Treats of the Distribution of Tracts in the Valley of the Shenandoah.
The Shenandoah goes by the eastern edge of the wide valley, murmuring
its own musical name, "Shenandoah," as if it knew the word's
significance in glory, tumult, and pain, but had taught all three to
march to a quiet requiem; "Shenandoah"--old, unhappy, far-off things,
under the lulling and palliation now of many years.
Gard rode directly south, through plodding, dusty lines of haggard-eyed
men, and came to it a few miles above the junction and the famous Ferry.
The cannon boomed all day on his left over by the larger river. He rode
by daylight and openly and none seemed to doubt him; his dress and
little printed tracts were passports enough for the time. He fell into
the habit, first by impulse and then by policy, of carrying a tract in
his hand, using its subject and phraseology for the next conversation
and entering on the subject promptly.
It gave him a sense of detachment and isolation of a peculiar kind, this
urging on some weary and hurrying group a doctrine of peace, compassion,
and humility, as if the manner and language were working inward and
growing less alien to him, and he really were a mysterious evangelist--a
messenger with spiritual tidings and council. He noticed--and it seemed
from its recurrence to have a certain pathos--that, after the laughter
which rose around him in most cases had subsided, the faces would lose
their weariness and strain, and seem to express another side of their
humanity. They reminded him, then, of the fruit-seller and the policeman
on the avenue, where he used to go to and from the Brotherhood of
Consolation and the Church of the Trinity, who recognized in him some
one apart and remote from the current of events--the river of humanity
on the avenue.
It was even a more turbulent river that was pouring west and southwest
along the two railroads leading from the Ferry. They were beginning to
tear up and burn the northern line, but along the other the trains still
moved in puffing succession. To Gard the sense of the part he played
was strong almost to reality. The quaint, biblical, old-world phrases
which he ever kept reading and repeating reacted upon him. He seemed,
even to himself, to become intangible and apart.
"What shall a man take in exchange for his soul?" halting his horse and
taking out the little white tract.
"I don't know. If you've got a plug of tobacco I might trade."
"If I had any, friend, I would give it to you freely."
The man looked at him curiously.
"I reckon you would now. This the best you know how, ain't it?"
Others who had stopped laughed and swarmed around. "Give me one!" "Me
one!"
"There are more who need them."
"Oh, all right."
"No hogs here."
"Good-luck to you, elder."
The stream flowed on, some chuckling over their tracts, some silent. An
officer said:
"You ought to get a pass, elder." So he came to where the Shenandoah
murmured its musical name. A range of blue mountains rose beyond it.
There seemed to be little going on by the river. The retreat had shifted
to the west along the railroads into the Opequan valley, and he turned
and rode west among low, wooded hills. It was Wednesday. They were
tearing and burning the southern of the two railroads now--an endless
row of bonfires of the ties, the iron rails laid across them to be
heated for bending.
"'Let not your hearts be troubled.'"
A man bending over a rail drew his hand back, swore lustily, and
straightened up.
"What's that? Oh!" He took the tract.
"That's what it says, sure enough. Maybe you don't know that rail was
hot." The tract was passed around. One read aloud, "He hath taken charge
and command. He hath established His law."
Gard sat motionless on his horse, looking placidly over their heads to
the pale-blue horizon.
"Who is the one greatest in authority here?"
"This side of God Almighty and Winchester. I reckon you mean the old
man. Hi, lieutenant!" The cantering officer pulled up. "He wants the
general."
"Does, does he? What for?"
A pause. Gard dropped his eyes to the officer who was reading the tract.
"It is said to be best that I should have his permission to--"
"Oh, I see. Come along, then."
They rode beside the track through strata of heat and smoke from the
fires, Gard following. It occurred to him that he had given his name on
an impulse the day before as Moselle, and would possibly need it now.
They came to a group of horsemen, talking, except one in front of them,
who watched the toiling squads silently. He wore a full black beard, and
sat his horse awkwardly.
"This seems to be some kind of a missionary, general. He wants to see
you."
The general glanced up under the brim of his slouched hat; then suddenly
flung back his head, so that his big beard stood out from his chest, and
said, simply:
"What do you want?"
"I am directed by a Session of the Brethren to distribute these."
"Who are you?"
"Of a congregation in Maryland."
"What is your name?"
"Moselle."
"Who are the Brethren?"
"We are called Dunkers by those not of our communion. We do not use the
name."
"There was a church of that sect near Sharpsburg."
"It is our church."
"They seemed to be German. You have no accent."
"It was said to be the reason I was chosen--the speaking freely the
language. It was said at the Session."
"Very well."
He dropped his eyes to the tract in his hand.
Gard remained placid, persistent.
"It was said a permission might be written."
"Very well."
He wrote a few words on a scrap of paper and handed it to Gard.
"May I keep this tract in exchange?"
"It is not exchanged. It is given."
Gard turned his horse. The general looked up.
"You are a young man"--silence--"But your sect takes no part in wars."
Gard waited. "Do you know the subject of this tract?"
"It is on the text, 'I must be about my Father's business.'"
The general seemed to have in mind to say more. He looked at Gard
peculiarly--not quite as the others had seemed to do, half suspecting,
half recognizing an alien being, a moral and mental unknown at some
withdrawn height, but as if recognizing one like himself in isolation
and pilgrimage, and so understanding his bearing and capacity for
silence.
The horsemen behind whispered and smiled.
"Very well." The general turned again to the working squads, and Gard
rode away in the smoke that drifted from the fires across the track. He
had a sense, too, of some flash of recognition that had gone below the
part he was playing, and seemed to involve a salutation and question of
other import and circumstance, a recognition of kinship in the knowledge
of other realities than the feet walk upon or the eyes see; knowledge of
the silence out of which one is born, of the flux of his present, of
destiny in ambush, of the "stream of the flying constellations," and the
steady pour of time, "inhaled as a vapor;" knowledge of the individual's
own lonely issue in the midst of these. But the turning again to his
working squads seemed to have been the general's solution--or, at least,
conclusion. "Very well;" one must be about the business set him to do.
"He must work in his garden," had been more than one sage's conclusion.
Gard did not entirely wish to work his way back to the point of view
that once had been his, of a spectator of events, who only acted in them
in order to appreciate them vividly. He wished to regain his old
enthusiasm, the poise and the clear sense of things, the interest,
dulled since the Peninsular campaign; and for the rest, to go on to
positions requiring new definitions. So far as the general had served as
a councillor, he had seemed to advise attention to business, to imply
that there was personal value in simple and direct doing.
During the two following days Gard rode along the railroad to
Winchester, and up and down the Opequan valley, picking up information
and asking such questions as he could make bear on the distribution of
tracts. Once or twice he thought he recognized a face he had seen across
the road by the Dunker church. It was not impossible. But one could not
identify from such smoky glimpses.
On Saturday he left Winchester and went eastward, crossing the Opequan
where the turnpike led by a shallow, rippling ford, and the flat-fenced
meadows of the bottom lands were all about. His saddle-bags were nearly
empty, and beyond the Blue Ridge he might find means to send a message
north.
A horseman was watering his horse at the ford, his hat tipped back, a
bandage around his head. They greeted, and Gard handed him a tract.
"Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown." It was one of the faces he
seemed to have seen.
"Oh, you're that missionary they call 'Abstract Piety.' Well, look
here!"
He stopped and stared. Gard leaned forward to let his horse drink, saw
his own face in the stream, and wondered what it might mean to the man
with the bandage who watched him, and whom he had somewhere seen. It
might be a critical question, what his face meant to the man with the
bandage. Crises! As one went on, every step was a crisis between the
moment past and the moment in front. The current streaked the
reflections in the water, and there were little brown minnows holding
their heads up-stream. He noticed his own expression in the
reflection--the impassive mask that he had come to wear without effort,
the spade-shaped beard, the lips whiter than the rest of the tanned
skin, which might suggest to the acute that the shaving of them was
recent, the swift curve of the hair-line, the heavy eyelids over eyes
that looked up dreamily out of the wavering water. He thought that, from
an artistic standpoint, he must look his part, or something like it,
with an emphasis. But every one travels by his own road to his own
conclusions. The man, whose white bandage wavered and gleamed in the
water near his own reflection, reminded him of one from whom he had
taken a pistol in the cornfield by the Dunker church, whose eyes had
been mad and glaring, and his hair soaked in his own blood. In fact,
that was the face. Crises! Did it mean the sudden end of his running
days? Probably either his or the other man's. Their reflections in the
stream seemed to parody them, to watch and mimic. The water chuckled.
There was something ironic in things. One fancied the current of time
itself to be streaming and streaked yellow in the sunlight, and full of
bubbles. The minnows poised and darted against the stream.
Gard's horse flung up his head with a start.
"If the message I have given you is not for you, will you not give it to
another?"
As he left the water he heard the other's horse splashing behind him.
The road turned from the river through a sandy cut in the woods. At the
woods' edge the bandaged head was beside him.
"Stranger, you don't happen to have that gun about you you stole from
me?"
Gard turned and looked into the small, black, fatal circle of a pistol
barrel, like an eye-socket with the ball in ominous retreat.
"I do not carry weapons," he said, quietly.
"You don't! I reckon you do. You ought to have plugged me down at the
ford with one of those weapons you don't carry. We're going back."
"If you wish to take my life--"
"I'd like to, mightily."
"Very well."
"You're a Yankee spy. Wheel around there and keep ahead."
"This mistake delays me. I have permission--"
"Keep your hand out of your pocket."
Gard paused an instant, then said: "Very well," and turned his horse
slowly to the right, shook his left foot from the stirrup, and guided
his horse close in. Their right shoulders almost touched. He gripped
the man's pistol-hand and throat with the same movement. The pistol spat
past his cheek. He heaved, left foot in the saddle, and leaped. The man
gurgled, and they fell over his horse's cruppers heavily in the road,
the man below on his bandaged head. The bandage fell off; his blood
trickled into the dust, and he lay still. The horses had cantered apart.
Gard twisted his head around as he lay athwart, looked an instant, and
loosened his hand from the black-bearded throat. The grip was so hard
and sinewy, it was like untying a knot. It took effort, as if his
muscles had been screwed up and rusted in place. The man was dead or
stunned.
Gard got up with the pistol in his hand. He brushed his own clothes,
caught his horse, sent the other's with a cut from a switch galloping
away into the woods, and came back. He found cartridges and a glass
flask full of whiskey in the man's pockets, and put them in his own. If
not dead, perhaps he had better be; otherwise one must change disguise,
and proper disguises were not easy. He slipped a cartridge and cocked
the trigger.
The sun above the trees shone on the livid face in the dust. It was
about noon, and the hour that Mavering stalked from the sandy road-bed
thirty miles away into the charred forest and murmured: "It's not my
funeral. It appears to be the anchorite's."
On the whole, the neighborhood was too lively for loose pistol-shooting.
Gard lifted the limp body and carried it into a thicket, brought the
bandage and laid it beside, kicked the dust over the blood-pools in the
road, mounted his horse and smoothed his face, trying to settle its
placidity.
He trotted and cantered all the afternoon northeastward among low hills,
passing many untroubled farm-yards, but little soldiery. A couple of
horsemen said, "Howdy, elder," and seemed to have met with him and his
mission before. He gave them one of his few remaining tracts
absent-mindedly, without answering, came when the sun was low to the
Shenandoah, and heard it murmur its musical name.
"Probably he'd been more convenient dead."
The bridge was burned. He swam his horse through the current. The blue
mountains fronted him darkly against the sky. The turnpike led up
through a gap and so over into the elder Virginia. It was dark when he
reached the end of the meadow lands where the upward pitch and the woods
of the mountain road began. "Probably he'd be handier that way."
At the top of the gap were open pastures, a cabin where a dog barked,
but no light shone in the windows. The stars were out innumerably, the
valley behind in the cold, blue vapor of the night.
"But it might be better to change the part, after all," he thought;
"better for luck."
Fortune might grow weary, a good mule be overworked, a good tune sung
too long; for instance, the doxology was a good tune, two-four time, the
measure of the tread of the moral law, a taciturn, single-minded tune,
something like the general who sat his horse awkwardly by the burning
railroad.
The moon that was slender and new at Antietam had grown round as a
shield and rose late. Beyond the pastures on the gap the road led down
through the woods to the elder land asleep in the moonrise.
"_Einst, O Wunder, einst_," the world and the young man, the big wars,
the stir of living! And how wonderful then the moon and the night's
infinite valleys, the glory of being and of loneliness, when to be a
living soul was royal and the splendor of the night was its crown, when
palpable currents, rivers thrilling and divine, poured into it, as the
universe paid homage to its worth. Gard felt that he had somewhere lost
his resonance. He must look for another coat and a happier disposition,
shave his beard and shake dice with chance again. The road plunged down
into the cavern of the woods. He let his horse pick his way, and judged
the character of the road-bed from the sound of his steps below in the
darkness.