There was no longer any excuse for hesitation or delay. The book had
come to ripeness in him; the birth-hour was at hand, and he must go and
have it out with himself. He explained these things to Corydon, sitting
beside her and holding her hands; they ascended once more to the heights
of consecration; they renewed their vows of fortitude and faith, and
then he went away.
For weeks thereafter he would be like the ghost of a man in the house,
haggard and silent and preoccupied. All the work that he had ever done
in his life seemed but child’s play in comparison. Before this he had
portrayed the struggles of men and women; but now he was to portray the
agony of a whole nation--his heart must beat with the pulse of millions
of suffering people. And the task was like a fiend that came upon him
in the night-time and laid hold of him, dragging him away to sights of
terror and madness. He was never safe from the thing for a moment--he
could never tell when it might assail him. He might be washing the
dishes, or wrestling with the refractory pump; but the vision would
come to him, and he would wander off into the forest--perhaps to sit,
crouching in the snow, trembling, and staring at the pageant in his
soul.
He lived in the midst of battles; the smoke of powder always in his
nostrils, the crash of musketry and the thunder of cannon in his ears.
He saw the cavalry sweeping over the plains, the infantry crouching
behind intrenchments; he heard the yells of the combatants, the shrieks
of the wounded and dying; he saw the mangled bodies, and the ground
slippery with blood. New aspects of the thing kept coming to him--new
glimpses into meanings yet untold. They would come to him in great
bursts of emotion, like tempests that swept him away; and these things
he had to wrestle with and master. It meant toil, the like of which he
had never faced before, a tension of all his faculties, that would last
for hours and hours, and leave him bathed in perspiration, and utterly
exhausted.
A scene would come to him, in some moment of insight; and he would drop
everything else, and follow it. He would go over it, at the same time
both creating and beholding it, at the same time both overwhelmed by it
and controlling it--but above all things else, remembering it! He would
be like Aladdin in the palace, stuffing his pockets with priceless
jewels; coming away so loaded down that he could hardly stagger, and
spilling them on every side. Then, scarcely pausing to rest, he would
go back after what he had lost; he would grope about, gathering diamonds
and rubies that he had all but forgotten--or perhaps coming upon new
vaults and new treasure-chests.
So he would labor over a description, going over it and over it, not so
much working it out, as letting it work itself out and stamp itself upon
his memory. It made no difference how long the scene might be, he would
not write a word of it; it might be some battle-picture, that would fill
thirty or forty pages--he would know it all by heart, as Demosthenes or
Webster might have known an oration. And only at the end would he write
it down.
Over some of the scenes in this new book he labored thus for two or
three weeks at a stretch; there would be literally not a moment of the
day, nor perhaps of the night, when the thing was not working in some
part of his mind. He would think about it for hours before he fell
asleep; and when he opened his eyes it would be waiting at his bedside
to pounce upon him. If he tried for even a few minutes to rest, or to
divert his mind to some other work, he would find himself ill at ease
and troubled, with a sense as of something pulling at him, calling to
him. And if anything came to interrupt him, then he would be like a
baker whose oven grows cold before the bread is half done--it would be a
sad labor making anything out of that batch of bread.