The Second Hunt After the Captain

by ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

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JUST eighty years ago there appeared in the December issue of this monthly an article called “My Hunt After ‘The Captain.’” It began in this wise: —

In the dead of the night which closed upon the bloody field of Antietam, my household was startled from its slumbers by the loud summons of a telegraphic messenger. The air had been heavy all day with rumors of battle, and thousands and tens of thousands had walked the streets with throbbing hearts, in dread anticipation of the tidings any hour might bring.

We rose hastily, and presently the messenger was admitted. I took the envelope from his hand, opened it, and read: —

Hagerstown 17th
To——H—
Capt H— wounded shot through the neck thought not mortal at Keetlysville

WILLIAM G LEDUC

Now in those days it was the austere rule of the Atlantic that none of its contributions should carry a signature. Thus even when the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” had led the February issue in that same year, there was nothing to identify it as having been written by the wife of the great Dr. Howe, that handsome matron who had been a Miss Ward of New York. But in the case of “My Hunt After ‘The Captain’" all readers in Boston (and the rest did not matter) must have spotted its authorship. For one thing, they were familiar with the style. When the Atlantic was launched in 1857, a series of discursive essays had, after a little lapse of twenty-five years, been resumed in its pages with these words: “I was just going to say, when I was interrupted. . . .” But even from one to whom the accents of the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table were not immediately recognizable there was no real effort to conceal the identity of the Captain or of him who had done the hunting. The mystery of the - —— H— who received that midnight telegram was about as baffling as those puzzles which used to clutter the periodicals of the nineties, when the reader who enclosed ten cents was sure to receive a grand piano, a diamond-frame bicycle, or at least a drawing-slate if only he could, after terrific cogitation, supply the missing letters in Gr-ver Cl-vel-nd. All Boston subscribers to the Atlantic in 1862 knew (and had been tranquilly expected to know) that the author of “My Hunt After ‘The Captain’” was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the bustling little professor of anatomy at Harvard, and that the Captain was his towering namesake who, like many another member of the class of ‘61, had not even waited for Commencement in his haste to be off with the 20th Massachusetts.

In his service with that eventful regiment, the younger Holmes was thrice wounded; the second time at Antietam. What his father reported in the Atlantic of December, 1862, was his own five-day search through the fringes of that battlefield only to discover, when at last he found his ambulatory case on a train at Harrisburg, that all the while his boy, not badly wounded at all, had been living the life of Riley under a quiet Hagerstown roof. Let me quote from that report: —

In the first car, on the fourth seat to the right, I saw my Captain; there saw I him, even my firstborn, whom I had sought through many cities.

“HOow are you, Boy?”

“How are you, Dad?”

Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently disguising those natural impulses that made Joseph, the Prime-Minister of Egypt, weep aloud so that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard, — nay, which had once overcome his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he fell on his brother’s neck and cried like a baby in the presence of all the women. But the hidden cisterns of the soul may be filling fast with sweet tears, while the windows through which it looks are undimmed by a drop or a film of moisture.

The peroration of “My Hunt After ‘The Captain’” reads as follows: —

The source of my repeated disappointments was soon made clear enough. The Captain had gone to Hagerstown, intending to take the cars at once for Philadelphia, as his three friends actually did do, and as I took it for granted he certainly would. But as he walked languidly along, some ladies saw him across the street, and seeing, were moved with pity, and pitying, spoke such soft words that he was tempted to accept their invitation and rest awhile beneath their hospitable roof. The mansion was old, as the dwellings of gentlefolks should be; the ladies were some of them young, and all were full of kindness; there were gentle cares, and unasked luxuries, and pleasant talk, and music-sprinklings from the piano, with a sweet voice to keep them company, — and all this after the swamps of the Chickahominy, the mud and flies of Harrison’s Landing, the dragging marches, the desperate battles, the fretting wound, the jolting ambulance, the log-house, and the rickety milk-cart! Thanks, uncounted thanks to the angelic ladies whose charming attentions detained him from Saturday to Thursday, to his great advantage and my infinite bewilderment! As for his wound, how could it do otherwise than well under such hands? The bullet had gone smoothly through, dodging everything but a few nervous branches, which would come right in time and leave him as well as ever. . . .

Fling open the window-blinds of the chamber that looks out on the waters and towards the western sun! Let the joyous light shine in upon the pictures that hang upon its walls and the shelves thick-set with the names of poets and philosophers and sacred teachers, in whose pages our boys learn that life is noble only when it is held cheap by the side of honor and of duty. Lay him in his own bed, and let him sleep off his aches and weariness. So comes down another night over this household, unbroken by any messenger of evil tidings, — a night of peaceful rest and grateful thoughts; for this our son and brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.

Thus ended what in its day was a famous narrative. But I am obliged to report that whenever he could be induced to refer to it at all, the Captain himself made it clear that he regarded it as a piece of revolting sentimentality. It is in the tradition for the battle-scarred to find distasteful all civilian writing in wartime. Any shrewd person must have guessed that the Captain couldn’t abide “My Hunt After ‘The Captain,’” but it is only fair to add that the younger Holmes never liked any of his father’s writings. In fact, he never liked his father.

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All those close to the Captain in the afteryears of his service on the United States Supreme Court, where, though he always referred to himself as a mere side-judge on that bench, he did somehow manage to reconstruct the English-speaking world’s notion of what law is and incidentally to shape the minds of the court’s present majority — all those, I say, who were in the confidence of the late Justice Holmes were aware that one of the most persistent and determining factors of his life was his hearty antagonism toward the man who had begotten him. The two were always at odds. The Judge made no secret of the fact that he went into law because his father did not want him to. And there is interesting evidence that he looked upon the nation-wide celebration of his ninetieth birthday as a kind of triumph over his old man.

They will wearily say “Of course, of course” who accept as established scientific truths the brilliant surmises of the late Sigmund Freud, but it is my own notion that this instance of father-and-son relationship might more profitably be studied as a special case. I would venture a guess that the little doctor began it, and began it because he was a little doctor. It is important to remember that the elder Holmes was only five-foot-three. Before his eyes his first-born grew into a handsome giant. When the boy was only eleven he passed his father in height. Probably it was just about then that Dr. Holmes began picking on his namesake. Between them they were busy on this planet for one hundred and twentysix years — from 1809 to 1935. During much of that time, father and son were antagonists.

Justice Holmes held it against his father’s Antietam story that it was not even accurate. That colloquy in the train, for instance. “How are you, Boy?” Here he was a Captain in the 20th Massachusetts, fresh from an ugly battle in which one bullet had gone right through his neck, yet someone was calling him Boy. It seems his reply was not “How are you, Dad?” at all. What he really said was, “Boy, nothing.”

In this magazine a few years ago, I reported this filial correction and added: —

There is a sequel. More than half a century later one of the girls called him up. Yes, one of the Hagerstown girls. And in a great flutter, the old Judge — but that is another story.

That familiar trick of the trade, to which not only Rudyard Kipling but the author of Sherlock Holmes was much addicted, is really an implied tryst with the reader and here, for once in a way, such an appointment shall be kept — here and, what is more, now.

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To be exact, it was nearer forty than fifty years later that one of those who had hovered over the wounded hero in Hagerstown wrote to the newly appointed side-judge in Washington. He had only just swum back into her ken, for although he had for several years been Chief Justice in Massachusetts and had published as long ago as 1881 that classic work on the common law which is still quoted in English opinions as though it were Holy Writ, it was only in 1902, when Theodore Roosevelt , not without subsequent twinges of regret, appointed Holmes to the Supreme Court in Washington, that, outside of his own Boston, he caught the eye and ear of laymen and, as in this instance, laywomen. Anyway, it was then that the Hagerstown girl wrote him. Now that he had become great and famous, would he, for old times’ sake, have a moment for poor, little, unimportant her? It was that sort of thing. It seems she was coming to Washington and would be lodged at the Shoreham. Would he consider putting aside affairs of state for one evening and slip away to dine with her? Would he!

Mrs. Holmes was against it. Not, mind you, because that brusque and tender woman feared the competition. Not she whose epitaph will be found forever in the letter he wrote his old friend Sir Frederick Pollock after her death: “For sixty years she made life poetry for me. ” Of course, her Wendell’s relish of a sightly woman was as constant a problem from the beginning of that extraordinary marriage — she always did say that they had to be married in the biggest church in Boston because there would not have been enough room in any other for all of Wendell’s girls — as it was proverbial in the lore about the Judge when in his last years he became a Washington tradition.

They used to tell a story about his walking with Brandeis down a leafy street on a fine spring day and spying a neat ankle on a girl just getting into a taxi. Turning ruefully to his companion, Holmes said: “Oh, to be seventy again!” If he did say that, he was quoting. For it was an old beau in the Paris of the late eighteenth century who said it first. At least Van Doren’s Benjamin Franklin ascribes it to that nephew of the great Corneille’s, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, who was appointed for life to the secretariat of the Academy of Sciences and, rather in the manner of our own Nicholas Murray Butler, held on to the job for seventy years. “Oh, to be seventy again!” Whether Holmes ever said it at all is unimportant. It is only important that he might have. It was in character — a character none knew so well as the former Fanny Dixwell, daughter of his old headmaster in the Latin school where he prepared for Harvard.

Fanny Holmes also made him toe the mark for sixty years, but at any dinnerparty at the comfortable, red-brick house in I Street it was her notion of how to manage him that on his right there should always be seated the prettiest woman in Washington.

Wherefore, if she opposed his going back through the years to meet his haze-hung Hagerstown past, it was not in dread of her own discomfort but of his. Perhaps she remembered the crash of Charles Dickens when, from a house aswarm with grown and growing children, he rushed so ingenuously to a rendezvous with her who many years before had been the foolish, flowerlike inspiration for Dora in David Copperfield. And yet if Mrs. Holmes were to argue bluntly, it would only remind him that he too was getting old. Well, instead she got him into his best bib and tucker, sent out and bought a staggering bouquet for him to take along, helped him into his overcoat, and turned him loose for the evening.

When he hadn’t come home by ten o’clock she went to bed. Still wide awake at eleven, she heard his key in the front door two floors below, heard him climb the first flight and go into his library. Then a long, long silence. Finally she got into her slippers, wrapped a dressing-gown around her, and trotted down to have a look. As she had expected, he was sitting at his desk with his face in his hands.

“Wendell!”

He did not look up as he answered: “Woman, shut your trap.”

“Wendell!” his wife persisted. “She’d grown fat, hadn’t she?”

He did look up then and meekly said: “Yes, my dear.”