Letty took an ambulance and went, in great distress of mind, to see
Mother Angela, Superior of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, who had
arrived from Indiana ready to continue hospital duties on the
Potomac if necessary.
The lovely Superieure, a lady of rare culture and ability, took
Ailsa’s hand in hers with a sad smile.
“Men’s prejudices are hard to meet. The social structure of the world is built on them. But men’s prejudices vanish when those same men fall sick. The War Department has regularised our position; it will authorise yours. You need not be afraid.”
She smiled again reminiscently.
“When our Sisters of the Holy Cross first appeared in the wards, the patients themselves looked at us sullenly and askance. I heard one say: ‘Why can’t they take off those white-winged sun-bonnets in the wards?’ And another sneered: ‘Sun-bonnets! Huh! They look like busted white parasols!’ But, Mrs. Paige, our white ‘sun-bonnets’ have already become to them the symbol they love most, after the flag. Be of good courage. Your silver-gray garb and white cuffs will mean much to our soldiers before this battle year is ended.”
That evening Ailsa and Letty drove back to the Parm Hospital in their ambulance, old black Cassius managing his mules with alternate bursts of abuse and of praise. First he would beat upon his mules with a flat stick which didn’t hurt, but made a loud racket; then, satisfied, he would loll in his seat singing in melodious and interminable recitative:
An’ I hope to gain de prommis’ lan’,
Yaas I do,
’Deed I do.
Lor’ I hope to gain de prommis’ lan’,
Dat I do,
An’ dar I’ll flap ma wings an’ take ma stan’,
Yaas I will,
’Deed I will,
An’ I’ll tune ma harp an’ jine de Shinin’ Ban’
Glory, Glory,
I hope to gain de prommis’ lan’!
And over and over the same shouted melody, interrupted only by an outburst of reproach for his mules.
They drove back through a road which had become for miles only a great muddy lane running between military encampments, halted at every bridge and crossroads to exhibit their passes; they passed never-ending trains of army waggons cither stalled or rumbling slowly toward Alexandria. Everywhere were soldiers, drilling, marching, cutting wood, washing clothes, cooking, cleaning arms, mending, working on camp ditches, drains, or forts, writing letters at the edge of shelter tents, digging graves, skylarking — everywhere the earth was covered with them.
They passed the camp for new recruits, where the poor “fresh fish” awaited orders to join regiments in the field to which they had been assigned; they passed the camp for stragglers and captured deserters; the camp for paroled prisoners; the evil-smelling convalescent camp, which, still under Surgeon General Hammond’s Department, had not yet been inspected by the Sanitary Commission.
An officer, riding their way, talked with them about conditions in this camp, where, he said, the convalescents slept on the bare ground, rain or shine; where there were but three surgeons for the thousands suffering from intestinal and throat and lung troubles, destitute, squalid, unwarmed by fires, unwashed, wretched, forsaken by the government that called them to its standard.
It was the first of that sort of thing that Ailsa and Letty had seen.
After the battles in the West — particularly after the fall of Fort Donnelson — terrible rumours were current in the Army of the Potomac and in the hospitals concerning the plight of the wounded — of new regiments that had been sent into action with not a single medical officer, or, for that matter, an ounce of medicine, or of lint in its chests.
They were grisly rumours. In the neat wards of the Farm Hospital, with its freshly swept and sprinkled floors, its cots in rows, its detailed soldier nurses and the two nurses from Sainte Ursula’s Sisterhood, its sick-diet department, its medical stores, its two excellent surgeons, these rumours found little credence.
And now, here in the vicinity, Ailsa’s delicate nostrils shrank from the stench arising from the “Four Camps”; and she saw the emaciated forms lining the hillside, and she heard the horrible and continuous coughing.
“Do you know,” she said to Letty the next morning, “I am going to write to Miss Dix and inform her of conditions in that camp.”
And she did so, perfectly conscious that she was probably earning the dislike of the entire medical department. But hundreds of letters like hers had already been sent to Washington, and already the Sanitary Commission was preparing to take hold; so, when at length one morning an acknowledgment of her letter was received, no notice was taken of her offer to volunteer for service in that loathsome camp, but the same mail brought orders and credentials and transportation vouchers for herself and Letty.
Letty was still asleep, but Ailsa went up and waked her when the hour for her tour of duty approached.
“What do you think!” she said excitedly. “We are to pack up our valises and go aboard the Mary Lane to-morrow. She sails with hospital stores. What do you think of that?”
“Where are we going?” asked Letty, bewildered.
“You poor, sleepy little thing,” said Ailsa, sitting down on the bed’s shaky edge, “I’m sure I don’t know where we’re going, dear. Two Protestant nurses are coming here to superintend the removal of our sick boys — and Dr. West says they are old and ugly, and that Miss Dix won’t have any more nurses who are not over thirty and who are not most unattractive to look at.”
“I wonder what Miss Dix would do if she saw us,” said Letty naively, and sat up in bed; rubbing her velvety eyes with the backs of her hands. Then she yawned, looked inquiringly at Ailsa, smiled, and swung her slender body out of bed.
While she was doing her hair Ailsa heard her singing to herself.
She was very happy; another letter from Dr. Benton had arrived.
Celia, who had gone to Washington three days before, to see Mr. Stanton, returned that evening with her passes and order for transportation; and to Ailsa’s astonishment and delight she found that the designated boat was the Mary Lane.
But Celia was almost too nervous and too tired to talk over the prospects.
“My dear,” she said wearily, “that drive from the Chain Bridge to Alexandria has mos’ly killed me. I vow and declare there was never one moment when one wheel was not in a mud hole. All my bones ache, Honey-bud, and I’m cross with talking to so many Yankees, and — do you believe me ! — that ve’y horrid Stanton creature gave orders that I was to take the oath!”
“The — oath?” asked Ailsa, amazed.
“Certainly. And I took it,” she added fiercely, “becose of my husband! If it had not been fo’ Curt I’d have told Mr. Stanton what I thought of his old oath!”
“What kind of an oath was it, Celia?”
Celia repeated it haughtily:
“‘I do solemnly swear, in the presence of Almighty God, to faithfully support the Constitution of the United States, and of the State of New York. So he’p me God.’”
“It is the oath of fealty,” said Ailsa in a hushed voice.
“It was not necessa’y,” said Celia coldly. “My husband is sufficient to keep me — harmless. . . . But I know what I feel in my heart, Honey-bud; and so does eve’y Southern woman — God help us all. . . . Is that little Miss Lynden going with us?”
“Letty? Yes, of course.”
Celia began to undress. “She’s a ve’y sweet little minx. . . . She is — odd, somehow. . . . So young — such a he’pless, cute little thing. . . Ailsa, in that child’s eyes — or in her features somewhere, somehow, I see — I feel a — a sadness, somehow — like the gravity of expe’ience, the something that wisdom brings to the ve’y young too early. It is odd, isn’t it.”
“Letty is a strange, gentle little thing. I’ve often wondered — —”
“What, Honey-bee?”
“I — don’t know,” sai
d Ailsa vaguely. “It is not natural that a happy woman should be so solemnly affectionate to another. I’ve often thought that she must, sometime or other, have known deep unhappiness.”
When Celia was ready to retire, Ailsa bade her good-night and wandered away down the stairs, Letty was still on duty; she glanced into the sick-diet kitchen as she passed and saw the girl bending over a stew-pan.
She did not disturb her. With evening a soft melancholy had begun to settle over Ailsa. It came in the evening, now, often — a sensation not entirely sad, not unwelcome, soothing her, composing her mind for serious thought, for the sweet sadness of memory.
Always she walked, now, companioned by memories of Berkley. Wherever she moved — in the quiet of the sick wards, in the silence of the moonlight, seated by smeared windows watching the beating rain, in the dead house, on duty in the kitchen contriving broths, or stretched among her pillows, always the memories came in troops to bear her company.
They were with her now as she paced the veranda to and fro, to and fro.
She heard Letty singing happily over her stew-pan in the kitchen; the stir and breathing of the vast army was audible all around her in the darkness. Presently she looked at her watch in the moonlight, returned it to her breast.
“I’m ready, dear,” she said, going to the kitchen door.
And another night on duty was begun — the last she ever was to spend under the quiet roof of the Farm Hospital.
That night she sat beside the bed of a middle-aged man, a corporal in a Minnesota regiment whose eyes had been shot out on picket. Otherwise he was convalescent from dysentery. But Ailsa had seen the convalescent camp, and she would not let him go yet.
So she read to him in a low, soothing voice, glancing from time to time at the bandaged face. And, when she saw he was asleep, she sat silent, hands nervously clasped above the Bible on her knee. Then her lids closed for an instant as she recited a prayer for the man she loved, wherever he might be that moon-lit night.
A zouave, terribly wounded on Roanoke Island, began to fret; she rose and walked swiftly to him, and the big sunken eyes opened and he said, humbly:
“I am sorry to inconvenience you, Mrs. Paige. I’ll try to keep quiet.”
“You foolish fellow, you don’t inconvenience me. What can I do for you?”
His gaze was wistful, but he said nothing, and she bent down tenderly, repeating her question.
A slight flush gathered under his gaunt cheek bones. “I guess I’m just contrary,” he muttered. “Don’t bother about me, ma’am.”
“You are thinking of your wife; talk to me about her, Neil.”
It was what he wanted; he could endure the bandages. So, her cool smooth hand resting lightly over his, where it lay on the sheets, she listened to the home-sick man until it was time to give another sufferer his swallow of lemonade.
Later she put on a gingham overgown, sprinkled it and her hands with camphor, and went into the outer wards where the isolated patients lay — where hospital gangrene and erysipelas were the horrors. And, farther on, she entered the outlying wing devoted to typhus. In spite of the open windows the atmosphere was heavy; everywhere the air seemed weighted with the odour of decay.
As always, in spite of herself, she hesitated at the door. But the steward on duty rose; and she took his candle and entered the place of death.
Toward morning a Rhode Island artilleryman, dying in great pain, relapsed into coma. Waiting beside him, she wrote to his parents, enclosing the little keepsakes he had designated when conscious, while his life flickered with the flickering candle. Her letter and his life ended together; dawn made the candle-light ghastly; a few moments later the rumble of the dead waggon sounded in the court below. The driver came early because there was a good deal of freight for his waggon that day. A few moments afterward the detail arrived with the stretchers, and Ailsa stood up, drew aside the screen, and went down into the gray obscurity of the court-yard.
Grave-diggers were at work on a near hillside; she could hear the clink clink of spade and pick; reveille was sounding from hill to hill; the muffled stirring became a dull, sustained clatter, never ceasing around her for one instant.
A laundress was boiling clothing over a fire near by; Ailsa slipped off her gingham overdress, unbound the white turban, and tossed them on the grass near the fire. Then, rolling back her sleeves, she plunged her arms into a basin of hot water in which a little powdered camphor was floating.
While busy with her ablutions the two new nurses arrived, seated on a battery limber; and, hastily drying her hands, she went to them and welcomed them, gave them tea and breakfast in Dr. West’s office, and left them there while she went away to awake Celia and Letty, pack her valise for the voyage before her, and write to Berkley.
But it was not until she saw the sun low in the west from the deck of the Mary Lane, that she at last found a moment to write.
The place, the hour, her loneliness, moved depths in her that she had never sounded — moved her to a recklessness never dreamed of. It was an effort for her to restrain the passionate confessions trembling on her pen’s tip; her lips whitened with the cry struggling for utterance.
“Dear, never before did I so completely know myself, never so absolutely trust myself to the imperious, almost ungovernable tide which has taken my destiny from the quiet harbour where it lay, and which is driving it headlong toward yours.
“You have left me alone, to wonder and to wonder. And while isolated, I stand trying to comprehend why it was that your words separated our destinies while your arms around me made them one. I am perfectly aware that the surge of life has caught me up, tossed me to its crest, and is driving me blindly out across the waste spaces of the world toward you — wherever you may be — whatever be the cost. I will not live without you.
“I am not yet quite sure what has so utterly changed me — what has so completely changed within me. But I am changed. Perhaps daily familiarity with death and pain and wretchedness, hourly contact with the paramount mystery of all, has broadened me, or benumbed me. I don’t know. All I seem to see clearly — to clearly understand — is the dreadful brevity of life, the awful chances against living, the miracle of love in such a maelstrom, the insanity of one who dare not confess it, live for it, love to the uttermost with heart, soul, and body, while life endures,
“All my instincts, all principles inherent or inculcated; all knowledge spiritual and intellectual, acquired; all precepts, maxims, proverbs, axioms incorporated and lately a part of me, seem trivial, empty, meaningless in sound and in form compared to the plain truths of Death. For never until now did I understand that we walk always arm in arm with Death, that he squires us at every step, coolly joggles our elbow, touches our shoulder now and then, wakes us at dawn, puts out our night-light, and smooths the sheets we sleep under.
“I had thought of Death as something hiding very, very far away. Yet I had already seen him enter my own house. But now I understand how close he always is; and, somehow, it has changed — hardened, maybe — much that was vague and unformed in my character. And, maybe, the knowledge is distorting it; I don’t know. All I know is that, before life ends, if there is a chance of fulfilment, I will take it. And fulfilment means you — my love for you, the giving of it, of myself, of all I am, all I desire, all I care for, all I believe, into your keeping — into your embrace. That, for me, is fulfilment of life.
“Even in your arms you tell me that there is to be no fulfilment. I have acquiesced, wondering, bewildered, confused. But, dear, you can never tell me so again — if we live — if I live to look into your eyes again — never, never. For I shall not believe it, nor shall I let you believe it, if only we can win through this deathly battle nightmare which is rising between us — if ever we can find each other again, touch each other through this red, unreal glare of war.
“Oh, Philip — Philip — only to have your arms around me! Only to touch you! You shall not tell me then that our destinies do not mingle. They sh
all mingle like two wines; they shall become utterly confused in one another; I was meant for that; I will not die, isolated by you, unknown to you, not belonging to you! I will not die alone this way in the world, with no deeper memory to take into the unknown than that you said you loved me.
“God alone knows what change misery and sorrow and love and death have accomplished in me; never have I stood so alone upon this earth; never have I cared so for life, never have I so desired to be a deathless part of yours.
“If you love me you will make me part of yours — somehow, some way. And, Philip, if there is no way, yet there is always one way if we both live. And I shall not complain — only, I cannot die — let life go out — so that you could ever forget that my life had been part of yours.
“Is it dreadful of me to think this? But the mighty domination of Death has dwarfed everything around me, dear; shrivelled the little man-made formulas and laws; the living mind and body seem more vital than the by-laws made to govern them. . . . God knows what I’m writing, but you have gone into battle leaving life unfulfilled for us both, and I assented — and my heart and soul are crying out to you, unreconciled — crying out my need of you across the smoke. . . .
“There is a battery at Cock-pit Point, firing, and the smoke of the guns drifts across the low-hanging sun. It must be only a salute, for our fleet of transports moves on, torrents of black smoke pouring out of every tall funnel, paddle-wheels churning steadily.
“When the fleet passed Mount Vernon the bells tolled aboard every boat; and we could see the green trees and a glimmer of white on shore, and the flag flying.
“What sadness! A people divided who both honour the sacredness of this spot made holy by a just man’s grave — gathering to meet in battle — brother against brother.
“But Fate shall not longer array you and me against each other! I will not have it so! Neither my heart nor my soul could endure the cruelty of it, nor my reason its wickedness and insanity. From the first instant I met your eyes, Philip, somehow, within me, I knew I belonged to you. I do more hopelessly to-day than ever — and with each day, each hour, more and more until I die. You will not let me go to my end unclaimed, will you? — a poor ghost all alone, lost in the darkness somewhere among the stars — lacking that tie between you and it which even death does not know how to sever!
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 502