BREAD CAST ON WATER
Prison X had a catechism which it taught all the newly arrived.
_Question._ Where are we?
_Answer._ In the North.
_Q._ Do we find the North interesting?
_Ans._ We do not.
_Q._ Where is the country of our preference?
_Ans._ South of the Potomac.
_Q._ Do we find this prison pleasing?
_Ans._ We do not.
_Q._ Have we an object in life?
_Ans._ We have.
_Q._ What is it?
_Ans._ To get out.
_Q._ Again?
_Ans._ To get out.
_Q._ Again?
_Ans._ To get out—and stay out.
_Q._ Both are difficult?
_Ans._ Both are difficult.
Q. Have all apparent ways been tried?
_Ans._ All apparent ways have been tried.
_Q._ Uprisings, tunnels, sawing window bars, bribing guards, taking a
corpse’s place, etc., have all been tried?
_Ans._ They have all been tried.
_Q._ And they have failed?
_Ans._ They have failed.
_Q._ What is to be done?
_Ans._ I do not know.
_Q._ Have you an object in life?
_Ans._ I have an object in life.
_Q._ What is it?
_Ans._ To get out—and stay out.
_Q._ To get South?
_Ans._ To get South.
Maury Stafford was not a newcomer, but the substance of this catechism
was graved in his mind and daily life and actions. He had passed the
stage of violently beating against the bars, and had passed the stage
of melancholia, and the stage of listlessly sitting in what fleck of
sunshine might be found in winter, or hand’s breadth of shade in
summer. He had settled into the steady stage, the second wind. He knew
well enough that, though it might last the longest, this stage, too,
would expire. When it did, it might not come again. He had seen it
expire in others and it had not come again. He had seen the dead moon
of hope that followed, the mere continuance of breathing in a life of
shards and weeds. He had seen the brain grow sick in the hands of the
will; he had seen the wrists of the will broken across.... He meant to
make the steady stage last, last, last!—outlast his last day in Prison
X.
The August day was hot—almost the hottest, said the papers, on record.
Prison X was careful now not to have too many prisoners at once in the
prison yard. But to-day the heat seemed to breed humanity; at any
rate, there came an order that a fair number of rebels at once might
go out into the air. In the officers’ yard as many as fifty were
permitted to gather at a time. The small, sunbaked, sordid place
looked west. At this hour of the morning it was in the prison’s
shadow, and cooler than it would be later in the day.
Some of the grey prisoners walked up and down, up and down; others sat
alone, or in twos and threes, in the shadow of the wall. There was
talk, but not loud talking. There was no briskness in the yard, no
crisp bubbling of word and action. Languor reigned, and all the
desirable lay without the walls. One tree-top showed above them, just
the bushy head of an airy, mocking giant.
At ten, the yard being filled, there came in through the gate, where
were double guards, three or four officers in blue and a Catholic
priest. The yard knew the inspecting officers, and bestirred itself to
only a perfunctory recognition—perfunctory, not listless; it being a
point of honour not to look listless or broken in presence of the
opposing colour. One of these blue officers the yard liked very well,
a bluff and manly fellow, with a frown for the very many things he
could not alter and a helping hand with the few that he could. The
grey made a subtle difference to show here in their greeting.
For the priest—they had never seen him before; and as novelty in
prison is thrice novelty, the various groups welcomed with an
interested gaze the stout-built, rusty-black figure with a strong
face, rosy and likable. “Holy Virgin!” said the priest. “If the South
is any warmer than this, sure ye’ll be afther thanking the Saints and
us for bringing you North! Are there any sons of the Church in sound
of my voice?”
There was one—a lieutenant in the last stages of consumption. He sat
in the sun with a red spot in each cheek and eyes bright as a bird’s.
The well-liked blue officer brought the priest to this boy. He was but
nineteen, and evidently had not a month to live. “Good morning,
Lieutenant!” said the officer. “Father Tierney’s a cordial in himself!
And if, being a Catholic, you’d like—”
“Were he twenty times a Ribil,” said Father Tierney, _sotto voce_,
“he’s a sick human crathure and a dying man.”
“Then I’ll leave you with him for a little,” said the officer, and
walked away.
“Peace go with you!” said Father Tierney. “My poor son, if you’ve done
any harm in the flesh, the Lord having taken away the flesh will take
away that, too.—You are not one of those who—” Father Tierney spoke
for thirty seconds in a lowered voice.
“No,” said the lieutenant, “I used to try, but I gave it up when I saw
that I was going to get out anyhow. But a lot of us are still
trying—There’s one over there that’s trying, I’m certain. He’s been
awful good to me. If he could—if you could now—”
“The man standing in the shadow of the wall?”
The man standing in the shadow of the wall was only a stride or two
away. The blue officers had their backs turned; the grey prisoners
were listlessly minding their own business; guards and sentries had
their eyes on their superiors. The sun blazed down, the green tree-top
just nodded.
“Good morning, my son,” said Father Tierney.
“Good morning, Father.”
Father Tierney took off his hat and with it fanned his rosy, open
face. “Holy Virgin! ’Tis warmer here in the District than it is in
Maryland—Maryland being my home, my son.”
“Which half of Maryland, Father?”
“The ‘Maryland, my Maryland’ half, my son.”
“That,” said Stafford, “is the half that I like best. It is the
nearest to Virginia.”
“What,” said Father Tierney, “if ye had a wishing-cap, would ye wish
for?”
“Gold and a blue suit, Father.”
“A uniform, ye mane?”
“No. A hospital steward’s suit. Blue linen. I’ve got it worked out.”
“My son,” said Father Tierney, in a brisk, full voice, “ye’ve a look
of mortal fever! The Saints know it doesn’t become us to boast! But I
was born with a bit of a medical faculty sticking sthraight out and
looking grave.—Let me lay my finger on your pulse.”
Stafford’s palm closed upon something hard and round and yellow. His
eyes met the priest’s eyes.
“It’s a weary number of soul miles ye’ll have been travelling, my
friend,” thought the priest. “There’s something in you that’s been
lightning branded, but it’s putting out green shoots again.”
The blue officer was seen approaching. Father Tierney turned with
heartiness to meet him. “That poor lad yonder, Captain, he’s not long
for this sinful world! If you’ve no objection I’d like to come
again—That’s thrue! That’s thrue enough! ‘Who’d mercy have must mercy
show.’—Captain, darlint, it’s hot enough to melt rock! Between the
time I left Ireland and came to America, and that’s twinty years ago,
I went a pilgrimage to Italy. Having seen Rome I wint to Venice.
There’s a big palace there where the Doges lived, and up under the
palace roof with just a bit of lead like a coffin lid between you and
the core of the blessed sun in heaven—there’s the prisons they call
_piombi_.—Now you usually think of cold when you think of prisons, but
I gather that heat’s more maddening—”
Prison X was as capricious as any other despot. The next day was as
hot a day, but only so many might go into the air at once. Many,
waiting their turn in the black, stifling hall, got no other gleam
than that afforded by the grudged opening and the swift closing of the
outer door. The next day again the heat held and the despot’s ill
humour held. At long intervals the door opened, but before a score had
passed, it closed with a grating sound.
The fourth morning Stafford found himself again in the sun and shadow
of this yard. The earth was harder-baked, the blue sky more fiercely
metallic, the bushy head of the one tree seen over the wall more
decisively mocking. With it all there was a dizziness in the air. He
knew that he had been buoyed by the second wind. As he came out from
the gloom into the glare a doubt wound like a snake into his brain. He
feared the wind—that it would not last—it was so very sickening out
here.
He took the shade of the wall, pressed his shoulder against the bricks
and closed his eyes. For a minute or more the spirit sank, then the
will put its lips to some deep reservoir and drank. Stafford opened
his eyes and stood from the wall. Second wind or third wind, it held
steady.
The consumptive lieutenant was not in the yard. He had had a
hemorrhage and was now in the hospital watching Death come a stride a
day. The yard held a fair number of men, listless in the heat, walking
slowly, standing, or seated, with hands about the knees and bowed
heads, on the parched, untidy ground. The guards at the small gate, a
gate which opened on another yard, not free to prisoners, with beyond
it the true, heavy gate—the guards suffered with the heat, held their
rifles languidly. The moments went on, a line of winged creatures now
with broken wings, creeping, not flying, an ant-line of slow moments,
each with its burden of lassitude, ennui, enfeebled hope. The one
tree-top was all green and gold and shining fair and heavenly cool,
but it was set in Paradise, and from Paradise, like Abraham, it only
looked across the gulf, a gulf in which it acquiesced. And so it was a
mocking tree, more fiend than angel....
The figures of the sentries at the gate grew energized; they tautened,
stood at salute. Into the yard came on inspection a group of officers,
among them the one whom the prisoners held to be human. With them came
Father Tierney.
“The top of the morning to ye, children!” said Father Tierney. “Sure
it’s a red cock feather the morning’s wearing!” He came nearer.
“Where’s the lieutenant that was coughing himself away, poor deluded
lad!”
He looked about him, then came over to the wall, a big, rusty-black
figure, standing so close that he made another wall for shadow. His
eyes and Stafford’s met.
“The lieutenant, poor lad!” demanded Father Tierney, his strong, rich
voice rolling through the yard, “it’s the hospital he’s in?”
“Yes,” said Stafford. “He had a bad hemorrhage and they took him
yesterday.”
“Tell me,” said Father Tierney, “a bit about him, and I’ll write it to
his parents. Parents—especially mothers—have the same kind of
heartbreak on both sides of the line.”
The officers passed on. The thirty-odd grey prisoners walked or sat or
stood as before. Stafford was a little in shadow, and the priest’s
bulky form, squared before him, cut off the more crowded part of the
enclosure.
Father Tierney, discoursing of parents, dropped his voice with
suddenness. “It’s the smallest possible bundle. You’re sure you can
hide it under your coat?”
“Yes—”
“And his father’s a ribil fighting with Johnston—and his mother in
Kentucky—Holy Powers!” said Father Tierney, “the heat in this place’s
fearful and I once had sunsthroke—_Quick!_—It’s giddy enough—_Have you
got it?_—I’m feeling this minute!” He straightened himself, wandered
to a neighbouring stone, and, sitting down, called to the nearest
guard who came up. “Is there a cup of water handy, my son? I had a
sunsthroke once and this yard’s Gehenna to-day, no less!”
Two days later, just at sunset, a hospital steward passed through the
hall of the officers’ side of Prison X, nodded to the sentries at the
door, crossed the yard, was let pass the small gate, crossed the court
beyond, pretty well occupied as it was with blue soldiers, and
approached the heavy, final gate. An official of some description was
ahead of him, and he had for a moment to wait. The gate opened, the
man in front passed through; there came a moment’s vision of a green
tree against a rosy sky—the tree whose head showed above the prison
wall. The hospital steward stepped forward. He had the word—it had
been bought with a gold-piece of considerable denomination. He gave
it; the gate creaked open, he passed out. The sunset looked a fabulous
glory; the one tree had the sublimity of the pathless forest.
At dark he found the priest’s lodging and, waiting for him, a suit of
civilian clothes. He proposed to get to the river that night, swim it,
and find dawn and the Virginian shore. “Whist!” said Father Tierney.
“You’ll be afther attacking a fretful porcupine! Put out your hand,
and you’ll touch a pathrol. They’re thicker on the river bank than
blue flies. No, no! you thravel by road till you’re twinty-five miles
from here. You’ll come to a hamlet called called —— and there you’ll
find a carpenter shop and a negro named Taylor. He’s a faithful
freedman and well thought of by the powers that be. You stop and ask
for a drink of water, and thin you say in a whisper across the gourd,
‘Benedict Tierney and a boat across.’ You’ll get it.—It’s risky by the
road, thrue enough, but divil a bit of risk would there be if you wint
shtraight down to the river! The hedgehog would shoot as many quills
at you as was necessary.”
“Whether I get clear away or not, you have put me under an obligation,
Father, which—”
“Whist, my son, I’m Southern, I tell ye! Drink your wine, and God be
good to the whole of us!”
The night was still and starry, dry and warm. Stafford walked in
company yet of the second wind. Bliss, bliss, bliss, to be out of
Prison X! He went like a child, wary as a man, but like a child in
mere whiteness of thought and sensuousness of being. The stars—he
looked up at them as a boy might look his first night out of doors.
Bright they were and far away, and the flesh crept toward them with a
pleasure in the movement and a sadness for the distance. The
slumberous masses of the trees, the dim distinction of the horizon,
the sound of hidden water, the flicker of fireflies, the odour of the
fields, the dust of the glimmering road—all had keenness, sonority,
freshness of first encounters. For a long time he was not conscious of
fatigue. Even when he knew at last that he was piteously tired, night
and the world kept their vividness.
Between two and three o’clock some slight traffic began upon the road.
A farm-gate opened to let out a great empty wagon and a half-grown boy
with a whip over his shoulder. The horses turned their heads westward.
Stafford, rising from a rock-pile, asked a lift, and the boy gave it.
All rattled westward over the macadam road. The boy talked of the
battle of last month—the great battle in Pennsylvania.
“Didn’t we give them hell—oh, didn’t we give them hell? They saw we
killed twenty thousand!”
“Twenty thousand.... It is not, after all, strange that we deduced a
hell.... How fresh the morning smells!”
Horses, wagon, and boy were but going from one farm to another. Two
miles farther on Stafford thanked the youngster and left this convoy.
Light was gathering in the east. He was now met or overtaken and
passed by a fair number of conveyances. In some there were soldiers;
others held clusters of loudly talking or laughing men. A company of
troopers passed, giants in the half-light. He concluded that he must
be near an encampment, and as he walked he debated the propriety of
turning from the road and making his way through woods or behind the
screen of hills. Men on horseback, in passing, spoke to him. At last,
as the cocks were crowing, he did turn from the road. The lane in
which he found himself wound narrowly between dew-heavy berry-bushes
and an arch of locust trees. Branch and twig and leaf of these made a
wonderful fretted arch through which to view the carnation morning
sky. Ripe berries hung upon the bushes. Stafford was hungry and he
gathered these and ate. A bird began to sing, sweet, sweet! Holding by
the stem of a young persimmon he planted his foot in the moist earth
of the bank, and climbed upward to where the berries grew thickest.
Briar and elder and young locust closed around him. Above the bird
sang piercingly, and behind it showed the purple sky. The dewy
coolness was divine. His head was swimming a little with fatigue and
hunger, but he was light-hearted, with a curious, untroubled sense of
identity with the purple sky, the locust tree, the singing bird, even
with the spray of berries his hand was closing on.
The bird stopped singing and flew away. A horse neighed, the lane
filled with the sound of feet. Stafford saw between the bushes the
blue moving forms. He crouched amid the dimness of elder and
blackberry, not knowing if he were well hidden, but hoping for the
best. The company, pickets relieved and moving toward an encampment,
had well-nigh passed when one keen-eyed man observed some slight
movement, some overbending of the wayside growth. With his rifle
barrel he parted the green curtain.
This encampment was an outstretched finger of the encampment of a
great force preparing to cross the Potomac. It appeared, too, that
there had been recently an outcry as to grey spies. Stafford proffered
his story—a Marylander who had been to the city and was quietly
proceeding home. He had turned into the lane thinking it a short
cut—the berries had tempted him, being hungry—he had simply stood
where he had climbed, waiting until he could plunge into the lane
again;—behold the whole affair!
He might have won through, but in the guardhouse where he was searched
they found a small, worn wallet whose contents damned him. Standing
among the berry-bushes, his hand had gone to this with the thought
that he had best throw it away before danger swooped—and then he had
refrained, and immediately it was too late. The sergeant looked it
through, shook his head, and called a lieutenant. The lieutenant took
the papers in a bronzed hand, ran them over, and read a letter dated
two years back, written from Greenwood in Virginia and signed Judith
Cary. He folded it and returned it to the wallet which he kept.
“Of course you know,” he said in an agreeable voice, “that this is
your death-warrant. I wonder at you for such monumental carelessness!
Or, perhaps, it wasn’t carelessness.”
“No,” said Stafford, “it wasn’t carelessness. But I am not a spy.
Yesterday I escaped from Prison X.”
“Tell that,” said the lieutenant, “to the marines. Sergeant, we move
before noon, and jobs of this sort must be put behind us! There’s a
drumhead court sitting now. Bring him across.”
The tree was an oak with one great bough stretching like a warped beam
across a cart track. Stafford divined it when he and the blue squad
were yet three hundred yards away. It topped a slight rise and it
thrust that arm out so starkly against the sky. He knew it for what it
was. The world and the freshness of the world were as vividly with him
as during any hour of the preceding vivid twelve. Every sense was
vigorously functioning; the whole range of perception was lit; length
and breadth and depth, he felt an intimacy of knowledge, a sure
interpenetration. He saw wholly every little dogwood tree, every stalk
of the long grass by the roadside; the cadence of the earth was his,
and the taste of existence was in his mouth. He had a steady sense of
the deep that was flowing into the mould of life and then out of the
mould of life. He felt eternal. The tree and that stark limb bred in
him no fear.
A party of cavalry came up behind the foot soldiers.
“Where are you going?” asked the officer at the head.
“To hang a spy,” answered the lieutenant. “On the tree yonder.”
“Yes?” said the officer. “Not the pleasantest of work, but at times
necessary.—It’s a lovely morning.”
“Isn’t it? The heat’s broken at last.”
The troopers continued to ride alongside, and so all mounted the
little rise and came together upon the round of dry sward beneath the
tree. A curt order or two left the blue soldiers drawn up at one side
of this ring, and the prisoner with the provost guard in the centre,
beneath the tree. Stafford glanced down at the rope that was now about
his neck. It lay curled there like a tawny serpent, visible, real,
real as the bough up to which, too, he glanced—real, and yet
profoundly of no tremendous importance. He had a curious fleeting
impression as of a fourth dimension, as of the bough above arching a
portal, on the other side of which lay utter security. Upon the way
thither he had been perfectly silent, and he felt no inclination now
toward speech or any demonstration. He stood and waited, and he was
not conscious of either quickening or retarding in Time’s quiet
footfall.
The cavalry officer, in the course of a checkered existence, had
witnessed a plenty of military executions—so many, in fact, that Pity
and Horror had long since shrugged their shoulders and gone off to
sleep. They had left a certain professional curiosity; a degree of
connoisseurship in how men met death. He now pushed his horse through
the scrub to the edge of the ring. The action brought him within
twenty feet of the small group in the centre, and, upon the blue
soldiers standing back a little, face to face with the bareheaded
prisoner. The officer looked, then swung himself from the saddle, and,
with spurs and sabre jingling, strode into the trodden ground. “A
moment, Lieutenant, if you please! I have somewhere seen your
prisoner—though where—”
He came closer. Stafford, worn to emaciation, dressed in rough
civilian clothes, with the rope about his bared neck, returned his
gaze. Memory stepped between them with a hand to each. The air
darkened, grew filled with thunder, jagged lightning, and whistling
rain, the parched earth was quagmire, the dusty trees Virginia cedars
with twisted roots, wet, murmuring in a harsh wind. There was heard
the rattle of Stonewall Jackson’s musketry, and, above the thunder,
Pelham’s guns.
“Ox Hill!” exclaimed Marchmont with an oath.
Stafford’s eyelids just quivered. “Ox Hill,” he repeated.
Suddenly, with the thunder of Pelham’s guns, the bough above was no
longer the arch of a portal. It was an oak bough with the end of a
rope thrown across it. Life streamed back upon him. The clarity, the
silver calm, the crystal quality went from things. He staggered
slightly, and the blood drummed in his ears.
Marchmont was speaking rapidly to the lieutenant and the provost
officer. “How do you know that he is a spy? Said he was an escaped
prisoner—escaped from Prison X? Couldn’t you wait to find out? Believe
it? Yes, I believe it. He’s a Southern officer—he did me the best of
turns once—day when I thought I was a prisoner myself—day of
Chantilly.—Yes. Colonel Francis Marchmont. Marchmont Invincibles.
Remand him, eh?—until we telegraph to the Commandant at X. No use
treating him as a spy if he isn’t a spy, eh? Remember once in Italy
when that game was nearly played on myself.—You will wait, Lieutenant,
until I send an orderly back with a note to your general? Know him
well—think I can arrange matters.—Thanks! Here, Roberts!”
Roberts galloped off. The group beneath the tree, the soldiers drawn
up at one side, the troopers and their colonel stayed as they were,
waiting. The bright sands ran on, the breeze in the oak whispered like
a dryad, the bees buzzed, there came an odour of the pine. Stafford’s
hand and lip were yet stained with the berries. He stood, the tawny
cirque about his neck, waiting with the rest.
Roberts returned. He bore a folded piece of writing which he delivered
to Marchmont. The latter read, then showed it to the lieutenant, who
spoke to the sergeant of the provost guard. Two not unkindly hands
loosened the circle of rope and lifted it clear from the prisoner.
Marchmont came across with outstretched hand.
“Major Stafford, I thought I could manage it! As soon as the matter is
verified from X—I shall see if I cannot personally arrange an
exchange. I am pretty sure that I can do that, too.” His teeth gleamed
beneath his yellow mustache. “I haven’t at the moment a flask such as
you raised me from the dead with!—Jove! the fine steel rain and the
guns with the thunder, and Caliph pressed hard, and it was _peine
forte et dure_—”
“It was a travelled road,” said Stafford; “presently some one else
would have come by and released you. But this is not a travelled road
and I was very near to death.” He looked at his berry-stained hands.
“I don’t think I cared in the least about death itself. It seemed,
standing here, a perfectly unreal pasteboard arch, a piece of stage
furniture. But I have a piece of work to do on this side of it ... and
so, on the whole, I am glad you came by.” He laughed a little. “That
has a mighty ungracious sound, has it not? I should thank you more
heartily—and I do!”
A month from this day he stood upon Virginia earth, duly exchanged. He
had been put across at Williamsport. Marchmont had pressed upon him a
loan of money and a horse. For a week he had been, in effect,
Marchmont’s guest. A strange liking had developed between the two....
But now he was alone, and in Virginia,—Virginia that he had left more
than a year ago when the army crossed into Maryland and there followed
the battle of Sharpsburg. He was alone, riding through a wood slowly,
his hands relaxed upon the saddlebow, lost in thought.
About him was the silence of the warm September wood. It was a wood of
small pines, scarred and torn, as were now all the woods of this land
by the heavy hand and heel of a giant war. That was a general war, but
to each man, too, his own war. Stafford’s had been a long war, long
and sultry, stabbed with fierce lightnings. He had scars enough
within, stains of a rough and passionate weather, marks of a lava
flow. But to-day, riding through the September wood, he felt that the
war was over. He was drawing still from that deeper stratum of being,
from the colder, purer well. His mind had changed, and without any
inner heroics he was prepared to act upon that change. He had never
been weak of will.
In Winchester, when he entered it at sunset, he found a small grey
command, and on the pillared porch of the hotel and in the bare
general room various officers who came and went or sat at the table
writing. Stafford, taking his place also at this long and heavy board
and asking for pen and ink, fell into talk, while he waited, with an
infantry captain sitting opposite. Where was General Lee and the main
army?
“Along the Rapidan, watching Meade on the other side. Where have you
been,” said the captain, “that you didn’t know that?”
“I have been in prison.—On the Rapidan.”
“Yes. But Longstreet, with Hood and McLaws, has been ordered to
Tennessee to support Bragg. There’ll be a great battle down there.”
“Then there’s inactivity at the moment with us?”
“Yes. Marse Robert’s just resting his men and watching Meade. Nobody
exactly knows what the next move will be.”
A negro boy brought the writing-materials for which Stafford had
asked. He left the captain’s conversation and fell to writing. He
wrote three letters. One was to General Lee, whom he knew personally,
one to the general commanding his own brigade, and one to Warwick
Cary. When he came to the envelope for the last-named letter he
glanced across to the captain, also writing. “The Golden Brigade,
General Cary—Warwick Cary? Do you know if it is with Longstreet or by
the Rapidan?”
“By the Rapidan, I think. But Warwick Cary was killed at Gettysburg.”
Stafford drew in his breath. “I had not heard that! I am sorry,
sorry.... I begin to think how little I have heard. I have been in
Prison X since Sharpsburg.... General Cary killed!”
“Yes. At the head of his men in a great charge. But the brigade is by
the Rapidan.”
“It was not the brigade I was thinking of,” said the other.
He sat for a moment with his hand shading his eyes, then he slowly
tore into pieces the letter to Warwick Cary. The remaining two letters
he saw placed in the mail-bag for army headquarters. The next morning
early he rode out of Winchester, out upon the Valley Pike. Before him
lay Kernstown; beyond Kernstown stretched beneath the September mist
the long, great war-road with its thronging memories. He touched his
horse and for several days travelled southward through the blackened
Valley of Virginia.