[Chapter XV]
Treats of the Distribution of Tracts in the Valley of the Shenandoah.
The Shenandoah goes by the eastern edge of the wide valley, murmuring its own musical name, "Shenandoah," as if it knew the word's significance in glory, tumult, and pain, but had taught all three to march to a quiet requiem; "Shenandoah"—old, unhappy, far-off things, under the lulling and palliation now of many years.
Gard rode directly south, through plodding, dusty lines of haggard-eyed men, and came to it a few miles above the junction and the famous Ferry. The cannon boomed all day on his left over by the larger river. He rode by daylight and openly and none seemed to doubt him; his dress and little printed tracts were passports enough for the time. He fell into the habit, first by impulse and then by policy, of carrying a tract in his hand, using its subject and phraseology for the next conversation and entering on the subject promptly.
It gave him a sense of detachment and isolation of a peculiar kind, this urging on some weary and hurrying group a doctrine of peace, compassion, and humility, as if the manner and language were working inward and growing less alien to him, and he really were a mysterious evangelist—a messenger with spiritual tidings and council. He noticed—and it seemed from its recurrence to have a certain pathos—that, after the laughter which rose around him in most cases had subsided, the faces would lose their weariness and strain, and seem to express another side of their humanity. They reminded him, then, of the fruit-seller and the policeman on the avenue, where he used to go to and from the Brotherhood of Consolation and the Church of the Trinity, who recognized in him some one apart and remote from the current of events—the river of humanity on the avenue.
It was even a more turbulent river that was pouring west and southwest along the two railroads leading from the Ferry. They were beginning to tear up and burn the northern line, but along the other the trains still moved in puffing succession. To Gard the sense of the part he played was strong almost to reality. The quaint, biblical, old-world phrases which he ever kept reading and repeating reacted upon him. He seemed, even to himself, to become intangible and apart.
"What shall a man take in exchange for his soul?" halting his horse and taking out the little white tract.
"I don't know. If you've got a plug of tobacco I might trade."
"If I had any, friend, I would give it to you freely."
The man looked at him curiously.
"I reckon you would now. This the best you know how, ain't it?"