Joseph A. Altsheler – The Complete Collection

Chapter 37

Helen was struck with horror. The battle, weird enough in the day, was yet more so in the darkness, and she could not understand why it did not close with the light. It partook of an inhuman quality, and that scene out there was more than ever to her an inferno because the flaming pit was now enclosed by outer blackness, completely cut off from all else--a world to itself in which all the passions strove, and none could tell to which would fall the mastery.

She felt for the moment horror of both sides, North and South alike, and she wished only that the unnatural combat would cease; she did not care then--a brief emotion, though--which should prove the victor.

It was a dark and solemn night that came down over the Wilderness and the two hundred thousand who had fought all day and still fought amid its thickets. Never before had that thin, red soil--redder now--borne such a crop, and many were glad that the darkness hid the sight from their enemies. The two Generals, the master minds who had propelled their mighty human machines against each other, were trying to reckon their losses--with the battle still in progress--and say to themselves whether they had won or lost. But this battlefield was no smooth and easy chessboard where the pawns might be moved as one wills and be counted as they fell, but a wilderness of thickets and forests and hills and swamps and valleys where the vast lines bent or twisted or interlaced and were lost in the shades and the darkness. Count and reckon as they would, the two Generals, equal in battle, face to face for the first time--could not give the total of the day. It was still an unadded sum, and the guns, despite the night, were steadily contributing new figures. This was the flaw in their arithmetic; nothing was complete, and they saw that they would have to begin again to-morrow. So, with this day's work yet unfinished, they began to prepare, sending for new regiments and brigades, massing more cannon, and planning afresh.

But all these things were unknown to Helen as she sat there at the window with Mrs. Markham. Her thoughts wandered again to Wood, that splendid figure on horseback, and she sought to identify him there among the black marionettes that gyrated against the red background. But with the advance of night the stage was becoming more indistinct, the light shed over it more pallid and shifting, and nothing certain could be traced there. All the black figures were mixed in a confused whirl, and where stood the South and where the North neither Helen nor Mrs. Markham could tell.

The night was thick and hot, rank with vapours and mists and odours that oppressed throat and nostrils. The wind seemed to have died, but the fine dust of ashes still fell and the banks of nauseous smoke floated about aimlessly.

New fear assailed the two women for the first time--not so much fear of the shells and the bullets, but of the night and its mysteries and the weird combat that was still going on there where the light was so pallid and uncertain. Once again those who fought had become for them unreal--not human beings, but imps in an inferno of their own creation. They wished now that Harley was still with them. Whatever else he might be, he was brave and he would defend them. They looked around fearfully at the shadows that were encroaching upon the house. The rain of ashes and dust began to annoy them, and they moved a little closer to each other.

Helen glanced back once. The inside of the house was now in total darkness, and out of it came the monotonous wailing of the black woman. It occurred suddenly to Helen that the servant had crouched there crying the whole day long. But she said nothing to her and turned her back to the window.

"It is dying now," said Mrs. Markham.

The dull red light suddenly contracted and then broke into intermittent flashes. The sound of the cannon and the rifles sank into the low muttering of distant thunder. The two women felt the house under them cease to tremble. Then the intermittent flashes, too, disappeared, the low rumbling died away like the echo of a distant wind, and a sudden and complete silence, mystic and oppressive in its solemnity, fell over the Wilderness. Only afar the burning forest glowed like a torch.

The silence was for awhile more terrifying than the battle to which they had grown used. It hung over the forest and them like something visible that enfolded them. They breathed a hot, damp air heavy with ashes and smoke and dust, and their pulses throbbed painfully in their temples. Around them all the time was that horrible deathlike pall of silence.

They spoke, and their voices, attuned before to the roar of the battle, sounded loud, shrill and threatening. Both started, then laughed weakly.

"Is it really over?" exclaimed Mrs. Markham, hysterically.

"Until to-morrow," replied Helen, with solemn prevision.

She turned to the inner blackness of the house and lighted a candle, which she placed on the table, where it burned with an unsteady yellow light, illuminating the centre of the room with a fitful glow, but leaving the corners still in darkness. Everything lay under its veil of ashes--the table, the floor, and the bed on which Harley had slept.

Helen felt a strange sort of strength, the strength of excitement and resolve. She shook the black woman by the arm and bade her bring food.

"We must eat, for we shall have work to do," she said to Mrs. Markham, and nodded her head toward the outside.

It was the task of but a few minutes, and then the two women prepared to go forth. They knew they would be needed on this night, and they listened to hear the ominous sounds that would be a call to them. But they heard nothing. There was the same dead, oppressive stillness. Not a leaf, not a blade of grass seemed to stir. Helen looked once more from the window. Afar in the east the forest still burned, but the light there was pallid, grayish, more of the quality of moonlight than of fire, and looked dim. Directly before her in the forest where the battle had been all was black, silent and impenetrable. It was true there were faint lights here and there as of torches that had burned badly, but they were pin-points, serving only to deepen the surrounding blackness. Once or twice she thought she saw figures moving slowly, but she was not sure. She heard nothing.

Helen was in an unreal world. An atmosphere new, fiery and surcharged surrounded her, and in its heat little things melted away. Only the greater remained. That life in Richmond, bright and gay in many of its aspects, lived but a few days since, was ages and ages ago; it belonged to another world. Now she was in the forest with the battle and the dead, and other things did not count.

The door stood wide open, and as Helen prepared to go another woman entered there, a woman young like herself, tall, wrapped in a long brown cloak, but bareheaded. Two or three stray locks, dark but edged with red gold, strayed down. Her face, clear and feminine though it was, seemed to Helen stronger than any other woman's face that she had ever seen.

Helen knew instinctively that this was a woman of the North, or at least one with the North, and her first feeling was of hostility. So, as the two stood looking at each other, her gaze at first was marked by aversion and defiance. Who was she who had come with the other army, and why should she be there?

But Lucia Catherwood knew both the women in the old house. She remembered a day in Richmond when this girl, in lilac and rose, so fair a representative of her South, welcomed a gallant general; and she remembered another, a girl of the same years, lonely, an outcast in the farthest fringe of the crowd--herself. Her first emotion, too, was hostility, mingled with another feeling closely akin to it. She had seen her with Prescott, and unwillingly had confessed them well matched. She, too, asked what this woman was doing here in the forest beside the battle; but these feelings had only a short life with her. There were certain masculine qualities in Lucia Catherwood that tended to openness and frankness. She advanced and offered her hand like a man to Helen.

"We come under different flags," she said, "but we cannot be enemies here; we must be friends at least to-night, and I could wish that it should always be so."

Her smile was so frank, so open, so engaging that Helen, whose nature was the same, could resist her no longer. Despite herself she liked this girl, so tall, so strong, with that clear, pure face showing a self-reliance such as she had never before seen on the face of a woman. Mrs. Markham yet hung back a little, cool, critical and suspicious, but presently she cast this manner from her and spoke as if Lucia Catherwood was her friend, one of long and approved standing.

"I think that our work is to be the same," said Helen simply, and the other bowed in silent assent. Then the three went forth.

The field of battle, or rather the portion of it which came nearest to them--it wound for miles through the thickets--lay a half-mile from the house under the solid black veil of a cloudy night, the forest, and the smoke that yet drifted about aimlessly. Outside the house the strange, repellent odours grew stronger, as if it were the reek of some infernal pit.

They advanced over open ground, and the field of conflict was still black and soundless, though there was a little increase in the lights that moved dimly there. The smoke assailed them again, and fine ashes from the distant fire in the east now and then fell upon them. But they noticed none of these things, still advancing with steady step and unshrinking faces toward the forest.

The twinkling lights increased and sounds came at last. Helen would not say to herself what they were. She hoped that her fancy deceived her; but the three women did not stop. Helen looked at the tall, straight young figure beside her, so strong, so self-reliant, and she drew strength from her companion--now she was such. They walked side by side, and Mrs. Markham came behind. Helen began to feel the influence of a personality, a will stronger than her own, and she yielded to it without further question and without reluctance, having the feeling that she had known this girl a long time.

The trembling lights of the forest increased, moving about like so many fireflies in the night; the nauseous odours grew heavier, more persistent, and for a moment Helen felt ill; her head began to spin around at the thought of what she was going to see, but quickly she recovered herself and went on by the side of the girl who never faltered. Helen wondered at such courage, and wondering, she admired.

The ground grew rougher, set with tiny hillocks and stones and patch after patch of scrub bushes. Once Helen stumbled against something that felt cold even through the leather of her shoe, and she shuddered. But it was only a spent cannon ball lying peacefully among the bushes, its mission ended.

They reached burnt ground--spots where the scanty grass or the bushes had been set on fire by the cannon or the rifles. Many places still burned slowly and sent up languid sparks and dull smoke. In other places the ground was torn as if many ploughs had been run roughly over it, and Helen knew that the shells and the cannon balls had passed in showers. There were other objects, too, lying very quiet, but she would not look at them, though they increased fast as they went on, lying like seed sown above ground.