Strange Yesterday Read Free Page A

hurts!—how I know that! It is a ghastly feeling. My left was my sword arm. I am left-handed, but everything else I learnt to do with my right. Only in fence it was different. You remember old Pierre, the dried-up Frenchman who used to live along the Bowery; he taught me my fence, and he taught me saber play with my left hand. He insisted “that with my left arm I would have an indisputable advantage. He said that when they face a left-handed person, men forget all their parries and thrusts and strokes. He was right. That is why there were twelve of them, and never once I. Once they had me with the steel, through the arm at the shoulder. The second time they took no chances. They used a ball, and they shattered the bone at the socket into splinters. But perhaps they are not through yet; perhaps they will want more.”
    Holding his head close to her, she would say: “You are a child, and I would to God that I could suffer for you. I have lived so little, and you have lived so much. It has not been fair. If only I could have shared it. If only I could have felt some of it. If only it could have hurt me as it hurt you …”
    He would never know that seven years could be as long as seventy, and that death hurts, even when you do not die. Nor would he ever know how self-pity had hardened him.

4
    I N the second year after they were married, a child was born to Inez, a girl, brown of eye, and with her mother’s shadow to her skin. They called the girl Inez. Had it been a boy, they would have called it John Preswick. But since it was a girl, they gave it the name of Inez. Old John Preswick was a grandfather, and he was proud. He considered it a very wonderful and remarkable thing to be a grandfather; and, that thought in his mind, the very next day after it was an accomplished fact, he took his frog-headed stick, took his long coat, and took his pearl-colored cocked hat, and, in spite of the cutting wind and flaky snow, strutted down the Bowery Lane that all the world might know the extent of his satisfaction and pride.
    The world knew, but he caught a chill, of which he never got the better. For a month, he lingered, and then, his son and his son’s wife at his bedside, he died. They dressed his body as he himself would have dressed it; they laid it in a coffin, and they laid over it a red, white, and blue flag, and as they laid him into his grave, twelve rifles were discharged into the air, in recognition of the fact that his son had been a captain in the New York militia, that many, many years ago, he had marched with a boy named Hamilton upon the common, training other boys into a ragged squadron.
    But as the younger John Preswick stood there, his wife at his side, alien thoughts were coursing through his mind. It occurred to him that, after all, this man was his father, and that the man was dead. There would be no reprieve, as there had been in his case, for with his own eyes he had seen the body laid out, had seen it dressed for the coffin, had seen it bolted in, as salted fish are bolted into a crate. He should have felt pity, and he should have felt grief, but he did not experience a great deal of either. And that puzzled him, as he was puzzled by the sobs that racked the form of his wife. Just why should it mean so much more to her than it did to him? Perhaps all of that had been in the seven years. Many things must have been in those seven years, things he would never quite understand. Realizing that for the first time, he realized, too, that his wife was a very strange person, and that he had never known her. All of it piled up upon him, and made his brow ache, so that he was glad when at last they turned away from the new grave and went back to their house.
    Now he, the captain, was master of that house, and the great mahogany desk and the frog-headed stick was his. He went to the window, from which he could see the flag tossing over the Battery. For a long while he remained in the cold on