WEDDING RING
407
brothers, and brothers in His Holy Narne. And in this room with me
now, men suffer for sins not theirs, as for their own. It is a comfort
to know that I suffer only for my own." He knew not only that he
was to die, but that the war was over. "It is over. It is all over but the
dying, which will go on. Though the boil has come to a head and has
burst, yet must the pus flow. Men shall yet come together and die in
the common guilt of man and in the guilt that sent them hither from
far places and distant firesides. But God in His Mercy has spared me
the end. Blessed be His Name."
There was no more in the journal. There was only the letter to
Gilbert, written in the strange hand, dictated by Cass after he had
grown too weak to write. "Remember me, but without grief.
If
one
of us is lucky, it is I ..."
Atlanta fell. In the last confusion, the grave of Cass Mastern
was not marked. Someone at the hospital, a certain Albert Calloway,
kept Cass's papers and the ring which he had carried on the cord
around his neck, and much later, after the war in fact, sent them to
Gilbert Mastern with a courteous note. Gilbert preserved the journal,
the letters from Cass, the picture of Cass, and the ring on its cord, and
after Gilbert's death, the heir finally sent the packet to Jack Burden,
the student of history and the grand-nephew of Cass and Gilbert Mas–
tern. So they came to rest on the little pine table in Jack Burden's'
bedroom in the slatternly apartment which he occupied with the two
other graduate students, the unlucky, industrious, and alcoholic one,
and the lucky, idle, and alcoholic one.
Jack Burden lived with the Mastern papers for a year and a half.
He wanted to know all of the facts of the world in which Cass and
Gilbert Mastern had lived, and he did know many of the facts. And
he felt that he knew Gilbert Mastern. Gilbert Mastern had kept no
journal, but he felt that he knew him, the man with the head like
the block of bare granite, who had lived through one world into an–
other and had been at home in both. But the day came when Jack
Burden sat down at the pine table and realized that he did not know
Cass Mastern. He did not have to know Cass Mastern to get the de–
gree; he oniy had to know the facts about Cass Mastern's world. But
without knowing Oass Mastern, he could not put down the facts
about Cass ·Mastern's world. Not that Jack Burden said that to him–
self. He simply sat there at the pine table, night after night, staring at
the papers before him, twisting the ring on its cord, staring at the
photograph, and writing nothing. Then he would get up to get a
drink of water, and would stand in the dark kitchen, holding an old
jelly glass in his hand, waiting for the water to run cold from the tap.
