Special Messenger

Then he yawned again, showing every yellow tooth in his head.

The general opened his door wider, standing wiry and erect in boots and breeches. His flannel shirt was open at the throat; lather covered his features, making the distorted smile that crept over them unusually hideous.

“Well, I’m glad to see you,” he said to the Special Messenger; “come in while I shave. West, is there anything to eat? All right; I’m ready for it. Come in, Messenger, come in!”

She entered, closing the bedroom door; the general shook hands with her slyly, saying, “I’m devilish glad you got through, ma’am. Have any trouble down below?”

“Some, General.”

He nodded and began to shave; she stripped off her tight outer jacket, laid it on the table, and, ripping the lining stitches, extracted some maps and shreds of soft paper covered with notes and figures.

Over these, half shaved, the general stooped, razor in hand, eyes following her forefinger as she traced in silence the lines she had drawn. There was no need for her to speak, no reason for him to inquire; her maps were perfectly clear, every route named, every regiment, every battery labeled, every total added up.

Without a word she called his attention to the railroad and the note regarding the number of trains.

“We’ve got to get at it, somehow,” he said. “What are those?”

“Siege batteries, General—on the march.”

His mutilated mouth relaxed into a grin.

“They seem to be allfired sure of us. What are they saying down below?”

“They talk of being in Washington by the fifteenth, sir.”

“Oh.... What’s that topographical symbol—here?” placing one finger on the map.

“That is the Moray Mansion—or was.”

“Was?”

“Our cavalry burned it two weeks ago Thursday.”

“Find anything to help you there?”

She nodded.

The general returned to his shaving, completed it, came back and examined the papers again.

“That infantry, there,” he said, “are you sure it’s Longstreet’s?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You didn’t see Longstreet, did you?”

“Yes, sir; and talked with him.”

The general’s body servant knocked, announcing breakfast, and left the general’s boots and tunic, both carefully brushed. When he had gone out again, the Special Messenger said very quietly:

“I expect to report on the Moray matter before night.”

The general buckled in his belt and hooked up his sword.

“If you can nail that fellow,” he said, speaking very slowly, “I guess you can come pretty close to getting whatever you ask for from Washington.”

For a moment she stood very silent there, her ripped jacket hanging limp over her arm; then, with a pallid smile:

“Anything I ask for? Did you say that, sir?”

He nodded.

“Even if I ask for—his pardon?”

The general laughed a distorted laugh.

“I guess we’ll bar that,” he said. “Will you breakfast, ma’am? The next room is free, if you want it.”

Headquarters bugles began to sound as she crossed the hall, jacket dangling over her arm, and pushed open the door of a darkened room. The air within was stifling, she opened a window and thrust back the blinds, and at the same moment the ringing crack of a rifled cannon shattered the silence of dawn. Very, very far away a dull boom replied.

Outside, in dusky obscurity, cavalry were mounting; a trooper, pumping water from a well under her window, sang quietly to himself in an undertone as he worked, then went off carrying two brimming buckets.

The sour, burned stench of stale campfires tainted the morning freshness.

She leaned on the sill, looking out into the east. Somewhere yonder, high against the sky, they were signaling with torches. She watched the red flames swinging to right, to left, dipping, circling; other sparks broke out to the north, where two army corps were talking to each other with fire.

As the sky turned gray, one by one the forest-shrouded hills took shape; details began to appear; woodlands grew out of fathomless shadows, fields, fences, a rocky hillock close by, trees in an orchard, some Sibley tents.

And with the coming of day a widening murmur grew out of the invisible, a swelling monotone through which, incessantly, near and distant, broken, cheery little flurries of bugle music, and far and farther still, where mists hung over a vast hollow in the hills, the dropping shots of the outposts thickened to a steady patter, running backward and forward, from east to west, as far as the ear could hear.

A soldier brought her some breakfast; later he came again with her saddlebags and a big bucket of fresh water, taking away her riding habit and boots, which she thrust at him from the half-closed door.

Her bath was primitive enough; a sheet from the bed dried her, the saddlebags yielded some fresh linen, a pair of silk stockings and a comb.

Sitting there behind closed blinds, her smooth body swathed to the waist in a sheet, she combed out the glossy masses of her hair before braiding them once more around her temples; and her dark eyes watched daylight brighten between the slits in the blinds.

The cannonade was gradually becoming tremendous, the guns tuning up by batteries. There was, however, as yet, no platoon firing distinguishable through the sustained crackle of the fusillade; columns of dust, hanging above fields and woodlands, marked the courses of every northern road where wagons and troops were already moving west and south; the fog from the cannon turned the rising sun to a pulsating, cherry-tinted globe.

There was no bird music now from the orchard; here and there a scared oriole or robin flashed through the trees, winging its frightened way out of pandemonium.

The cavalry horses of the escort hung their heads, as though dully enduring the uproar; the horses of the field ambulances parked near the orchard were being backed into the shafts; the band of an infantry regiment, instruments flashing dully, marched up, halted, deposited trombone, clarion and bass drum on the grass and were told off as stretcher-bearers by a smart, Irish sergeant, who wore his cap over one ear.

The shock of the cannonade was terrific; the Special Messenger, buttoning her fresh linen, winced as window and door quivered under the pounding uproar. Then, dressed at last, she opened the shaking blinds and, seating herself by the window, laid her riding jacket across her knees.

There were rents and rips in sleeve and body, but she was not going to sew. On the contrary, she felt about with delicate, tentative fingers, searching through the loosened lining until she found what she was looking for, and, extracting it, laid it on her knees—a photograph, in a thin gold oval, covered with glass.

The portrait was that of a young man—thin, quaintly amused, looking out of the frame at her from behind his spectacles. The mustache appeared to be slighter, the hair a trifle longer than the mustache and hair worn by the signal officer, Captain West. Otherwise, it was the man. And hope died in her breast without a flicker.

Sitting there by the shaking window, with the daguerreotype in her clasped hands, she looked at the summer sky, now all stained and polluted by smoke; the uproar of the guns seemed to be shaking her reason, the tumult within her brain had become chaos, and she scarcely knew what she did as, drawing on both gauntlets and fastening her soft riding hat, she passed through the house to the porch, where the staff officers were already climbing into their saddles. But the general, catching sight of her face at the door, swung his horse and dismounted, and came clanking back into the deserted hallway where she stood.

“What is it?” he asked, lowering his voice so she could hear him under the din of the cannonade.

“The Moray matter.... I want two troopers detailed.”

“Have you nailed him?”

“Yes—I—” She faltered, staring fascinated at the distorted face, marred by a sabre to the hideousness of doom itself. “Yes, I think so. I want two troopers—Burke and Campbell, of the escort, if you don’t mind–”

“You can have a regiment! Is it far?”

“No.” She steadied her voice with an effort.

“Near my headquarters?”

“Yes.”

“Damnation!” he blazed out, and the oath seemed to shock her to self-mastery.

“Don’t ask me now,” she said. “If it’s Moray, I’ll get him.... What are those troops over there, General?” pointing through the doorway.

“The Excelsiors—Irish Brigade.”

She nodded carelessly. “And where are the signal men? Where is your signal officer stationed—Captain–”

“Do you mean West? He’s over on that knob, talking to Wilcox with flags. See him, up there against the sky?”

“Yes,” she said.

The general’s gimlet eyes seemed to bore through her. “Is that all?”

“All, thank you,” she motioned with dry lips.

“Are you properly fixed? What do you carry—a revolver?”

She nodded in silence.

“All right. Your troopers will be waiting outside.... Get him, in one way or another; do you understand?”

“Yes.”

A few moments later the staff galloped off and the escort clattered behind, minus two troopers, who sat on the edge of the veranda in their blue-and-yellow shell jackets, carbines slung, poking at the grass with the edges of their battered steel scabbards.

The Special Messenger came out presently, and the two troopers rose to salute. All around her thundered the guns; sky and earth were trembling as she led the way through an orchard heavy with green fruit. A volunteer nurse was gathering the hard little apples for cooking; she turned, her apron full, as the Special Messenger passed, and the two women, both young, looked at one another through the sunshine—looked, and turned away, each to her appointed destiny.

Smoke, drifting back from the batteries, became thicker beyond the orchard. Not very far away the ruddy sparkle of exploding Confederate shells lighted the obscurity. Farther beyond the flames of the Union guns danced red through the cannon gloom.

Higher on the hill, however, the air became clearer; a man outlined in the void was swinging signal flags against the sky.

“Wait here,” said the Special Messenger to Troopers Burke and Campbell, and they unslung carbines, and leaned quietly against their feeding horses, watching her climb the crest.

The crest was bathed in early sunlight, an aërial island jutting up above a smoky sea. From the terrible, veiled maelstrom roaring below, battle thunder reverberated and the lightning of the guns flared incessantly.

For a moment, poised, she looked down into the inferno, striving to penetrate the hollow, then glanced out beyond, over fields and woods where sunlight patched the world beyond the edges of the dark pall.

Behind her Captain West, field glasses leveled, seemed to be intent upon his own business.

She sat down on the grassy acclivity. Below her, far below, Confederate shells were constantly striking the base of the hill. A mile away black squares checkered a slope; beyond the squares a wood was suddenly belted with smoke, and behind her she heard the swinging signal flags begin to whistle and snap in the hill wind. She had sat there a long while before Captain West spoke to her, standing tall and thin beside her; some half-serious, half-humorous pleasantry—nothing for her to answer. But she looked up into his face, and he became silent, and after a while he moved away.

A little while later the artillery duel subsided and finally died out abruptly, leaving a comparative calm, broken only by slow and very deliberate picket firing.

The signal men laid aside their soiled flags and began munching hardtack; Captain West came over, bringing his own rations to offer her, but she refused with a gesture, sitting there, chin propped in her palms, elbows indenting her knees.

“Are you not hungry or thirsty?” he asked.

“No.”

He had carelessly seated himself on the natural rocky parapet, spurred boots dangling over space. For one wild instant she hoped he might slip and fall headlong—and his blood be upon the hands of his Maker.

Sitting near one another they remained silent, restless-eyed, brooding above the battle-scarred world. As he rose to go he spoke once or twice to her with that haunting softness of voice which had begun to torture her; but her replies were very brief; and he said nothing more.

At intervals during the afternoon orderlies came to the hill; one or two general officers and their staffs arrived for brief consultations, and departed at a sharp gallop down hill.

About three o’clock there came an unexpected roar of artillery from the Union left; minute by minute the racket swelled as battery after battery joined in the din.

Behind her the signal flags were fluttering wildly once more; a priest, standing near her, turned nodding:

“Our boys will be going in before sundown,” he said quietly.

“Are you Father Corby, chaplain of the Excelsiors?”

“Yes, madam.”

He lifted his hat and went away knee-deep through the windy hill-grasses; white butterflies whirled around him as he strode, head on his breast; the swift hill swallows soared and skimmed along the edges of the smoke as though inviting him. From her rocky height she saw the priest enter the drifting clouds.

A man going to his consecrated duty. And she? Where lay her duty? And why was she not about it?

“Captain West!” she called in a clear, hard voice.

Seated on his perch above the abyss, the officer lowered his field glasses and turned his face. Then he rose and moved over to where she was sitting. She stood up at once.

“Will you walk as far as those trees with me?” she asked. There was a strained ring to her voice.

He wheeled, spoke briefly to a sergeant, then, with that subtle and pleasant deference which characterized him, he turned and fell into step beside her.

“Is there anything I can do?” he asked softly.

“No.... God help us both.”

He halted. At a nod from her, two troopers standing beside their quietly browsing horses, cocked carbines. The sharp, steel click of the locks was perfectly audible through the din of the cannon.

The signal officer looked at her; and her face was whiter than his.

“You are Warren Moray—I think,” she said.

His eyes glimmered like a bayonet in sunlight; then the old half-gay, half-defiant smile flickered over his face.

“Special Messenger,” he said, “you come as a dark envoy for me. Now I understand your beauty—Angel of Death.”

“Are you Major Moray?” She could scarcely speak.

He smiled, glanced at the two troopers, and shrugged his shoulders. Then, like a flash his hand fell to his holster, and it was empty; and his pistol glimmered in her hand.

“For God’s sake don’t touch your sabre-hilt!” she said.... “Unclasp your belt! Let it fall!”

“Can’t you give me a chance with those cavalrymen?”

“I can’t. You know it.”

“Yes; I know.”

There was a silence; the loosened belt fell to the grass, the sabre clashing. He looked coolly at the troopers, at her, and then out across the smoke.

“This way?” he said, as though to himself. “I never thought it.” His voice was quiet and pleasant, with a slight touch of curiosity in it.

“How did you know?” he asked simply, turning to her again.

She stood leaning back against a tree, trying to keep her eyes fixed on him through the swimming weakness invading mind and body.

“I suppose this ends it all,” he added absently; and touched the sabre lying in the grass with the tip of his spurred boot.

“Did you look for any other ending, Mr. Moray?”

“Yes—I did.”

“How could you, coming into our ranks with a dead man’s commission and forged papers? How long did you think it could last? Were you mad?”

He looked at her wistfully, smiled, and shook his head.

“Not mad, unless you are. Your risks are greater than were mine.”

She straightened up, stepped toward him, very pale.

“Will you come?” she asked. “I am sorry.”

“I am sorry—for us both,” he said gently. “Yes, I will come. Send those troopers away.”

“I cannot.”

“Yes, you can. I give my word of honor.”

She hesitated; a bright flush stained his face.

“I take your word,” she murmured.

A moment later the troopers mounted and cantered off down the hill, veering wide to skirt the head of a column of infantry marching in; and when the Special Messenger started to return she found masses of men threatening to separate her from her prisoner—sunburnt, sweating, dirty-faced men, clutching their rifle-butts with red hands.

Their officers rode ahead, thrashing through the moist grass; a forest of bayonets swayed in the sun; flag after flag passed, slanting above the masses of blue.

She and her prisoner looked on; the flag of the 63d New York swept by; the flags of the 69th and 88th followed. A moment later the columns halted.

“Your Excelsiors,” said Moray calmly.

“They’re under fire already. Shall we move on?”

A soldier in the ranks, standing with ordered arms, fell straight backward, heavily; a corporal near them doubled up with a grunt.

The Special Messenger heard bullets smacking on rocks; heard their dull impact as they struck living bodies; saw them knock men flat. Meanwhile the flags drooped above the halted ranks, their folds stirred lazily, fell, and scarcely moved; the platoon fire rolled on unbroken somewhere out in the smoke yonder.

“God send me a bullet,” said Moray.... “Why do you stay here?”

“To—give you—that chance.”

“You run it, too.”

“I hope so. I am very—tired.”

“I am sorry,” he said, reddening.

She said fiercely: “I wish it were over.... Life is cruel.... I suppose we must move on. Will you come, please?”

“Yes—my dark messenger,” he said under his breath, and smiled.

A priest passed them in the smoke; her prisoner raised his hand to the visor of his cap.

“Father Corby, their chaplain,” she murmured.

“Attention! Attention!” a far voice cried, and the warning ran from rank to rank, taken up in turn by officer after officer. Father Corby was climbing to the summit of a mound close by; an order rang out, bugles repeated it, and the blue ranks faced their chaplain.

Then the priest from his rocky pulpit raised his ringing voice in explanation. He told the three regiments of the Irish Brigade—now scarcely more than three battalions of two companies each—that every soldier there could receive the benefit of absolution by making a sincere act of contrition and resolving, on first opportunity, to confess.

He told them that they were going to be sent into battle; he urged them to do their duty; reminded them of the high and sacred nature of their trust as soldiers of the Republic, and ended by warning them that the Catholic Church refuses Christian burial to him who deserts his flag.

In the deep, battle-filled silence the priest raised up his hands; three regiments sank to their knees as a single man, and the Special Messenger and her prisoner knelt with them.

“Dominus noster Jesus Christus vos absolvat, et ego, auctoritate ipius, vos absolvo ab omvir vinculo——”

The thunder of the guns drowned the priest’s voice for a moment, then it sounded again, firm and clear:

“Absolve vos a peccatis——”

The roar of battle blotted out the words; then again they rang out:

“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti!… Amen.”

The officers had remounted now, their horses plunging in the smoke; the flags were moving forward; rivers of bayonets flowed out into the maelstrom where the red lightning played incessantly. Then from their front crashed out the first volley of the Irish Brigade.

“Forward! Forward!” shouted their officers. Men were falling everywhere; a dying horse kicked a whole file into confusion. Suddenly a shell fell in their midst, another, another, tearing fiery right of way.

The Special Messenger, on her knees in the smoke, looked up and around as a priest bent above her.

“Child,” he said, “what are you doing here?” And then his worn gaze fell on the dead man who lay in the grass staring skyward through his broken eyeglasses with pleasant, sightless eyes.

The Special Messenger, white to the lips, looked up: “We were on our knees together, Father Corby. You had said the amen, and the bullet struck him—here!… He had no chance for confession.... But you said–”

Her voice failed.

The priest looked at her; she took the dead man’s right hand in hers.

“He was a brave man, Father.... And you said—you said—about those who fell fighting for—their own land—absolution—Christian burial–”

She choked, set her teeth in her under lip and looked down at the dead. The priest knelt, too.

“Is—is all well with him?” she whispered.

“Surely, child–”

“But—his was the—other flag.”

There was a silence.

“Father?”

“I know—I know.... The banner of Christ is broader.... You say he was kneeling here beside you?”

“Here—so close that I touched him.... And then you said.... Christian burial—absolution–”

“He was a spy?”

“What am I, Father?”

“Absolved, child—like this poor boy, here at your feet.... What is that locket in your hand?”

“His picture.... I found it in his house when the cavalry were setting fire to it.... Oh, I am tired of it all—deathly, deathly sick!… Look at him lying here! Father, Father, is there no end to death?”

The priest rose wearily; through the back-drifting smoke the long battle line of the Excelsiors wavered like phantoms in the mist. Six flags flapped ghostlike above them, behind them men writhed in the trampled, bloody grass; before them the sheeted volleys rushed outward into darkness, where the dull battle lightning played.

A maimed, scorched, blackened thing in the grass near by was calling on Christ; the priest went to him, turning once on his way to look back where the Special Messenger knelt beside a dead man who lay smiling at nothing through his shattered eyeglasses.

IV

ROMANCE

The Volunteer Nurse sighed and spread out her slender, iodine-stained fingers on both knees, looking down at them reflectively.

“It is different now,” she said; “sentiment dies under the scalpel. In the filth and squalor of reality neither the belief in romance nor the capacity for desiring it endure long.... Even pity becomes atrophied—or at least a reflex habit; sympathy, sorrow, remain as mechanical reactions, not spontaneous emotions.... You can understand that, dear?”

“Partly,” said the Special Messenger, raising her dark eyes to her old schoolmate.

“In the beginning,” said the Nurse, dreamily, “the men in their uniforms, the drums and horses and glitter, and the flags passing, and youth—youth—not that you and I are yet old in years; do you know what I mean?”

“I know,” said the Special Messenger, smoothing out her riding gloves. “Do you remember the cadets at Oxley? You loved one of them.”

“Yes; you know how it was in the cities; and even afterward in Washington—I mean the hospitals after Bull Run. Young bravery—the Zouaves—the multicolored guard regiments—and a romance in every death!” She laid one stained hand over the other, fingers still wide. “But here in this blackened horror they call the ‘seat of war’—this festering bullpen, choked with dreary regiments, all alike, all in filthy blue—here individuals vanish, men vanish. The schoolgirl dream of man dies here forever. Only unwashed, naked duty remains; and its inspiration, man—bloody, dirty, vermin-covered, terrible—sometimes; and sometimes whimpering, terrified, flinching, base, bereft of all his sex’s glamour, all his mystery, shorn of authority, devoid of pride, pitiable, screaming under the knife.—It is different now,” said the pretty Volunteer Nurse.—“The war kills more than human life.”

The Special Messenger drew her buckskin gloves carefully through her belt and buttoned the holster of her revolver.

“I have seen war, too,” she said; “and the men who dealt death and the men who received it. Their mystery remains—the glamour of a man remains for me—because he is a man.”

“I have heard them crying like children in the stretchers.”

“So have I. That solves nothing.”

But the Nurse went on:

“And in the wards they are sometimes something betwixt devils and children. All the weakness and failings they attribute to women come out in them—fear, timidity, inconsequence, greed, malice, gossip! And, as for courage—I tell you, women bear pain better.”