The Debatable Land Part 26

"It doesn't matter. I am going to throw my furlough and join the army."

"When?"

"To-morrow."

Mavering whistled, and then swore softly.

"Why?"

"I'm no better than you are. What business have you and I in heaven with our d.a.m.ned private job politics? Haven't you learned that yourself?"

They rode away towards the city, and separated at a corner lit dimly by a street lamp. Gard put his horse to a gallop and clattered away.

Chapter XIX

In which Windham Drops Out of the Fight--and Mavering Remarks on Human Adaptability

There was a steep hill-side, and below it a swift river, on the left the little village of Falmouth huddled in a gully, and beyond the village a higher hill, with a white house on the crest. Across the river, and farther down, the town of Fredericksburg was on fire in places, ruins here and there smoking lazily. From the town it was half a mile of meadow-land, hollowed and hillocked but flat in its main result, to the line of low hills, where the smoke rested thick and white, and the artillery did not rest at all, but growled and yelled unpacified.

Certain regiments had watched since noon from this hill, seen column after column go over the dipping meadows, and sometimes a half, sometimes a third, come back. About four they marched down through the huddled village, crossed on a pontoon bridge into Fredericksburg, and drew up beyond the town. The sh.e.l.ls shrieked over them. One exploded against a little wooden shanty, scattering splinters and dust. Two or three men dropped. One of them sat up at Gard's feet and rubbed his face.

"Are you hurt?"

"No, I'm scared."

"That's nothing."

"No, that's nothing."

The little cabin took fire. The flames crept up the dry, worm-eaten boards. The men turned and watched them.

A young lieutenant, who was small, and had a round, jolly face, came and walked beside Gard.

"You see, those other fellows seemed to lose about two-thirds; so a fellow will be pretty apt to go in and stay there. About two to one."

"About that. But the old man might mean somebody to go in and stay there alive. He might have that idea. Yours isn't inspiring."

"Oh, I only meant--I was thinking you might let my people know if I'm potted."

"All right."

"I'll do the same if--"

"No matter, Billy. I haven't any. Look out for your end men. They're nervous."

In a few moments the column was gone, scurrying away over hollows and flat stretches. Gard lay on his face near the stone foundations and smoking ashes of a barn in a field. "Out of this fight," he thought, and turned over. His muscles seemed to have all become dissolved and loose.

He lifted the edge of his coat and looked under. "It looks like a bad one." The blood did not flow steadily, but leaped and was bright red.

"It ought to be picked up. It is an artery. If I knew how I might pick it up!" It was a slanting trench, indefinitely deep, and pumping up blood from the bottom. There must be smashed bone in it somewhere. You could tell from the slant the direction of the point where the sh.e.l.l had burst. Two other men lay near by, one of them still living, but with the top of his head crushed; he was kicking a hole in the ground with his heel.

"I might try."

He made an effort, and in a moment his hands dropped back on the gra.s.s again, hands red, wet, and feeble. The immense noise of the cannonading became a hum in his ears and then was silent. A little white cloud in the sky seemed to spread over the blue and turn gray. He closed his eyes.

It would be like this, after all. It had always seemed a difficulty, a knotted problem that speculation could not untie. It did not seem like a knot or a difficulty now, but more like a solution, a smoothing, a quiet explanation. One thought life so difficult and death the hardest knot in its logic, but if one found death to be the answer instead of the worst difficulty, looked upon in that way it might even seem to be a simple answer. A gradual oblivion--not exactly that--a blending of noises into chords and gla.s.sy harmonies--it was more like that.

The noises of the field were all gone, and there was no more earth or sky, no men visible running past with rifles, no roar, echo, concussion, nor moan of the flying missiles. But the silent vacancy was filling again with other forms and sounds, whispering voices, faces that leaned and smiled, others that threatened, some that turned from him and cried out and fled. One of those that fled was the Father Superior. One of those that leaned and smiled was Helen. But there did not appear any reason for either, unless the Father Superior might be frightened at seeing what a lost soul looked like face to face. Helen wore a broad, white collar. Afterwards she came again with a blue ribbon around her neck, dressed in white, looking fragile, and said, "I'll fight for you; I don't care who they are." Who were "they?" Most of the forms were strangers, but Fritz Moselle sat at a cloudy organ that pealed with thunder and shot lightning from the top of its precipice of pipes. And he played till the yellow stars jumped down and sang anthems, and Mavering came stalking after them, saying. "They are an interesting and peculiar people on that secular comet up there, and the best liars I know; in the pursuit of which interest. O Fritz, I'm going to pick up my kit and go back." Mrs. Mavering would not go, and Madonna said, "Be kind to Gard," to the _bonus Deus_, who seemed puzzled. Helen came and sobbed over him and stretched out her hands. He caught at them, missed, and fell several years through s.p.a.ces and s.p.a.ces. Innumerable faces were plastered against the sides of the pit, innumerable lips cried to him, but he thought, "They all have issues of their own." A great voice, heavy, stolid, and cold, called, "Eternity around, divinity within,"

but no one really agreed with it. A gust of wind drove down the pit and blew him like a dried leaf, while he cried out helplessly, and fled another year before the wind, till a slim hand gripped his wrist and stopped him. The grip was sinewy. The gusts and the stolid voice went driving past them down the pit. It was useless to count the faces plastered against the sides. He could not raise his hands; to raise his eyelids was a dragging effort, sad and slow. It was night. The air was damp and cold. They were carrying him on a stretcher. Their steps sounded on the pontoon bridge. The water rippled below, or else it was the rain beating on the tent, murmuring, murmuring. Helen was saying "You _must_ stay," and held his wrist, and he said, "I never saw anything make up its mind the way you do," so that they both laughed, and the pit echoed like a ba.s.s drum which made them laugh more, and then echoed with infinite thrilling moans which frightened them. And he whispered in the darkness, "It's fun we're in the same pit," and she whispered back, "Yes, gorgeous."

"It fills me with benignant admiration"--so reads one of Mavering's articles, dated "This 21st of December, one mile, possibly two--Heaven help us and call it three--from the Rappahannock," and ent.i.tled "Ill.u.s.trated Speculations"--"It fills me with benignant admiration, this human adaptability. I have seen to-day the troops returning from what they called, with apparent justice, 'The Mud March,' a futile procession, with no other result than mud. For all night had the wind howled, the rain smitten them compositely with sleet and snow; they had splashed since dawn in profound mud, and are now partially dried and partially comfortable in ingenious ways, but in the main still wearing mud, finding themselves adaptable to mud, arguing that mud adds a certain density to clothing, a casing and protection to the features against the atmospheric and social hostility of Virginia. I have seen the author of _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ in a brigade hospital camp, holding the hand of a bearded, piratical-looking stranger from Michigan, who will die to-night and without doubt adapt himself to whatever shall be his lot. But this poet and tilter at conventions--what convention he is tilting at now seems obscure, what poetry he meditates with lines of ungainly sprawl. I merely record that he sits in a brigade hospital tent, holding the hand, hour after hour, of one whom he knows not from mythical Adam, proving himself, I infer, in his own way adaptable. I have seen one Captain Windham, of the 3d Regiment, ----, a man known to me these half-dozen years, a suggestive person with a problematical mind, musician and scout, bred in a monastery, and tending speculatively G.o.d knows where, but likely, from his looks, to be presently disembodied and 'blown with restless violence about the pendent world,' a condition to which, I believe profoundly, he will readily adapt himself. He lies pumped empty of blood, and with a sh.e.l.l wound more or less terrific, in the tent where sits the author of _Leaves of Gra.s.s_. The rain beats slowly on the tent. I see the dim shining thereof, and of other tents around it, lantern-lit. Under the high floor of a house-porch I feed a fire surrept.i.tiously with the lattice-work, and look out into the night, and consider the life of man, its beautiful inconsequence. It is as good a place as any other, this sub-portican retreat in the midnight pause of bellowing war. It serves me and the time. Have I not lived? Have I not slept in fine linen and stridden a horse, and looked into eyes that smiled for me, and had a bullet hole through my hat, and bowed from a platform to a sea of faces? And were they any better, intrinsically, than this? Why, then, my mud-encased and mud-protected soldiery, my Michigan pirate, my monastery-bred visionary and scholastic adventurer, both of the latter now floating on the edge of the downward-and-gone, my poet of catalogues and statistics in defiant metre, preacher of the gospel of muscular affection, now practising that gospel--we are all, I conclude, doing very well where we are. Human adaptability! Or is it in some measure a fluid type peculiar to this continent?

"Enters here one with shoulder-straps and an ill-conditioned face, which he pokes in and inquires curiously, 'Why I am burning up a house full of patients?' In reply, 'If I were burning up a house, without doubt there would be reasons. But I distinguish, I am not burning up a house, but lighting a torch of intelligence for a public in the dark. Remarking, 'Oh! You're smoking up through the floor of the porch. Look out!' he withdraws.

"Which reminds me to go up the river to-morrow and find the end of a telegraph wire that is approachable and unabsorbed by the military.

"A singular convocation of atoms is this same war, wherein atomic egoism is at times the more violently a.s.serted, and again disturbed and modified. The semi-translucent but resisting barrier that separates the human atom from the human atom is a.s.saulted and impinged against almost to penetration or shattering. In this upheaval atoms tend back to inorganic unity. The roots of existence are exposed, the primeval reappears. Nevertheless I have not seemed anywhere more 'an individual and an egoist,' to quote the problematical musician, than now, sheltered here from the sombre rain, burning another man's green lattice-work for private comfort, and possessed of an occurrent idea or desire, if it were possible, to inquire of this Windham how fares his individual egoism, and whether the adventure apparently before him is, in his opinion, one worthy of a sportsman.

"The scripture of the immortal bard mentions a 'thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice.' Imagination suggests an acclimatization of the disembodied essence to Arctic needs, some ingenious utilization of Northern Lights, and confesses its suggestions feeble. My imagination is not what it once was. Gray hairs of me display their tenuous forewarning. 'The times are waxing late.' Without pretending a polemical interest in this war, I have candidly to state that it looks to me like both engines in the ditch. 'The jig,' in the stately words of Job, 'is about up.' The rain echoes that oracular opinion, and the brigade hospital tents glimmer distantly, where lies that problematical cross-breed of a monastery and later conditions, where sits the author of _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ hour after hour, holding the hand of a piratical stranger from Michigan."

Chapter XX

Treats of Further Incidents in the House with the White Door

The mud on the suburban road sucked about the feet of Mavering's horse.

So he came again at night to the hospital above the river and to the brick house with the white door and pillars. Another horse was fastened at the gate. A fat, grinning negro woman opened the door, and when he entered the room, Helen started forward with an exclamation, a red spot on each cheek that did not belong there; Rachel smiled graciously and came towards him in the manner of polished and experienced hospitality; and the man who stood backed against the chimney-piece, his shoulders covering half of it and looking as ma.s.sive as the brickwork, was Morgan Map. He gathered his yellow eyebrows at seeing Mavering, moved, swayed an instant, then clicked his teeth and waited stiffly with back set to the brickwork.

"Ah, captain!"

Morgan growled something indistinguishable. Mavering's wide mouth had on its widest smile, and in his soul was pleasure and appreciation.

"We have here," he thought, "a tidy little game."

He sat down and described the late battle, and considered. Morgan finally took his hat.

"Are you going into the city, Mavering?"

"Don't wait for me. Oh! It occurs to me--that paper you lost, containing, you recollect, certain specifications, was captured and went South." He had the thread of his fluency in hand now. "The object for which it appeared to have been drawn up was, as perhaps you have heard"--a pause--"not entirely attained, and I don't know that it may not itself have been destroyed. Probably not. At any rate, witnesses could be found down there in time, affidavits and so on, as to what it contained and the circ.u.mstances of its--its loss, which contents and circ.u.mstances and their purport are only known to you, to me, and to the person to whom the specifications referred. I propose, if you don't mind, to make Mrs. Mavering a fourth."

"You'd better ride into the city with me."

"I should be pleased to oblige you, but it's not my funeral. I have my own obsequies in process. Why make myself likely to become a secondary corpse at another man's?"