The Debatable Land Part 15

The lieutenant, "What of them?"

"The pitch, of course; they go from E flat to F, and then drop to D.

That's a very pretty interval."

"You've got an ear! They do sort of go up and down."

"Le's fight some more."

"Oh, Jimmie, dry up!"

High noon over the corn, and the woods, and the white building with the squat chimney.

Jimmie again. "Le's fight so--Oh!"

He leaped, flung up his hands and fell--his rifle clattering behind--his head rolled over once and lay still. The man next him lifted Jimmie's head, laid it down gently and turned away. Some one farther along said, "Pshaw!" One still farther, "Who's that?"--"Jimmie"--"Oh!"

The captain took the rifle and belt with fifteen counted cartridges and walked down the line to the man with the shattered rifle.

"Here you are."

Company B was silent, and crouched more closely. The sun slipped down perceptibly and burned red in the smoke. The throb of the unseen guns grew Quicker. From woods' edge and cornfield, from covered lines in the weeds by zigzag fences, the smoke was living and leaping, Company B busy and interested. A horseman clattered by. "Get ready!"

"Bayonets?"

"All right. Get into it now!"

Gra.s.s-fields, fences, and ploughed ground; all voices of the battle-field awake; yelling and cheering, crash of musketry, crack of rifles, roar of guns, sh.e.l.ls that whooped in flight and burst into a score of individual screams. Beneath all, an undertone, a rumbling, grinding, splintering sound, the organ ba.s.s of the field; into the corn, that rustled as before, that brushed in turn against Northern and Southern faces, that sheltered alike from the slant sun all still faces in the furrows, pale and ghastly and grimed, thick together, piled dead over dead. Then came the fence, the road, the squat-chimneyed building, the gaping woods with black teeth and white breath; and Company B. Reg.

Third, went into the wished-for woods at last, with empty belts and point-on bayonets; went through them, and saw the sun beyond, and broken lines running across open fields. Some thirty of them came back and sat down by the white building gloomily. The captain looked them over and hummed. "The Campbells are coming--trala, trala." The sun dropped low.

The throb of the guns down the valley grew slower, duller, fainter.

Sanitary men with stretchers pushed to and fro in the corn. The woods grew dark, the fields dusky. Campfires crackled beside the road, Company B's by the white building. Tin cups were poked into the coals.

Conversation was grumbling, fragmentary.

"Jimmie's shut down on pretty sudden."

"Jimmie! There's fifty better men out of this company dropped in their tracks! I don't see why you're so cut on Jimmie."

"I wished it was some one else." The speaker's voice broke. "He was such a d.a.m.n fool."

"Oh, I see."

"Know the name of that creek?"

"No."

"It's the Antietam."

"What of it? It ain't the Wyantenaug, that's all I care."

"And this thing's a Dunker church."

"You got more useless information 'n would set up a college."

"Pennsylvania fellow told me over there Dunkers are sort of Dutch Baptists."

"Oh, go get some wood!"

The captain was in the road. He walked over and leaned on the splintered fence and watched the red lights of a hundred little fires play ghostly games with black shadows in the foliage of the woods. Men were pushing about in the corn, rustling the blades. The stars were out, the young moon setting slim and lovely with the old moon on her arm. The distant crackle of rifles, belated fragments of the battle, seemed futile, isolated, mistaken and sad in the light of the drooping, withdrawing moon.

Fifty feet away was a large camp-fire of fence rails. Of the men about it, one had lean, long limbs and face, wore a long black coat and black slouched hat, and talked continuously in solemn, flowing ba.s.s. The rest listened, absorbed. Now and then one of them laughed.

The captain drew near. The lean talker unfolded his legs and rose.

"G.o.ds! The anchorite? Gentlemen, who might this be?"

"Cap'n Windham, Company B," said some one.

"He hath grown a beard! In complete steel, revisits the glimpses of the moon! A Hotspur of the North, will kill him six or seven dozen Confederates before breakfast and say, 'Fie on this quiet life!' Will tootle a reed no more! Will dive into the bottom of the deep, pluck up drowned honor by the locks, and call it vanity! Vat for a fool of a musician!"

"How are you, Jack?"

"A war correspondent I, John Roland Mavering, who will celebrate you, a Homer to Achilles, who wants to know for his invocation how you happen not to be dead."

They locked arms and sauntered along the road in leisurely pursuit of the moon.

Chapter XIII

In Which Appears a General of Division, and One of "the Brethren."

If Gard entered the war, as he claimed, in the theory of a spiritual adventure, it must be hinted that he had sometimes lost sight of his theory. Outside events had shown a tendency to usurp and absorb in the process of the happening. It was not so noticeable during the first nine months. He marched, drilled, felt the rain and the cold wind at night in the open, heard the enemy's guns, saw bleeding men carried by from the distant field, and shared in what was called "the defence of Washington," a matter that did not seem difficult or exciting beyond reason. He was made a sergeant--a purely outside event. There was leisure to watch the scene, to keep one's poise, to experiment with existence. If at times his old sense of separateness, of isolation among objects, scenes, and persons whose importance to him was only in their inner effect upon him--if this sense at times seemed less vivid than before, and the movements of men in ma.s.ses, the common enthusiasms, made him feel that his solitary journeying was in some mystical way accompanied by watching myriads with the same forward step and shadowy goal, it was rather a pa.s.sing, a recurrent sensation.

But with the middle of spring came three months of storm and stress in the Virginia peninsula. He came out of the ranks by reason of some inscrutable opinion of him conceived and reported to authorities--something connected with an expedition through a swamp--was promoted because there were no other officers to speak of in the company when the army reached its new base at last on the James River.

He looked back curiously now to the tumult of those weeks, a period when he could not remember to have remembered himself, a long night of irrelevant dreams, the sense of ident.i.ty lost in the dull confusion, himself going and coming, ordering and obeying, seeing difficulties and finding solutions with a set of surface faculties, the soul within him torpid, at least taciturn. The experience had left him with a sense of distaste and humiliation, with a certain troubled doubt. Was a man captain of himself, if he could be seized, stunned, drowned in circ.u.mstance, lost like a drop of water in a flood, rendered indistinct to his own consciousness from the flowing, pouring ma.s.s around him?

Gard did not suppose himself to be unique. He supposed other men had similar paths to walk in, pilgrim fashion; that every man owned merely himself and his destiny, his issue in the nature of things his own; that to every man there was but one great distinction, it lying between himself and what was not himself. In his own age, at least, he supposed it a growing tendency for men to look within their own souls for the infinite which they could not find without.

There was no doubt the peninsular campaign had been an experience affecting him profoundly. It had shown him what a pit of danger lay on the side of such absorption; that to plunge into affairs so intense, so physical, so powerful in their sweep and pull, was for the individualist numbing, miasmic, clouding the eye whose function should be to see one path clearly. It had given him a new sense and a certain dread of the strength of what lay on the other side of that distinction between himself and the not himself. It had left in him, he fancied, a kind of sediment, an element in respect to which it became ill.u.s.trated that what a man has experienced is a part of him. It had made him perhaps more consciously watchful of his poise, his mental erectness and control. But the main result so far had been that sense of uncertainty and troubled doubt, as if he had lost the trail, as if much had grown dim that was once definite and guiding. Mavering's appearance seemed to suggest something, a clew or an omen. Jack, at least, was individual, nomadic, and distinct. He never let his surroundings grow into him.

Thursday, the day after the battle, the hills, woods, and fields were quiet except for stray picket shooting. The two armies could feel each other. Why they lay all day so near, so quiet, was no business of either's subordinate atoms. Gard felt that he but barely cared, if no more was asked of him and his remnant of thirty than to stay where they were. No doubt they also serve who wait. He could stretch in the sunlight, listen to Mavering's home despatches, choice, flowing, vehement, and supply him with technical language.

Farmers drove in on the road during the day, and distributed apples from their wagons, or peddled home-made bread. A number of them wore singular, broad-brimmed hats, smooth hair, long, and parted in the middle, shaven lips and long beards below, and some spoke broken English with an odd, German dialect. They were said to be the Dunkers of the squat-chimneyed church, now spotted with bullet-holes, one cas.e.m.e.nt blown in. To Gard they seemed to ill.u.s.trate grimly the shaping power of externals, these men whose mouths were set to the line of their wide hats, hair plastered smoothly to mark the even tenor of their peace.

They called themselves "The Brethren." There was something in their faces at once a reminder of and a contrast to the faces he remembered in the Brotherhood of Consolation.

The camp-fires flickered once more at night against the black foliage.