University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.

Late in the afternoon of that day, Flemington got
leave and strolled into town, — into poor, desolate Petersburg.
He wandered aimlessly about through the
upper part of the city. Flem was working off, as he
was accustomed to say, his sentimentalities.

As the night comes on, one feels as if one approached
the shore of life. Upon this shore, the receding wave
of the day left phosphorescent sparkles. Lights began
to glimmer in homes.

Occasionally, as a door opened to admit some late
father or brother or other stay of a family, the laugh of
children — for children did laugh, just as flowers
bloomed, amid this desolation — escaped and saluted
him like an unmeant caress. It was as if a bird sang
while one hurried to a battle raging in the next woods.

Flemington wandered on, into the lower city. Here
were no lights. The houses stood with doors open and
windows up; and this, not by neglect of “careless
tenants.” There were no tenants. The whole quarter
had been abandoned. Terrible Battery No. 5 had

spoken a doom-word, and at its sound all these houses
had been emptied of their souls. Like a cemetery of
untenanted graves stood they, while hobgoblin shells
screeched and chattered and made the emptiness
hideous.

The night had come on gloomily, and the clouds were
now black and threatening. The lines were quiet, and
even Hoke's pickets were firing slowly and feebly. As
Flemington turned, at the lower end of Bolingbroke
Street, intending to go back to Jarratt's, the rain-storm
broke upon him, and he ran up the steps of a brick
house by which he was passing, to get shelter. He
tried the door, found it unlocked, entered, and passed
on into the parlor. The carpet was still on the floor.
It had a soft “feel”; Flemington was tired of the pavements;
he stretched himself out on the Brussels, and
gave himself up to luxury.

He had listened to the rain but a few minutes when
he heard the front door open. Almost immediately
two persons entered the room in which he lay. “Somebody
else got the sentimentals?” thought he, and
peered curiously through the darkness. An inexplicable
impulse forbade him to discover himself. As the
figures passed him, a woman's dress brushed over his
outstretched feet.

The strange visitors opened a door and went into an
inner apartment.

“Jane,” said a man's voice, “ye 'll find some light'ood
out thar in the passage. Git some an' kindle a fire,
fur I 'm wet an' cold. I 'll strike a light in a minute.”

Flemington saw that the light shone through, on one
side the partition, into the room where he lay. He

crept noiselessly that way, and found an alcove with a
rack for flower-pots, on which were yet standing some
rose-bushes. Glass-doors were between this alcove and
the inner room. He leaned on the rack and peered
through.

“A familiar tang is about that face,” thought he;
“where the devil have I seen it before?”

“If you 'd 'a' had as much trouble as I have, gittin' out
o' Norfolk, and 'd 'a' brought all these things strung
about you, to boot, you might talk about bein' tired and
cold!” said the woman, rising from the fire-place where
she had been kneeling.

“Jane, don't git mad. Don't scold me, for God's
sake! I 'm a mizzable man. I 'm gittin' skeery. I 'm
afeard to hide myself down hyur all day any longer.
Forty shell, an' more, 's been a-whizzin' over my head
to-day, an' hittin' the houses an' a-scatterin' the bricks
down like it was rainin' brickbats fur good! Ef I
was n't afferd o' meetin' some o' Sterlin's crowd I 'd go
back to the rigiment an' tell 'em some lie or other,
'bout bein' captured like, an' jes' got back, an' never
deserted, an' all. But I can't do it. I'm mizzable,
Jane!”

Gorm Smallin was lying on the floor with his feet to
the fire, his head resting on a round stick of wood
which he had rolled from a corner of the room. A
black bottle stood on the floor, in arm's reach. He
took a long pull and a strong pull at it. His spirits rose
a little.

“Come, old gal!” said he, more cheerily. “Let 's see
what ye 've got, this time, f'om Norfolk!”

The woman had already begun to disrobe, and having

removed her outer cloak, was now unwinding a variety
of scarfs, of all colors, from a waist capacious enough,
naturally, to dispense with the assistance of smuggled
goods. Carefully laying the scarfs upon an outspread
cloth, she proceeded to divest herself of skirt and hoop,
and presently produced, from beneath an inner skirt, a
sort of half-hoop, from which dangled a miscellaneous
array of vials and packages.

“Quinine, by the Rood!” said Flemington, enumerating
to himself the articles, as she untied them and
arranged them on the floor. “And—what is it?—sewing
silk, I reckon, and three pair o' shoes, ladies' size, price
one hundred and fifty a pair, so — needles, morphine,
lunar caustic, lace — and — and a hundred other articles
too numerous to mention! 'Gad, she must have sailed,
overland, from Norfolk, with assorted cargo of dry goods
and medicines!”

Whilst the vessel (weaker) was getting herself
“light,” Gorm Smallin had been taking on freight.
Right whiskey in the real present, and good comfort in
the near prospective, these had power upon the man.
Up from the waves of sorrow, all driping with the
brine, arose the head of Smallin.

He became patronizing, grandiose, braggart.

“Jane,” said he, surveying complacently the array of
merchandise just landed, “thar aint no manner of
doubt but you 're a sharp un an' a strong un! An' I
will say, altho' I say it myself, 'at I don't know 'at I
ever seed ary another 'oman besides yerself 'at could
'a brought out a whole store, dry goods an' all, f 'om
Norfolk, right thu pickets an' gyards an' all, under her
skyurts an' roun' her waist! I will say, Jane, ef I do

say it myself, bully for you! I 'm a deferent man to
what I was afore I seed you, Jane” —

“A Janus-faced scoundrel!” quoth Flemington from
the rose-bushes.

“I recomember when I was in the rigiment I used
to say to myself, Gorm Smallin hit aint no use to fight
the military! 'Cause why? Why 'cause every time I
run the block' to town, every single time, here cum
extry roll-call, and drum beatin' long-roll away in the
middle o' the night! and `Smallin' absent f'om roll-call'
next mornin', an' then, shore as shootin', dubble-de-dute!”

“An affectionate pet name for `double duty,' ladies
and gentlemen,” whispered Flemington, gravely bowing
to the roses.

“I did cum it on 'em awhile, tho', a-playing off sick
on 'em! An' it did work elegint, elegint, Jane, untwell
one Monday mornin', Jim Sunnypond, a mean sneak,
swore 'at I was the only man 'at had the priv'lege of
gittin' sick in the whole rigiment, an' said it was axin'
too much of my comrades for me to want to be sick all
the time, an' said fa'r play an' equal rights an' division
o' labor! An' said Monday was his day to git sick; an'
then every man in the whole rigiment got to havin' his
sick-day, an' the military smelt a rat, an' so `sick'
played out!”

“Or, as the Latins have it, sic transit; if my audience
will pardon so much pedantry!” commented
Flemington, with a deprecatory gesture which nearly
betrayed him by overturning the most substantial of his
audience from the rack.

“But, Jane, hit takes you an' me together, you an'
me” —

“Oh that I had a stone-bow to hit him in the mouth!”
quoted Flemington.

— “To fool 'em, don't it? Mind what I tell you, no
man don't fool with me, for nothin'! The military
fooled with me; but you an' me has fooled hit to death,
aint we? An' ole man Sterlin”' — his voice sank
involuntarily — “he mus' go an' try to fool with me!
Jane, he better had n't 'a' done it!”

Even in his drunken maundering, Gorm Smallin
paused a moment.

“Jane, sometimes a fellow's brains seems to git actyve
and peert, like, all of a suddent! I tell you what,
I done that thing, that night, jest as well as ef I'd been
to college all my life! Ye see, I tried, an' tried, an'
studied, while I was gittin' to Thalberg” —

Flemington bent close and listened, almost without
breathing.

— “To think how I could fix a slow-match 'at would
burn untwell I had — untwell I had—had done the other
thing. Fur I was afeared there 'd be sich a stir an'
rumpus about, a'ter that, 'at I could n' git a chance to
build the fire. At last, I cum to think about punk, as
we used to call it when I was a boy, which it 'll burn in
a coal, 'ithout blazin', as slow as you please. And so I
fixed it, 'ith powder an' punk an' some book-leaves an'
laths; an' I even did n' forgit to dig two or three extry
holes 'ith my knife in the plaster, for the air to git thu
an' feed the fire, like!

“An' then I slipped aroun', Jane, roun' to t'other side
the house, an' I seed a light shinin' out like” — Gorm
Smallin arose unsteadily to his feet, grasped a piece of
lightwood to represent his rifle (having risen into the

high-tragic), and backed slowly towards the glass-door
where Flemington stood; who, drawing his breath hard,
had laid his hand on his pistol and was wildly debating
which outweighed — the justice of killing this murderer
of his friends, or the deadly sin of sending this inebriated
soul to perdition.

— “Like this, Jane, an' I got me a tree an' stood thar,
God A'mighty knows how long I stood thar, a year,
may be, or two of 'em, an' at last in come Sterlin' an'
his wife and the gals, an' then they played the pianner
an' sung an' hullabalood another hour, an' then they all
sot down together, 'ith Sterlin' in the middle, an' he
talked an' talked; an' all the time I could n' shoot somehow,
my arms was weak, an' my eyes was dim, an' I
thought onst or twiced 'at I was a gwine blind. An'
a'ter a while the ole 'oman laid her cheek agin his'n, an'
somethin seems-to-me-like screeched in my ears like a
car-whistle, `Why aint you settin' 'ith your wife, an',
may be, child, in your house, enjoyin' yer comfort!' and
afore I knowed it, Jane, God knows afore I knowed it,
jest as ole Sterlin' was a sayin' `Amen!' I up gun an'
shot an' seed 'em fall on”—

Suddenly a shell tore through the room where Flemington
stood, into the next apartment, and exploded just
over Gorm Smallin's head. Blinded and half-stifled
by the thick sulphurous smoke, Flemington, with a great
effort, conquered the stun of the concussion and staggered
through the door, which had jarred open, into
the fresh air of the street.

He revived, and listened. No sound came from the
interior of the house save the occasional drop of plastering
shaken loose by the explosion.

But the heavens had cleared, the stars were glittering
through the humid air with a sort of rainy fire.
The batteries on the lines had reopened, and the night
was full of that unquiet strange thrill which runs through
an army before a battle: for the long lines were like
two strips of gold-foil, and always trembled and wavered
with a certain unaccountable agitation, which prophesied
victory, as the photometer light, afar off.

Time is a lens which should be clear. Gorm Smallin
was a dust-speck upon it. God had blown him off.
Who prays for dust-specks? and yet who will swear
that he himself is aught more?

Serious of soul, questioning his heart, Flemington
hurried to his camp.