Books at bedtime by calming anxiety, the locket by Kate Choppin.
One night in autumn, a few men were gathered about a fire on the slope of the hill.
They belonged to a small detachment of Confederate forces and were awaiting orders to march.
Their grey uniforms were worn beyond the point of shabbyness.
Another man was heating something in a cup over the embers.
Two were lying in full length the little distance away, while a fourth was trying to decipher
a letter and had drawn close to the light.
He had unfastened his collar and a good bit of his flannel shirt front.
What's that you got around your neck, Ned?
Asked one of the men lying in obscurity.
Ned or Edmund mechanically fastened another button of his shirt and did not reply.
He went on reading his letter.
Is it your sweetheart's picture?
Taint no gals picture offered the man at the fire.
He had removed his tin cup and was engaged in stirring its grimy contents with a small stick.
That's a charm, some kind of hoody business that one of them priest gave him to keep him
out of trouble.
I know them Catholics.
That's how come French he got promoted and never got a scratch since he's been in the
ranks.
Hey French, ain't I right?
Edmund looked up absolutely from his letter.
What is it he asked?
Ain't that a charm you got around your neck?
It must be Nick returned Edmund with a smile.
I don't know how I could have gone through this year and a half without him.
The letter had made Edmund heart sick and home sick.
He stretched himself on his back and looked straight up at the blinking skies.
But he was not thinking of them nor anything but a certain spring day when the bees were
humming in the climitus.
When a girl was saying goodbye to him, he could see her as she unclassed from her neck the
locket which he fastened about his own.
It was an old fashioned golden locket bearing miniatures of her father and mother with their
names and the date of their marriage.
It was her most precious earthly possession.
Edmund could feel again the folds of the girl's soft white gown and see the droop of the
injured angel sleeves as she circled her fair arms around his neck.
Her sweet face, appealing pathetic, tormented by the pain of parting appeared before him
as vividly as life.
He turned over, burying his face in his arm and there he lay still and motionless.
The profound and treacherous night with its silence and semblance of peace settled upon the
camp.
He dreamed that the fair octave brought him a letter.
He had no chair to offer her and was pained and embarrassed at the condition of his garments.
He was ashamed of the poor food which comprised the dinner at which he begged her to join them.
He dreamt of a serpent coiling around his throat and then he strove to grasp it.
The slimy thing had glided away from his clutch.
Then his dream was clamor.
Get your duds you, Frenchy, Nick was bellowing in his face.
There was what appeared to be a scramble and a rush rather than any regulated movement.
The hillside was allowed with clatter and motion, with sudden up springing lights among the
pine.
In the east the dawn was unfolding out of the darkness.
Its glimmer was yet dim in the plain below.
What it all about, wandered a big black bird perched in the top of the tallest tree.
He was an old solitary and wise one, yet he was not wise enough to guess what it was that
it was all about.
So all day long he kept blinking and wondering.
The noise reached far out over the plain and across the hills and awoke the little babes
that were sleeping in their cradle.
The smoke killed up towards the sun and shadowed the plain so that this stupid bird thought
it was going to rain but the wise one knew better.
They are children playing a game he thought.
I shall know more about it if I watch long enough.
At the approach of night they had all vanished away with their dinn and smoke.
Then the old bird plundered its feathers.
At last he had understood.
With a flap of his great black wings he shot upwards, circling towards the plain.
A man was picking his way across the plain.
He was dressed in the garb of a clergyman.
His mission was to administer the consolations of religion to any of the prostate figures
in whom there might yet linger a spark of life.
A negro accompanied him, bearing a bucket of water and a flask of wine.
There were no wounded here.
They had all been born away but there had treated been harried and the vultures and the good
Samaritans would have to look to the dead.
There was a soldier, a mere boy, lying with his face to the sky.
His hands were catching the sword on either side and his fingernails were stuffed with earth
and bits of grass that he had gathered in his despairing grass upon life.
This musket was gone.
He was hapless and his face and clothing were begrined.
Around his neck hung a gold chain and lock it.
The priest bending over him, unclassed the chain and removed it from the dead soldiers
neck.
He had grown used to the terrors of war and could face them unflinchingly, but it's
pace us some way always brought the tears to his old dim eye.
The angelus was ringing half a mile away.
The priest and the negro nelton murmured together the evening benediction and a prayer for
the dead.
2.
The peace and beauty of a spring day had descended upon the earth like a benediction.
Along the leafy road which skirted an arrow torched with stream in central Louisiana,
rumbled an old-fashioned cabrelay, much the worse for hard and rough usage over the country
roads and lanes.
The fat black horses went in a slow, measured trot, notwithstanding constant urging on the
part of the fat black coachman.
Within the vehicle was seated the fair Octavia and her old friend and neighbour, Judge
Pilya, who had come to take her for a morning drive.
Octavia wore a plain black dress, severe in its simplicity.
The narrow belts held it at the waist and the sleeves were gathered into a close fitting
waistband.
She had discarded her hoop skirt and appeared not unlike in her.
Beneath the folds of her bodice nestled the old locket.
She never displayed it now.
It had returned to her sanctified in her eyes, made precious as material things sometimes
are by being forever identified with a significant moment in one's existence.
A hundred times she had read over the letter with which the locket had come back to her.
No later than that morning she had again poured over it.
As she sat beside the window, smoothing the letter out upon her knee, heavy and spiced
odours stalled into her with the songs of birds and the humming of insects in the air.
She was so young and the world was so beautiful that there came over her a sense of unreality
as she read again and again the pre-sletter.
He told her of that autumn day, drawing its clothes, with the gold and the red fading out
of the west and the night gathering its shadows to cover the faces of the dead.
She could not believe that one of those dead was her own, with Visage uplifted to the grey
sky in an agony of supplication.
A spasm of resistance and rebellion seized and swept over her.
Why was the spring here with its flowers and its deducted breath if he was dead?
Why was she here?
What further had she to do with life and the living?
Like Tavir had experienced many such moments of despair, but a blessed resignation had
never failed to follow and it fell then upon her like a mantle and enveloped her.
I shall grow old and quiet and sad like poor Aunt Tavir, she murmured to herself as she
folded the letter and replaced it into the secret ring.
Already she gave herself a little d'umu'er like her Aunt Tavir.
She walked with a slow guide in unconscious imitation of Mademoiselle Tavir, whom some
youthful affliction had robbed of earthly compensation while leaving her in the possession
of youth's illusions.
As she sat in the old cabrelay beside the father of her dead lover again, there came
to Octavia the terrible sense of loss which had assailed her so often before.
The soul of her youth clamoured for its rights for a share in the world's glory and exaltation.
She leaned back and drew her veil a little closer about her faith.
It was an old black veil of her own Tavir's.
A whiff of dust from the road had blown in and she wiped her cheeks and her eyes with
her soft white handkerchief, a homemade handkerchief fabricated from one of her old fine
muslin peticotes.
Will you do me the favor Octavia?
Requested the judge in the courteous tone which he'd never abandoned to remove that veil
which you wear?
It seems out of harmony some way with the beauty and promise of the day.
The young girl obediently yielded to her old companion's wish and unpaining the cumbersome
somber drapery from her bonnet, folded it neatly and laid it upon the seat in front of her.
Ah, that is better, far better, he said in a tone expressing unbounded relief.
He ever put it on again dear.
Octavia felt a little hurt as if he wished to debar her from her share and parcel in the
burden of affliction which had been placed upon all of them.
Again, she drew forth the old muslin handkerchief.
They had left the big road and turned into the level plain which had formerly been an
old meadow.
There were clumps of thorn trees here and there, gorgeous in their spring radiance.
Some cattle were grazing off in the distance in spots where the grass was tall and luscious.
At the far end of the meadow was a towering lilac hedge, skirting the lane that led to
Judge Piliy's house.
And the scent of its heavy blossoms met them like a soft and tender embrace of welcome.
As they neared the house, the old gentleman placed a ram around the girl's shoulders and
turning her face up to him, he said.
"Do you not think that on a day like this miracles might happen when the whole earth is vibrant
with life?
Does it not seem to you, Octavia?
That heaven might for once relent and give us back our dead?"
He spoke very low, advisedly and impressively.
In his voice was an old quaver which was not habitual and there was an agitation in every
line of his fissage.
She gazed at him with eyes that were full of supplication and a certain terror of joy.
They had been driving through the lane with the towering hedge on one side and the open
meadow on the other.
The horses had somewhat quickened their lazy pace.
As they turned into the avenue, leading to the house, a whole choir of feathered songsters
fluted a sudden turret of melodious greeting from their leafy hiding places.
Octavia felt as if she had passed into a stage of existence which was like a dream, more
poignant and real in life.
There was the old grey house with its sloping eaves.
Amid the blur of grain and dimly she saw familiar faces and heard voices as if they came
from far across the fields.
An Edmund was holding her.
Her dead Edmund, her living Edmund, and she felt the beating of his heart against her
and the agonizing rapture of his kisses striving to awake her.
It was if the spirit of life and the awakening spring had given back her soul to the youth
and bade her rejoice.
It was many hours later that Octavia drew the locket from her bosom and looked to Edmund
with a questioning appeal in her glance.
It was the night before an engagement, he said.
In the hurry of the encounter and the retreat next day, I never missed it till the fight
was over.
I thought of course I had lost it in the heat of the struggle, but it was stolen.
Stolen, she shut it and thought of the dead soldier with his face uplifted to the sky
in an agony of supplication.
Edmund said nothing, but he thought of his mess made, the one who had lain far back in
the shadow, the one who had said nothing.