Dr. Blecker used no delicate euphuism in talking of women, which, maybe, was as well. He knew, that, more than men, though quietly, they are facing the problem of their lives, their unused powers, their sham marriages, and speak of these things to their own souls with strong, plebeian words. So much his Northern education opened his eyes to see, but he stopped there; if he had been a clear-sighted truth-seeker, he would have known that some day the problem would be solved, and by no foul Free Love-ism. But Paul was enough Southerner by birth to shrink from all inquiry or disquiet in women. If there were any problem of life for them, Grey Gurney held it solved in her nature: that was all he cared to know. Did she?
After the regiment was gone, she went into the old work,—cooking, sewing, nursing Pen. Very little of her brain or heart was needed for that; the heavy surplus lay dormant. No matter; God knew. Jesus waited thirty years in a carpenter's shop before He began His work,—to teach us to wait: hardest lesson of all. Grey understood that well. Not only at night or morning, but through the day, at the machine, or singing songs to Pen, she used to tell her story over and over to this Jesus, her Elder Brother, as she loved to call Him: He would not be tired of hearing it, how happy she was,—she knew. She did not often speak of the war to Him,—knowing how stupid she was, near-sighted, apt to be prejudiced,—afraid to pray for one side or the other, there was such bitter wrong on both; she knew it all lay in His hand, though; so she was dumb, only saying, "He knows." But for herself, out of the need of her woman's nature, she used to say, "I can do more than I do here. Give me room, Lord. Let me be Paul Blecker's wife, for I love him." She blushed, when even praying that silently in her heart. Then she used to sing gayer songs, and have a good romp with the children and Pen in the evenings, being so sure it would all come right. How, nobody could see: who could keep this house up, with the ten hungry mouths, if she were gone? But she only changed the song to an earnest hearty hymn, with the thought of that. It would come at last: He knew.
Was the problem solved in her?
It being so sure a thing to her that this was one day to be, she began in a shy way to prepare for it,—after the day's work was done to the last stitch, taking from the bottom of her work-basket certain pieces of muslin that fitted herself, and sewing on them in the quiet of her own room. She did not sing when she worked at these; her cheeks burned, though, and there was a happy shining in her eyes bright enough for tears.
Sitting, sewing there, when that July night came, she had no prescience that her trial day was at hand: for to stoop-shouldered women over machines, as well as to Job, a trial day does come, when Satan obtains leave in heaven to work his will on them, straining the fibre they are made of, that God may see what work they are fit for in the lives to come. This was the way it came to the girl. That morning, when she was stretching out some muslin to bleach in a light summer shower, there was a skirmish down yonder in among some of the low coal-hills along the Shenandoah, and half a dozen men were brought wounded in to Harper's Ferry. There was no hospital there then; one of the half-burnt Government offices was used for the purpose; and as the surgeon at that post, Dr. Blecker, was one of the wounded, young Dr. Nott came over from the next camp to see to them. His first cases: he had opened an office only for six months, out in Portage, Ohio, before he got into the army; in those six months he played chess principally, and did the poetry for the weekly paper,—his tastes being innocent: the war has been a grand outlet into a career for doctors and chaplains of that calibre. Dr. Nott, coming into the low arsenal-room that night, stopped to brush the clay off his trousers before going his rounds, and to whisk the attar of rose from his handkerchief. "No fever? All wounds?" of the orderly who carried the flaring tallow candle.
All wounds: few of them, but those desperate. Even the vapid eyes of Nott grew grave before he was through, and he ceased tipping on his toes, and tittering: he was a good-hearted fellow, at bottom, growing silent altogether when he came to operate on the surgeon, who had waited until the last. "The ball is out, Dr. Blecker,"—looking up at length, but not meeting the wounded man's eye.
"I know. Cross the bandage now. You'll send a despatch for me, Nott? There is some one I want to see, before——I'll hold out two or three days?"
"Pooh, pooh! Not so bad as that. We'll hope at least, Dr. Blecker, not so bad as that. I've paper and pencil here." So Dr. Blecker sent the despatch.
It was a hot July night, soon after the seven days' slaughter at Richmond. You remember how the air for weeks after that lay torpid with a suppressed heat,—as though the very earth held her breath to hear the sharp tidings of death. It never was fully told aloud,—whispered only,—and even that hoarse whisper soon died out. We were growing used to the taste of blood by that time, in North and South, like bulls in a Spanish arena. This night, and in one or two following it, the ashy sultriness overhead was hint of some latent storm. It is one of the vats of the world where storms are brewed,—Harper's Ferry: stagnant mountain-air shut in by circling peaks whose edges cut into the sky; the sun looking straight down with a torrid compelling eye into the water all the day long, until at evening it goes wearily up to him in a pale sigh of mist, lingering to rest and say good-bye among the wooded sides of the hills. Our hill-storms are generally bred there: it was not without a certain meaning that the political cloud took its rise in this town, whose thunder has shaken the continent with its bruit.
Paul Blecker lay by a window: he could see the tempest gathering for days: it was a stimulus that pleased him well. Death, or that nearness to it which his wound had brought, fired his brain with a rare life, like some wine of the old gods. The earth-life cleared to him, so tired he grew then of paltry words and thoughts, standing closer to the inner real truth of things. So, when he had said to the only creature who cared for him, "They say I will not live, come and stay with me," he never had doubted, as a more vulgar man might have done, that she would come,—never doubted either, that, if it were true that he should die, she would come again after him some day, to work and love yonder with him,—his wife. Nature sends this calmness, quiet reliance on the real verities of life, down there into that border-ground of death,—kind, as is her wont to be. When the third day was near its close, he knew she would come that night; half smiling to himself, as he thought of what an ignorant, scared traveller she would be; wishing he could have seen her bear down all difficulties in that turbulent house with her child-like "He wants me,—I must go." How kind people would be to her on the road, hearing her uncertain timid voice! Why, that woman might pass through the whole army, even Blenker's division, unscathed: no roughness could touch her, remembering the loving trust in her little freckled face, and how innocently her soul looked out of her hazel eyes. He used to call her Una sometimes: it was the only pet name he gave her. She was in the Virginia mountains now. If he could but have been with her when she first saw them! She would understand there why God took his prophets up into the heights when He would talk to them.