"He hath grown a beard! In complete steel, revisits the glimpses of the moon! A Hotspur of the North, will kill him six or seven dozen Confederates before breakfast and say, 'Fie on this quiet life!' Will tootle a reed no more! Will dive into the bottom of the deep, pluck up drowned honor by the locks, and call it vanity! Vat for a fool of a musician!"
"How are you, Jack?"
"A war correspondent I, John Roland Mavering, who will celebrate you, a Homer to Achilles, who wants to know for his invocation how you happen not to be dead."
They locked arms and sauntered along the road in leisurely pursuit of the moon.
[Chapter XIII]
In Which Appears a General of Division, and One of "the Brethren."
If Gard entered the war, as he claimed, in the theory of a spiritual adventure, it must be hinted that he had sometimes lost sight of his theory. Outside events had shown a tendency to usurp and absorb in the process of the happening. It was not so noticeable during the first nine months. He marched, drilled, felt the rain and the cold wind at night in the open, heard the enemy's guns, saw bleeding men carried by from the distant field, and shared in what was called "the defence of Washington," a matter that did not seem difficult or exciting beyond reason. He was made a sergeant—a purely outside event. There was leisure to watch the scene, to keep one's poise, to experiment with existence. If at times his old sense of separateness, of isolation among objects, scenes, and persons whose importance to him was only in their inner effect upon him —if this sense at times seemed less vivid than before, and the movements of men in masses, the common enthusiasms, made him feel that his solitary journeying was in some mystical way accompanied by watching myriads with the same forward step and shadowy goal, it was rather a passing, a recurrent sensation.
But with the middle of spring came three months of storm and stress in the Virginia peninsula. He came out of the ranks by reason of some inscrutable opinion of him conceived and reported to authorities—something connected with an expedition through a swamp—was promoted because there were no other officers to speak of in the company when the army reached its new base at last on the James River.
He looked back curiously now to the tumult of those weeks, a period when he could not remember to have remembered himself, a long night of irrelevant dreams, the sense of identity lost in the dull confusion, himself going and coming, ordering and obeying, seeing difficulties and finding solutions with a set of surface faculties, the soul within him torpid, at least taciturn. The experience had left him with a sense of distaste and humiliation, with a certain troubled doubt. Was a man captain of himself, if he could be seized, stunned, drowned in circumstance, lost like a drop of water in a flood, rendered indistinct to his own consciousness from the flowing, pouring mass around him?
Gard did not suppose himself to be unique. He supposed other men had similar paths to walk in, pilgrim fashion; that every man owned merely himself and his destiny, his issue in the nature of things his own; that to every man there was but one great distinction, it lying between himself and what was not himself. In his own age, at least, he supposed it a growing tendency for men to look within their own souls for the infinite which they could not find without.