The rest of the story.
Beth has had every advantage, has lived all of her life in a fashionable section of the city,
and now here she is in a cab-bound for Whitechapel, a slum, a depth of human existence,
beneath anything she has ever experienced.
What she's about to do, we call making the drop, payment of ransom to kidnappers,
and when this brief but harrowing episode is over, Beth will see the world through other eyes forever after,
and that brings us to the rest of the story.
High-born Beth, in a common taxicab on her way to the underworld,
she knows that she is risking her life, and yet this risk must be taken for she's about to negotiate with kidnappers for the release of a captive.
The man in her family, her father, her brother, have done their best to dissuade Beth from this mission.
They have warned her of the danger, and yet horror stories are ringing in Beth's ears about the decapitated heads of kidnapped victims,
returned in bloody parcels to the families who refused to pay.
So for like of a man with courage, your moral conviction of woman, Beth is going to descend into the wolves' den,
someone she loves as being held in torment may in fact already be dead,
and yet if there's only a chance that he's still alive, Beth will take her own chances with her own life.
A man named Taylor is her contact.
He's known to be the leader of a kidnapped ring, though he professes only to have connections.
This outward role is why the police cannot touch him. Beth does not care.
A loved one's life is in the balance.
The cab comes to a halt in the middle of the grimy slum street, broken windows filled, tumbled down.
This is the address Beth has been given.
At once a gang of men and boys with haunted faces converge from the quiet to encircle the cab,
the danger of which Beth has been warned has now become a reality.
And yet it'll pass.
It will pass.
For the real life account of which you've just heard concludes Happily Negotiations Successful,
ransom paid, kidnapped, victim released, exhausted, but unharmed.
In retrospect, there is no doubt.
He would have been killed, were it not for Beth?
For him a five day ordeal was over and for Beth a new life was beginning.
Within days of this her first adventure beyond the elegance she had always known,
she would marry secretly, and she would run away from home.
And years later on a sunny balcony in Italy she would recall the desolation of White Chapel,
she would recall the den of kidnappers in East London, the haunted faces,
and she would describe it all in a poem so that you would know that she was once there,
a poem called Aurora Lee.
No, you may never have read those lines of verse, but you are acquainted with the lady who wrote them.
The gifted woman whose strict father kept her home until she was 40,
the dominated daughter who found her first courage to break free as an angel of mercy,
was Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
And the kidnapped victim for whom she had risked her life in the depths of a White Chapel slum.
The captive indirectly responsible for Elizabeth's first freedom was never ever again to leave her side,
a golden spaniel puppy named Flush.
And now you know the rest of the story.
The rest of the story.
John Clem had been with the 22nd Massachusetts Regiment for more than two years now.
He had faced every imaginable danger on the battlefields of the Civil War,
even had a load of army equipment blasted right out of his hands by a Confederate cannonball during the Battle of Shiloh.
But nothing, nothing had prepared him for the intimate horror of September 2018-63, the Battle of Chikamagwa.
The 22nd Massachusetts was catching hell, infantry was being captured on mass.
Amid the Cacophonist mayhem John Clem heard the voice of a Confederate officer booming surrender.
Without stopping to consider his options or his odds, John ran as fast as he could.
The officer was pursuing him on horseback and squeezed off a couple of shots and shouted again for the soldier to give himself up.
John halted and turned slowly as if reluctantly obeying the command and their eyes met.
And for a seeming eternity with artillery fire and bellows of anger and screams of the dying echoing all around them,
John Clem and the grey-coated officer gazed into each other's souls.
It was only for an instant really, but it would live forever in the battlefields of John's dreams,
because in the next instant John jerked his rifle to his shoulder and pulled the trigger in half of the revs head blew away.
John turned and ran again, even harder this time, until he spied a heap of contorted corpses.
There was only one way of escape he told himself, pretend to be shot and toppled onto the pile of bodies,
and then wait until nobody was looking and high-tailed it back behind the Union line.
And this John did.
For his valor, at the Battle of Chikamagua, John Clem was promoted to corporal and thereafter he would be captured once and wounded twice,
but even after the war was over, his life in the United States Army was only beginning.
John finally resigned a major general in 1916, and yet all through his many and various military experiences he would remain haunted.
A wake or a sleep he would remain haunted by a pair of Confederate eyes, a light and a live and quizzically expressed only a moment before John closed them forever.
You see, impressionable minds and tender hearts just naturally go together, and yet what such a mind readily absorbs such a heart cannot hope to explain.
In history texts, the American war between the states is often subtitled the Brothers War, and yet so young were so many of the soldiers who fought and died in the battles of blue and gray,
that they may also be said to comprise a children's crusade, or something more.
All of your life you've heard majestic issues applied to that otherwise unconscionable conflict, and yet looming overall was an almost palpable insanity.
Perhaps no better illustrated than by the attempted capture of John Glenn, whereupon the Confederate officer chasing him about to be killed by him, shouted surrender surrender you damned little Yankee.
Indeed, private John Clem, 60 pounds, 30 inches tall, age 12, now you know the rest of the story.