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In the Wake of War, by Hallie Erminie Rives

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In the Wake of War
by Hallie Erminie Rives, 1905



THERE is nothing so elusive yet so fascinating as a chance resemblance. We walk
a street crowded with thousands of human atoms like ourselves, yet each
meaningless, unindividual. The mass has the consistency of a stream of water
parted by a stone. Suddenly one of these atoms acquires form, color, substance,
and character; its individuality strikes a chord in the brain. A thousand
disassociate fragmentsЧ memory-worn strands of time and placeЧ struggle to
coalesce, to re-weave themselves into a pattern we once knew. Our thoughts give
aid. Recollection puzzles itself, finds itself impotent, rages at its own
powerlessness. At such a moment the mind recurs again and again with painful
insistence to the problem, and the chance resemblance, by reason of aggravation,
acquires an importance wholly disproportionate. The man who pursues such a
will-o'-the-wisp memory does so protesting, in spite of himself.
It was in some such frame of mind that Brent Maxwell stood looking out across
the desolate hillside. The landscape still mourned, in blackened stone walls and
thinned forests, the devastation of Sherman's march to the sea. The bare
unpromise of the scene was in his soul. He knew the gaunt poverty that follows
in the wake of war. He had fought loyally for the Union. And now, after fifteen
years of reconstruction, he had learned that Appomattox had dawned only upon the
first chapter of defeat. The fierce patriotism which had led him, a youth of
enthusiasm and dreams of the glory of sacrifice, to leave his place and portion
in the North when the first call sounded, and the earnestness of intention with
which he had flung himself into the newly breathing industrial life of a
Southern city, had had time to cool and sober. In spite of success the very
intensity of the struggle against adverse conditions had bred in him a
resentment against the necessity which made green fields a desert, plantation a
waste, and a smiling country a cemetery of unmarked graves. Something of the
dogged sadness which hung on the people among whom he elected to dwell had
centred into him. He had lived down the hatred and the sneer, but the process
had made him bitter against the circumstances which had given this hatred rise.
On this early morning his thoughts, which had been busy estimating the
possibilities of the farm, whose deeds he had in his pocket, and whose
foreclosure had brought him from his own city, had been suddenly arrested and
turned from their channel. A rattling vehicle had passed him, containing two
figuresЧ a man and a woman. The faces of both interested him. The woman's was
sad and sober-sweet, surmounted by pearl gray hair. There was a little color in
her cheeks. The man had dead white hair and beard, with face blue-tinged and
shifting eyes of yellow. He wore a heavy butternut overcoat and a knitted nubia
of childishly bright colors.
There was something in this last face that started reverberating echoes in
Maxwell's brain. An intangible hand was at work tying together loose ends of
recollection. He knew and yet he did not know. Wherever he looked, as he plodded