticing name the same might be called, was quite capable of transmitting to his descendants such an accès de la folie as was manifested by our particular Fool.

  Certainly, no such defect can be attributed to his maternal line: they knew on which side their bread was buttered. Of the truest of Puritan stock, the mother's family had found a lodgement on a little hillside farm carved out of the Hop-Brook Grant in Berkshire, which seemed almost as precarious in its rocky ruggedness and inaccessibility as the barn-swallow's nest, clinging in some mysterious way to the steep slope under the eaves of the old hip-roofed barn against which it was built. Yet, like the nest, the little hillside home had sufficed for the raising of many a sturdy brood, who had flown away to the constantly receding West almost before they had grown to full-fledged man- and womanhood. Brave-hearted, strong-limbed, and clear-headed, or, as they would now be called, level-headed, were these children of the Berkshire hills. There was no trace of mental unsoundness about any of them. Especially free from such imputation was Eliza Hall, the golden-haired, brown-eyed, youngest of nine, who, with her saucily upturning nose, a few freckles on her round cheeks, which made their peach-bloom all the more noticeable, — despite the entreaties of friends, the prayers of lovers, and the protest of parents, — would away to the West in her eighteenth year to become a Yankee schoolma'am in Michigan.

  That the young lumberman, Michael Servosse, — rich in the limitless possibilities of a future cast in the way which had been marked out by nature as the path of advancing empire, a brave heart and unquenchable energy, to whom thousands of acres of unrivaled pine-lands yielded tribute, and whose fleet of snug schooners was every year growing larger, — that he should capture and mate with the fair bird from the New-England home-nest was as fitting as the most enthusiastic advocate of natural selection could desire. They were the fairest types of remote stocks of kindred races, invigorated by the fresh life of a new continent.

  The first fruit of such a union was the Fool, born on the first day of the month of flowers, in the year of grace one thousand eight hundred and thirty-four, on the very spot where the Iroquois met in council with the great chief Pontiac when the cunning plan was devised to gain entrance to the fort by playing a game of lacrosse on the parade-ground for the amusement of the garrison. The wife of a year, as the perils of maternity drew nigh in the absence of her husband, who was up the lake attending to his spring shipments, began to sigh for her far-away mountain home, and so named the new life, which brought consolation to her loneliness, Comfort.

  During his babyhood, boyhood, and youth, our hero manifested none of those characteristics from which he afterwards received the name by which he is known in these pages. He was reared with care. Though his father died while he was yet young, he left sufficient estate to enable the mother to give to her children every advantage of education, and divide a small surplus between them as each arrived at man's estate. The young Servosse, therefore, ate, drank, and slept, studied, played, and quarreled, like other boys. Like others who enter college, and have constitutions sufficiently robust to avoid dyspepsia arising from sedentary habits and the frying-pan, he left it at the end of four years, with a diploma properly signed and sealed, as well as very prettily printed on mock parchment, which was quite as good as veritable sheepskin for such a purpose. He studied law, as so many sensible men have done before his day, and with his first mustache was admitted under all the legal forms to sign himself "Attorney and Counselor at Law," and allowed to practice his art upon such clients as he could decoy into any of the courts of the Commonwealth of Michigan. Thereupon, putting in force the "Circumspice" which appeared upon the seal attached to his license, he cast about for a place in which to set snares for the unwary, and pitched upon the town of Peru; hung out his shingle; obtained a fair business; married the pretty Metta Ward; and, in the summer of his twenty-seventh year, manifested the first symptoms of that mental weakness which led him to perform the task of unwisdom hereinafter narrated.

  CHAPTER II

  LE PREMIER ACCÈS

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  IT was the 23d of July in his twenty-seventh year. He had been for several days in a very depressed state of mind, nervous and irritable, beset by gloomy forebodings, wakeful, and, when he did sleep, moaning as if in anguish of mind, talking in his sleep, or waking suddenly and crying out, as if in danger or distress. There was nothing in his social or business relations to justify any such state of mind. He was very warmly regarded by the little community in which he was settled, — a leader in its social life, an active member of the church in which he had been reared, and superintendent of its sabbath school. He had a good home, undistinguished by mortgage or incumbrance of any sort; a wife, whose energy and activity kept this home in the neatest possible condition, almost as it seemed without exertion, and certainly without the tyranny of servants; an office in the very center of the town, where it could not escape the search of the most unwilling or unobservant seeker; and a practice which yielded him more than he had any call to spend. All this should have made him the most contented and happy of men.

  Yet, in spite of all these comforting surroundings, he had for a considerable time neglected his business to a marked degree, and seemed to have little interest in those things which ought most nearly to have concerned him. For the last few days he seemed to have had no heart or interest in any thing save the results of a battle, which was said to have been fought half a thousand miles away, in which neither he nor any one of his clients had an interest which could have been measured by the American unit of value or any fraction thereof. Yet this young attorney was refusing to eat or drink, because he did not know the results of said battle, or perhaps because he feared that it might not turn out to his notion.

  Metta, his young wife, was surprised and alarmed. Never before had there been any thing like trouble in the breast of her spouse, that he did not lighten his heart of at least half its load by at once revealing to her the cause of his annoyance. The difficulties of each puzzling case were talked over with her; and not unfrequently her pure unbiased heart had pointed out to him equities which his grosser nature had failed to perceive. Had he been cast in an action, he was sure to come home at night, perhaps dragging and weary with the story of his discomfiture, to receive consolation and encouragement from her lips; but this new trouble he had studiously concealed from her. At least he had refrained from all conversation in regard to it, and revealed its existence only by the involuntary symptoms which we have set forth. But who could conceal such symptoms from the eye of love? She had seen them, and wept and trembled at the evil that portended. She was no skilled student of mental phenomena; but, if she had been, she would have known that all these indications — insomnia, causeless apprehension, anxiety in regard to matters of no personal moment to him, moodiness, and studious concealment of the cause of his disquietude — were most infallible indications of mental disorder. Yet, although she did not know this as a scientific fact, her heart had diagnosed the symptoms; and the prescience of love had taught her with unerring accuracy to apprehend the evil which impended. With the self-forgetfulness of womanly devotion, she had concealed her sorrow from the purblind eyes of the dull mole whose heart was occupied only with the morbid fancies which were eating their relentless way into his soul. She wept in secret over what she foresaw, and pressed her hands with tearful beseeching to her troubled heart, while her white lips uttered the prayer, which she felt could not be answered, "I pray Thee, let this cup pass from me!"

  Yet she met him, through whom she knew this affliction must come, ever with smiles and gladness. At morn she kissed him farewell, as he stood on the vine-covered porch of their lit
tle cottage, when he started for his office, while the balmy breath of the summer morning blew over them, and the bees hummed from flower to flower, sipping the honeyed dew from the throats of the unclosed morning-glories. At noon, when he came for the mid-day meal, the door flew open before his hand had touched the knob, and she stood before him in the little hall, draped in the neat, cool muslin which became her so well, a smile upon her lips, and inextinguishable lovelight in her eyes. And when he would sit in moody silence after their pleasant tea, while the evening shadows fell around, — brooding, ever brooding, over the evil which he would persist in making his own, — she would steal into his lap, and her soft arms would clasp his neck, while her lips would not rest from prattle or song until bribed into silence by kisses or laughter. Never had his home been so sweet. Never could home be sweeter. Yet all this seemed only to increase his melancholy, and make him even more moody and disconsolate.

  On the previous day he had come home before the tea-table had been set, — an hour before his usual time; but somehow she had expected that he would do so. She had peeped through the blinds of her little chamber, and seen him coming; so that, as he climbed wearily up the steps, he found her standing on the lower stair in the hall, her lips wreathed in smiles, and her head crowned with roses, as she waited to spring into his arms.

  "O Metta!" he said in an agonized voice, as he clasped her to his breast, and then put her away, and looked into her blushing face and into the eyes which were crowding back the tears she was determined should not flow, — "O Metta, we are beaten!"

  "In what case?" she asked, at once pretending to misunderstand the purport of his words.

  He saw the pretty little trick; but he was too sad, and melancholy had taken too firm a hold upon him, to allow him to reward it with a smile.

  "Alas!" he sighed, "this can be laughed away no longer. Blood has been shed. Not a few lives, but a thousand, have been lost. Our army has fought at a place called Bull Run, and been terribly defeated."