During the fortnight or three weeks following the departure of Battery G it became clear to every one that the war was as good as over. It had lasted already a whole year, but now the end was obviously at hand. The union army had the Rebels cooped up in Yorktown—the identical place where the British had been compelled to surrender at the close of the Revolution—and it was impossible that they should get away. The very coincidence of locality was enough in itself to convince the most skeptical.
We read that Fitz John Porter had a balloon fastened by a rope, in which he daily went up and took a look through his field-glasses at the Rebels, all miserably huddled together in their trap, awaiting their doom. Our soldiers wrote home now that final victory could only be a matter of a few weeks, or months at the most. Some of them said they would surely be home by haying time. Their letters no longer dwelt upon battles, or the prospect of battles, but gossiped about the jealousies and quarrels among our generals, who seemed to dislike one another much more than they did the common enemy, and told us long and quite incredible tales about the mud in Virginia. No soldier’s letter that spring was complete without a chapter on the mud. There were many stories about mules and their contraband drivers being bodily sunk out of sight in these weltering seas of mire, and of new boots being made for the officers to come up to their armpits, which we hardly knew whether to believe or not. But about the fact that peace was practically within view there could be no doubt.
Under the influence of this mood, Miss Parma-lee’s ambitious project for a grand fair and festival in aid of the Field Hospital and Nurse Fund naturally languished. If the war was coming to a close so soon, there could be no use in going to so much worry and trouble, to say nothing of the expense.
Miss Julia seemed to take this view of it herself. She ceased active preparations for the fair, and printed in the Thessaly Banner of Liberty a beautiful poem over her own name entitled “The Dovelike Dawn of White-winged Peace.” She also got herself some new and summery dresses, of gay tints and very fashionable form, and went to be photographed in each. Her almost daily presence at the gallery came, indeed, to be a leading topic of conversation in Octavius. Some said that she was taking lessons of Marsena—learning to make photographs—but others put a different construction on the matter and winked as they did so.
As for Marsena, he moved about the streets these days with his head among the stars, in a state of rapt and reverent exaltation. He had never been what might be called a talker, but now it was as much as the best of us could do to get any kind of word from him. He did not seem to talk to Julia any more than to the general public, but just luxuriated with a dumb solemnity of joy in her company, sitting sometimes for hours beside her on the piazza of the Parmalee house, or focusing her pretty image with silent delight on the ground glass of his best camera day after day, or walking with her, arm in arm, to the Episcopal church on Sundays. He had always been a Presbyterian before, but now he bore himself in the prominent Parmalee pew at St. Mark’s with stately correctness, rising, kneeling, seating himself, just as the others did, and helping Miss Julia hold her Prayer Book with an air of having known the ritual from childhood.
No doubt a good many people felt that all this was rough on the absent Dwight Ransom, and probably some of them talked openly about it; but interest in this aspect of the case was swallowed up in the larger attention now given to Marsena Pulford himself. It began to be reported that he really came of an extraordinarily good family in New England, and that an uncle of his had been in Congress. The legend that he had means of his own did not take much root, but it was admitted that he must now be simply coining money. Some went so far as to estimate his annual profits as high as $1,500, which sounded to the average Octavian like a dream. It was commonly understood that he had abandoned an earlier intention to buy a house and lot of his own, and this clearly seemed to show that he counted upon going presently to live in the Parmalee mansion. People speculated with idle curiosity as to the likelihood of this coming to pass before the war ended and Battery G returned home.
Suddenly great and stirring news fell upon the startled North and set Octavius thrilling with excitement, along with every other community far and near. It was in the first week or so of May that the surprise came; the Rebels, whom we had supposed to be securely locked up in Yorktown, with no alternative save starvation or surrender, decided not to remain there any longer, and accordingly marched comfortably off in the direction of Richmond!
Quick upon the heels of this came tidings that the union army was in pursuit, and that there had been savage fighting with the Confederate rear-guard at Williamsburg. The papers said that the war, so far from ending, must now be fought all over again. The marvellous story of the Monitor and Merrimac sent our men folks into a frenzy of patriotic fervor. Our women learned with sinking hearts that the new corps which included our Dearborn County regiments was to bear the brunt of the conflict in this changed order of things. We were all off again in a hysterical whirl of emotions—now pride, now horror, now bitter wrath on top.
In the middle of all this the famous Field Hospital and Nurse Fund Fair was held. The project had slumbered the while people thought peace so near. It sprang up with renewed and vigorous life the moment the echo of those guns at Williamsburg reached our ears. And of course at its head was Julia Parmalee.
It would take a long time and a powerful ransacking of memory to catalogue the remarkable things which this active young woman did toward making that fair the success it undoubtedly was. Even more notable were the things which she coaxed, argued, or shamed other folks into doing for it. Years afterward there were old people who would tell you that Octavius had never been quite the same place since.
For one thing, instead of the Fireman’s Hall, with its dingy aspect and somewhat rowdyish associations, the fair was held in the Court House, and we all understood that Miss Julia had been able to secure this favor on account of her late uncle, the Judge, when any one else would have been refused. It was under her tireless and ubiquitous supervision that this solemn old interior now took on a gay and festal face. Under the inspiration of her glance the members of the Fire Company and the Alert Baseball Club vied with each other in borrowing flags and hanging them from the most inaccessible and adventurous points. The rivalry between the local Freemasons and Odd Fellows was utilized to build contemporary booths at the sides and down the centre—on a floor laid over the benches by the Carpenters’ Benevolent Association. The ladies’ organizations of the various churches, out of devotion to the union and jealousy of one another, did all the rest.
At the sides were the stalls for the sale of useful household articles, and sedate and elderly matrons found themselves now dragged from the mild obscurity of homes where they did their own work, and thrust forward to preside over the sales in these booths, while thrifty, not to say penurious, merchants came and stood around and regarded with amazement the merchandise which they had been wheedled into contributing gratis out of their own stores. The suggestion that they should now buy it back again paralyzed their faculties, and imparted a distinct restraint to the festivities at the sides of the big court-room.
In the centre was a double row of booths for the sale of articles not so strictly useful, and here the young people congregated. All the girls of Octavius seemed to have been gathered here—the pretty ones and the plain ones, the saucy ones and the shy, the maidens who were “getting along” and the damsels not yet out of their teens. Stiff, spreading crinolines brushed juvenile pantalettes, and the dark head of long, shaving-like ringlets contrasted itself with the bold waterfall of blonde hair. These girls did not know one another very well, save by little groups formed around the nucleus of a church association, and very few of them knew Miss Par-malee at all, except, of course, by sight. But now, astonishing to relate, she recognized them by name as old friends, shook hands warmly right and left, and blithely set them all to work and at their ease. The idea of selling things to young men abashed them by its weird and unmaidenly novelty. She showed them how it should be done—bringing forward for the purpose a sheepishly obstinate drugstore clerk, and publicly dragooning him into paying eighty cents for a leather dog-collar, despite his protests that he had no dog a............