But under visions I had made my resolve. Douglas was dead, but others were living.
Two months before in a gray dawn, the walls of a fort in Charleston Harbor had crumbled under fire from a score of rebel batteries. Now the shots echoed in my ears with a new volume.
"Good luck, Solon—and good-by—I'm going 'on to Richmond.'"
"Oh, that!" said he, easily, "that will be over before you can get to the front."
But I went, forthwith, and, triumphant lover though he was, the editor of the Little Arcady Argus was less than a prophet.
I went to the "little" war; and of her I carried, as I marched, an ambrotype in a closed case, which I had obtained deviously. She smiled in it, a little questioning, inciting smile, that seemed to lurk back in her eyes rather than along her lips. It was the smile that had availed to keep me firm in my vows of silence.
It was another picture I brought back five years later—the picture of a young girl, not smiling but grave, even fearful, as if she had faced the camera full of apprehension. But I knew her not; the thing had come to me by chance, and I threw it aside to be forgotten.
It is best to tell quickly that those years were swift and full. Early in the second a letter from Solon, read at a random camp-fire, told me of my namesake's coming. For the other years I pleased myself prodigiously by remembering that she must speak my name openly to her first-born. And I lusted for battle, then. I was an early Norseman, and I would escape the prosaic bed-death, since, for those dying thus, Held waited in her chill prison-house below, with hunger her dish, starvation her knife, care her bed, and anguish her curtains. To survive for easy death, long deferred, perhaps, I should have my empty dish and bed of care at once. Lacking the battle death, I could at least mimic it, as they did of old, that Odin's choosers of the slain might lead me to Valhalla. There should I forever fight at dawn and be healed at noon, if wounded, to be ready for the feast and song. The world was not big enough for us two if we must stay apart. Life was not to be lived in a beggarly and ignoble compromise. War was its business, bravery its duty, and cowardice its greatest crime—above all, that ultimate, puling cowardice of accepting life empty for its own barren sake.
At the last I lay on a cot in a field hospital, entertained for the moment by the novelty of that vacant, spacious feeling on my left side—wondering if I could shave now with one arm—without another hand to pull my face into hard little hummocks for the razor.
I heard the soft quick tread of a hospital steward, and standing before me, he took from its envelope the letter Solon Denney had sent me to say that she was dead. I handed it back, told him to burn it, and I shut my eyes to the sickening shapes of life. My fever came up again, and in the night I felt inch by inch over ground wet with blood for a picture I had relinquished in a Quixotic moment. I must have been troublesome, for they gave me the drug of dreams and I awakened peacefully. I watched the field surgeons gather about a young line officer brought in with a shot through his neck. For the better probing of the wound they removed his head and gave it to me to hold. Seeing that it was Solon Denney's head, I was seized with a mood of jest—I would hide it and make Solon search. I advanced craftily down an endless corridor, but came to the edge of a wood, where there was a wicked spitting of shots. I cried out again, and once more they gave me the drug. Then I dreamed more quietly. I saw that the soul of my dead arm searched for her soul—that it would soon be drawn to her and offer itself to comfort her and never, never leave her. It would say, "At least take the arm, since you may have it without the face." It seemed that my other arm should go to her, too. This side of her there could be nothing for either to close upon. It appeared to me that I fell asleep on this fancy and dreamt that I awoke painfully to a poor, one-sided life, effortless, barren, forbidding.