The Kentons | Page 5

who made
history ought to write it, and in his first Commemoration-Day oration
he urged his companions in arms to set down everything they could
remember of their soldiering, and to save the letters they had written
home, so that they might each contribute to a collective autobiography
of the regiment. It was only in this way, he held, that the intensely
personal character of the struggle could be recorded. He had felt his
way to the fact that every battle is essentially episodical, very campaign
a sum of fortuities; and it was not strange that he should suppose, with
his want of perspective, that this universal fact was purely national and
American. His zeal made him the repository of a vast mass of material

which he could not have refused to keep for the soldiers who brought it
to him, more or less in a humorous indulgence of his whim. But he
even offered to receive it, and in a community where everything took
the complexion of a joke, he came to be affectionately regarded as a
crank on that point; the shabbily aging veterans, whom he pursued to
their workbenches and cornfields, for, the documents of the regimental
history, liked to ask the colonel if he had brought his gun. They, always
give him the title with which he had been breveted at the close of the
war; but he was known to the, younger, generation of his
fellow-citizens as the judge. His wife called him Mr. Kenton in the
presence of strangers, and sometimes to himself, but to his children she
called him Poppa, as they did.
The steady-going eldest son, who had succeeded to his father's affairs
without giving him the sense of dispossession, loyally accepted the
popular belief that he would never be the man his father was. He joined
with his mother in a respect for Kenton's theory of the regimental
history which was none the less sincere because it was unconsciously a
little sceptical of the outcome; and the eldest daughter was of their
party. The youngest said frankly that she had no use for any history, but
she said the same of nearly everything which had not directly or
indirectly to do with dancing. In this regulation she had use for parties
and picnics, for buggy-rides and sleigh-rides, for calls from young men
and visits to and from other girls, for concerts, for plays, for circuses
and church sociables, for everything but lectures; and she devoted
herself to her pleasures without the shadow of chaperonage, which was,
indeed, a thing still unheard of in Tuskingum.
In the expansion which no one else ventured, or, perhaps, wished to set
bounds to, she came under the criticism of her younger brother, who,
upon the rare occasions when he deigned to mingle in the family affairs,
drew their mother's notice to his sister's excesses in carrying-on, and
required some action that should keep her from bringing the name, of
Kenton to disgrace. From being himself a boy of very slovenly and
lawless life he had suddenly, at the age of fourteen, caught himself up
from the street, reformed his dress and conduct, and confined himself in
his large room at the top of the house, where, on the pursuits to which
he gave his spare time, the friends who frequented his society, and the
literature which nourished his darkling spirit, might fitly have been

written Mystery. The sister whom he reprobated was only two years his
elder, but since that difference in a girl accounts for a great deal, it
apparently authorized her to take him more lightly than he was able to
take himself. She said that he was in love, and she achieved an
importance with him through his speechless rage and scorn which none
of the rest of his family enjoyed. With his father and mother he had a
bearing of repressed superiority which a strenuous conscience kept
from unmasking itself in open contempt when they failed to make his
sister promise to behave herself. Sometimes he had lapses from his
dignified gloom with his mother, when, for no reason that could be
given, he fell from his habitual majesty to the tender dependence of a
little boy, just as his voice broke from its nascent base to its earlier
treble at moments when he least expected or wished such a thing to
happen. His stately but vague ideal of himself was supported by a
stature beyond his years, but this rendered it the more difficult for him
to bear the humiliation of his sudden collapses, and made him at other
times the easier prey of Lottie's ridicule. He got on best, or at least most
evenly, with his eldest sister. She took him seriously, perhaps because
she took all life so; and she