The Complete Works of Stephen Crane (120 page)

The sentry and the prisoner remained immovably waxen, and over in the gloom the head thrust from the floor watched them with its silver eyes.

Finally, the prisoner slipped from the feed box, and, raising his arms, yawned at great length. “Oh, well,” he remarked, “you boys will get a good licking if you fool around here much longer. That’s some satisfaction, anyhow, even if you did bag me. You’ll get a good walloping.” He reflected for a moment, and decided: “I’m sort of willing to be captured if you fellows only get a d —— d good licking for being so smart.”

The sentry looked up and smiled a superior smile. “Licking, hey? Nixey!” He winked exasperatingly at the prisoner. “You fellows are not fast enough, my boy. Why didn’t you lick us at —— ? and at —— ? and at —— ?” He named some of the great battles.

To this the captive officer blurted in angry astonishment, “Why, we did!”

The sentry winked again in profound irony. “Yes — I know you did. Of course. You whipped us, didn’t you? Fine kind of whipping that was! Why, we — —”

He suddenly ceased, smitten mute by a sound that broke the stillness of the night. It was the sharp crack of a distant shot that made wild echoes among the hills. It was instantly followed by the hoarse cry of a human voice, a far-away yell of warning, singing of surprise, peril, fear of death. A moment later there was a distant, fierce spattering of shots. The sentry and the prisoner stood facing each other, their lips apart, listening.

The orchard at that instant awoke to sudden tumult. There were the thud and scramble and scamper of feet, the mellow, swift clash of arms, men’s voices in question, oath, command, hurried and unhurried, resolute and frantic. A horse sped along the road at a raging gallop. A loud voice shouted, “What is it, Ferguson?” Another voice yelled something incoherent. There was a sharp, discordant chorus of command. An uproarious volley suddenly rang from the orchard. The prisoner in gray moved from his intent, listening attitude. Instantly the eyes of the sentry blazed, and he said with a new and terrible sternness, “Stand where you are!”

The prisoner trembled in his excitement. Expressions of delight and triumph bubbled to his lips. “A surprise, by Gawd! Now — now, you’ll see!”

The sentry stolidly swung his carbine to his shoulder. He sighted carefully along the barrel until it pointed at the prisoner’s head, about at his nose. “Well, I’ve got you, anyhow. Remember that! Don’t move!”

The prisoner could not keep his arms from nervously gesturing. “I won’t; but — —”

“And shut your mouth!”

The three comrades of the sentry flung themselves into view. “Pete — devil of a row! — can you — —”

“I’ve got him,” said the sentry calmly and without moving. It was as if the barrel of the carbine rested on piers of stone. The three comrades turned and plunged into the darkness.

In the orchard it seemed as if two gigantic animals were engaged in a mad, floundering encounter, snarling, howling in a whirling chaos of noise and motion. In the barn the prisoner and his guard faced each other in silence.

As for the girl at the knothole, the sky had fallen at the beginning of this clamour. She would not have been astonished to see the stars swinging from their abodes, and the vegetation, the barn, all blow away. It was the end of everything, the grand universal murder. When two of the three miraculous soldiers who formed the original feed-box corps emerged in detail from the hole under the beam and slid away into the darkness, she did no more than glance at them.

Suddenly she recollected the head with silver eyes. She started forward and again applied her eyes to the knothole. Even with the din resounding from the orchard, from up the road and down the road, from the heavens and from the deep earth, the central fascination was this mystic head. There, to her, was the dark god of the tragedy.

The prisoner in gray at this moment burst into a laugh that was no more than a hysterical gurgle. “Well, you can’t hold that gun out forever! Pretty soon you’ll have to lower it.”

The sentry’s voice sounded slightly muffled, for his cheek was pressed against the weapon. “I won’t be tired for some time yet.”

The girl saw the head slowly rise, the eyes fixed upon the sentry’s face. A tall, black figure slunk across the cow stalls and vanished back of old Santo’s quarters. She knew what was to come to pass. She knew this grim thing was upon a terrible mission, and that it would reappear again at the head of the little passage between Santo’s stall and the wall, almost at the sentry’s elbow; and yet when she saw a faint indication as of a form crouching there, a scream from an utterly new alarm almost escaped her.

The sentry’s arms, after all, were not of granite. He moved restively. At last he spoke in his even, unchanging tone: “Well, I guess you’ll have to climb into that feed box. Step back and lift the lid.”

“Why, you don’t mean — —”

“Step back!”

The girl felt a cry of warning arising to her lips as she gazed at this sentry. She noted every detail of his facial expression. She saw, moreover, his mass of brown hair bunching disgracefully about his ears, his clear eyes lit now with a hard, cold light, his forehead puckered in a mighty scowl, the ring upon the third finger of the left hand. “Oh, they won’t kill him! Surely they won’t kill him!” The noise of the fight in the orchard was the loud music, the thunder and lightning, the rioting of the tempest which people love during the critical scene of a tragedy.

When the prisoner moved back in reluctant obedience, he faced for an instant the entrance of the little passage, and what he saw there must have been written swiftly, graphically in his eyes. And the sentry read it and knew then that he was upon the threshold of his death. In a fraction of time, certain information went from the grim thing in the passage to the prisoner, and from the prisoner to the sentry. But at that instant the black formidable figure arose, towered, and made its leap. A new shadow flashed across the floor when the blow was struck.

As for the girl at the knothole, when she returned to sense she found herself standing with clinched hands and screaming with her might.

As if her reason had again departed from her, she ran around the barn, in at the door, and flung herself sobbing beside the body of the soldier in blue.

The uproar of the fight became at last coherent, inasmuch as one party was giving shouts of supreme exultation. The firing no longer sounded in crashes; it was now expressed in spiteful crackles, the last words of the combat, spoken with feminine vindictiveness.

Presently there was a thud of flying feet. A grimy panting, red-faced mob of troopers in blue plunged into the barn, became instantly frozen to attitudes of amazement and rage, and then roared in one great chorus, “He’s gone!”

The girl who knelt beside the body upon the floor turned toward them her lamenting eyes and cried: “He’s not dead, is he? He can’t be dead?”

They thronged forward. The sharp lieutenant who had been so particular about the feed box knelt by the side of the girl and laid his head against the chest of the prostrate soldier. “Why, no,” he said, rising and looking at the man. “He’s all right. Some of you boys throw some water on him.”

“Are you sure?” demanded the girl, feverishly.

“Of course! He’ll be better after awhile.”

“Oh!” said she softly, and then looked down at the sentry. She started to arise, and the lieutenant reached down and hoisted rather awkwardly at her arm.

“Don’t you worry about him. He’s all right.”

She turned her face with its curving lips and shining eyes once more toward the unconscious soldier upon the floor. The troopers made a lane to the door, the lieutenant bowed, the girl vanished.

“Queer,” said a young officer. “Girl very clearly worst kind of rebel, and yet she falls to weeping and wailing like mad over one of her enemies. Be around in the morning with all sorts of doctoring — you see if she ain’t. Queer.”

The sharp lieutenant shrugged his shoulders. After reflection he shrugged his shoulders again. He said: “War changes many things; but it doesn’t change everything, thank God!”

The dark uniforms of the men were so coated with dust from the incessant wrestling of the two armies that the regiment almost seemed a part of the clay bank which shielded them from the shells. On the top of the hill a battery was arguing in tremendous roars with some other guns, and to the eye of the infantry, the artillerymen, the guns, the caissons, the horses, were distinctly outlined upon the blue sky. When a piece was fired, a red streak as round as a log flashed low in the heavens, like a monstrous bolt of lightning. The men of the battery wore white duck trousers, which somehow emphasized their legs; and when they ran and crowded in little groups at the bidding of the shouting officers, it was more impressive than usual to the infantry.

Fred Collins, of A Company, was saying: “Thunder! I wisht I had a drink. Ain’t there any water round here?” Then somebody yelled, “There goes th’ bugler!”

As the eyes of half the regiment swept in one machinelike movement there was an instant’s picture of a horse in a great convulsive leap of a death wound and a rider leaning back with a crooked arm and spread fingers before his face. On the ground was the crimson terror of an exploding shell, with fibres of flame that seemed like lances. A glittering bugle swung clear of the rider’s back as fell headlong the horse and the man. In the air was an odour as from a conflagration.

Sometimes they of the infantry looked down at a fair little meadow which spread at their feet. Its long, green grass was rippling gently in a breeze. Beyond it was the gray form of a house half torn to pieces by shells and by the busy axes of soldiers who had pursued firewood. The line of an old fence was now dimly marked by long weeds and by an occasional post. A shell had blown the well-house to fragments. Little lines of gray smoke ribboning upward from some embers indicated the place where had stood the barn.

From beyond a curtain of green woods there came the sound of some stupendous scuffle, as if two animals of the size of islands were fighting. At a distance there were occasional appearances of swift-moving men, horses, batteries, flags, and, with the crashing of infantry volleys were heard, often, wild and frenzied cheers. In the midst of it all Smith and Ferguson, two privates of A Company, were engaged in a heated discussion, which involved the greatest questions of the national existence.

The battery on the hill presently engaged in a frightful duel. The white legs of the gunners scampered this way and that way, and the officers redoubled their shouts. The guns, with their demeanours of stolidity and courage, were typical of something infinitely self-possessed in this clamour of death that swirled around the hill.

One of a “swing” team was suddenly smitten quivering to the ground, and his maddened brethren dragged his torn body in their struggle to escape from this turmoil and danger. A young soldier astride one of the leaders swore and fumed in his saddle, and furiously jerked at the bridle. An officer screamed out an order so violently that his voice broke and ended the sentence in a falsetto shriek.

The leading company of the infantry regiment was somewhat exposed, and the colonel ordered it moved more fully under the shelter of the hill. There was the clank of steel against steel.

A lieutenant of the battery rode down and passed them, holding his right arm carefully in his left hand. And it was as if this arm was not at all a part of him, but belonged to another man. His sober and reflective charger went slowly. The officer’s face was grimy and perspiring, and his uniform was tousled as if he had been in direct grapple with an enemy. He smiled grimly when the men stared at him. He turned his horse toward the meadow.

Collins, of A Company, said: “I wisht I had a drink. I bet there’s water in that there ol’ well yonder!”

“Yes; but how you goin’ to git it?”

For the little meadow which intervened was now suffering a terrible onslaught of shells. Its green and beautiful calm had vanished utterly. Brown earth was being flung in monstrous handfuls. And there was a massacre of the young blades of grass. They were being torn, burned, obliterated. Some curious fortune of the battle had made this gentle little meadow the object of the red hate of the shells, and each one as it exploded seemed like an imprecation in the face of a maiden.

The wounded officer who was riding across this expanse said to himself, “Why, they couldn’t shoot any harder if the whole army was massed here!”

A shell struck the gray ruins of the house, and as, after the roar, the shattered wall fell in fragments, there was a noise which resembled the flapping of shutters during a wild gale of winter. Indeed, the infantry paused in the shelter of the bank appeared as men standing upon a shore contemplating a madness of the sea. The angel of calamity had under its glance the battery upon the hill. Fewer white-legged men laboured about the guns. A shell had smitten one of the pieces, and after the flare, the smoke, the dust, the wrath of this blow were gone, it was possible to see white legs stretched horizontally upon the ground. And at that interval to the rear, where it is the business of battery horses to stand with their noses to the fight awaiting the command to drag their guns out of the destruction or into it or wheresoever these incomprehensible humans demanded with whip and spur — in this line of passive and dumb spectators, whose fluttering hearts yet would not let them forget the iron laws of man’s control of them — in this rank of brute-soldiers there had been relentless and hideous carnage. From the ruck of bleeding and prostrate horses, the men of the infantry could see one animal raising its stricken body with its fore legs, and turning its nose with mystic and profound eloquence toward the sky.

Some comrades joked Collins about his thirst. “Well, if yeh want a drink so bad, why don’t yeh go git it!”

“Well, I will in a minnet, if yeh don’t shut up!”

A lieutenant of artillery floundered his horse straight down the hill with as great concern as if it were level ground. As he galloped past the colonel of the infantry, he threw up his hand in swift salute. “We’ve got to get out of that,” he roared angrily. He was a black-bearded officer, and his eyes, which resembled beads, sparkled like those of an insane man. His jumping horse sped along the column of infantry.

The fat major, standing carelessly with his sword held horizontally behind him and with his legs far apart, looked after the receding horseman and laughed. “He wants to get back with orders pretty quick, or there’ll be no batt’ry left,” he observed.

The wise young captain of the second company hazarded to the lieutenant colonel that the enemy’s infantry would probably soon attack the hill, and the lieutenant colonel snubbed him.

A private in one of the rear companies looked out over the meadow, and then turned to a companion and said, “Look there, Jim!” It was the wounded officer from the battery, who some time before had started to ride across the meadow, supporting his right arm carefully with his left hand. This man had encountered a shell apparently at a time when no one perceived him, and he could now be seen lying face downward with a stirruped foot stretched across the body of his dead horse. A leg of the charger extended slantingly upward precisely as stiff as a stake. Around this motionless pair the shells still howled.

There was a quarrel in A Company. Collins was shaking his fist in the faces of some laughing comrades. “Dern yeh! I ain’t afraid t’ go. If yeh say much, I will go!”

“Of course, yeh will! You’ll run through that there medder, won’t yeh?”

Collins said, in a terrible voice, “You see now!” At this ominous threat his comrades broke into renewed jeers.

Collins gave them a dark scowl and went to find his captain. The latter was conversing with the colonel of the regiment.

“Captain,” said Collins, saluting and standing at attention — in those days all trousers bagged at the knees—”captain, I want t’ get permission to go git some water from that there well over yonder!”

The colonel and the captain swung about simultaneously and stared across the meadow. The captain laughed. “You must be pretty thirsty, Collins?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Well — ah,” said the captain. After a moment, he asked, “Can’t you wait?”

“No, sir.”

The colonel was watching Collins’s face. “Look here, my lad,” he said, in a pious sort of a voice—”look here, my lad” — Collins was not a lad—”don’t you think that’s taking pretty big risks for a little drink of water?”

“I dunno,” said Collins uncomfortably. Some of the resentment toward his companions, which perhaps had forced him into this affair, was beginning to fade. “I dunno wether ’tis.”

The colonel and the captain contemplated him for a time.

“Well,” said the captain finally.

“Well,” said the colonel, “if you want to go, why, go.”

Collins saluted. “Much obliged t’ yeh.”

As he moved away the colonel called after him. “Take some of the other boys’ canteens with you an’ hurry back now.”

“Yes, sir, I will.”

The colonel and the captain looked at each other then, for it had suddenly occurred that they could not for the life of them tell whether Collins wanted to go or whether he did not.

They turned to regard Collins, and as they perceived him surrounded by gesticulating comrades, the colonel said: “Well, by thunder! I guess he’s going.”

Collins appeared as a man dreaming. In the midst of the questions, the advice, the warnings, all the excited talk of his company mates, he maintained a curious silence.

They were very busy in preparing him for his ordeal. When they inspected him carefully it was somewhat like the examination that grooms give a horse before a race; and they were amazed, staggered by the whole affair. Their astonishment found vent in strange repetitions.

“Are yeh sure a-goin’?” they demanded again and again.

“Certainly I am,” cried Collins, at last furiously.

He strode sullenly away from them. He was swinging five or six canteens by their cords. It seemed that his cap would not remain firmly on his head, and often he reached and pulled it down over his brow.

There was a general movement in the compact column. The long animal-like thing moved slightly. Its four hundred eyes were turned upon the figure of Collins.

“Well, sir, if that ain’t th’ derndest thing! I never thought Fred Collins had the blood in him for that kind of business.”

“What’s he goin’ to do, anyhow?”

“He’s goin’ to that well there after water.”

“We ain’t dyin’ of thirst, are we? That’s foolishness.”

“Well, somebody put him up to it, an’ he’s doin’ it.”

“Say, he must be a desperate cuss.”