House Divided (102 page)

Burr said no more than this in words, but his tone was so eloquent of disapproval that Julian thought it was remotely possible Uncle Faunt had meant to be as cruel as he seemed. But since Faunt never came to Richmond, or at least never came to Fifth Street, Julian presently forgot him in nearer things. He was acquiring the knack of walking with one crutch instead of two; and he was puzzling to devise some harness—a strap around his waist, or the sort of thing women wore—to which in default of any useful stump an artificial leg could be attached.

 

Late in February, Rollin Lyle came one day to the house on Fifth Street. He had gone without a scratch through South Mountain and Sharpsburg and his regiment had a fine month along the Opequon, recuperating after that campaign into Maryland. “And at Fredericksburg we weren't really engaged at all,” Rollin explained, “but I got a
shell fragment through my shoulder, and it didn't want to heal. So I've been down home since before Christmas.”

“I'll bet that was fun.”

“In a way, it was,” Rollin agreed. “Papa's there. He was too old, so they wouldn't take him in the army; so he's raising all the food he can, managing all the plantations. He had to move away from the coast, because so many of the people went off to the Yankees; so he moved the rest of them to Fallow Fields, up the Peedee River in North Carolina. It's healthier there. He had twenty-eight negroes die last year, working the rice, and twenty-two of them were task hands. Mama likes it better at Fallow Fields, but it wasn't the same as being at our real home.”

When Vesta and Cinda appeared, they greeted Rollin delightedly. Cinda asked whether he had visited Camden.

“Yes, I came around by Columbia,” he said. “I've been eight days coming from there—four days waiting for floods to run off, and four days on the cars.” But he had ridden from Columbia to the Plains to see Jenny and the children. Kyle and Janet were both riding, he reported; little Clayton was walking and talking a little. Jenny seemed well, and she was busy, and as fine and as beautiful as she had always been. Managing the Plains certainly agreed with her, and Mrs. Cloyd said no man could do it better. Jenny and Mrs. Cloyd saw a lot of each other.

After supper Rollin went to call on Dolly, and Vesta and Cinda agreed that his long devotion to Dolly was his only flaw; but Julian said Dolly was an awfully pretty girl. “And Rollin, once he likes a person, is mighty loyal.” Rollin had promised to return to spend the night; and Julian waited up for him. When he came, Rollin reported that Dolly had had another caller, a Captain Pew.

“I think he's a friend of Mr. Streean,” he said. “He's a blockade runner. He was still there when I left. Dolly seems fond of him.” Julian almost smiled at his tone.

 

After Rollin left Richmond to rejoin his regiment along the Rappahannock, Julian's rich hours and days with Anne continued. She was her father's housekeeper, and when bad weather kept them indoors, Julian might sit with a law book on his knee while she puzzled over
her accounts. In March she was scandalized to have to pay thirty-two dollars for a barrel of flour. “Papa says he's a mind to move South,” she told Julian. “He says he's just sick and tired of paying through the nose to these old extortioners!”

But she was to be glad she had bought that barrel when she did, for a few days later the Government seized all the flour in the city's warehouses. “I expect lots of people just simply haven't got any at all,” Anne declared, and Julian found that this was true. Even Aunt Enid borrowed from his mother, and she was furious at the Government's tyranny.

“There's going to be trouble, you wait and see,” Enid predicted. “The warehouses are just simply full of flour and we can't get any! People won't stand it.” The day one of the warehouses burned, she came to repay the borrowed flour and to say triumphantly: “What did I tell you? Someone set that warehouse on fire! I'm just as sure as I can be.” Cinda said she need not have hurried to repay the borrowed flour, but Enid said Captain Pew had brought her a barrel from Nassau. “He and Dolly came to supper last night. He just got back day before yesterday.” She was in the liveliest humor, her eyes sparkling. “Julian, that's what you ought to do, go blockading! You don't need two legs to do that, and Captain Pew makes heaps and heaps of money. He told us last night he took a load of cotton that he paid forty-three thousand dollars for, and traded it in Nassau for Yankee goods and some lead from England, and he got some gold besides, and put that in the bank at Nassau; and he sold the things he brought back for almost a million dollars! So you see!”

Julian grinned. “Sounds like a made-up story to me.”

“Well, it isn't! Why, one of the sailors on his ship bought six gallons of gin in Nassau for twenty-five dollars and sold it in Wilmington for nine hundred dollars.” She laughed in sudden amusement. “Dolly just declares she's going to get a little ship and go blockading herself and make a fortune! She could, too. Anybody can! Of course some people think it's wrong; but Trav says if people didn't buy blockade goods there wouldn't be any blockade-runners, so he says you can't blame them!”

Cinda protested: “That doesn't sound like Travis, Enid. You must have misunderstood him.”

“Well, of course I never know what he really means,” Enid conceded. “But I know what he said! I know it's true, too. I mean about blockaders making all that money.”

When she was gone, Julian whistled. “Golly, Mama, how do you stand her? How does Uncle Trav stand her?” But Cinda did not reply.

 

A winter's snow melted fast; and Friday morning Anne stopped on her way to do some household errands and insisted that Julian go with her. It was still slippery enough so that he took two crutches, and he was to be glad he had done so. They were in Smithers's dry goods store on Main Street when they felt rather than heard, a muffled, jarring explosion. They. hurried out of doors and saw people running down toward the river and heard far thin screams; and as fast as Julian could manage they followed the crowd till they were caught in a press of pushing people and Julian found it hard to hold his footing. Anne suddenly stopped and held his arm.

“There, we won't go any farther,” she declared. “I won't have you jostled so.”

He knew a quick delight at her solicitude. “I'm all right. Let's go see what happened.”

“I don't care what happened. You'll fall down.”

“I'll get up again.”

“In this crowd? Julian Dewain, don't be an idiot! Here, get into this doorway so people won't bump into you.” And as he yielded: “I declare, you can be the most exasperating man!”

His happiness overshadowed any curiosity about the explosion which had set this hurrying crowd in motion; but presently an ambulance passed them, and another, and the news of what had happened spread from mouth to mouth. Something ignited the powder in the cartridge factory on Brown's Island and blew the sides out of the flimsy wooden building so that the roof fell in. The workers were almost all young girls and women; and many of them—no one yet knew how many—were torn by the blast, or crushed, or burned.

Julian and Anne went home knowing no more than this; but the Saturday
W hig
said at least thirty girls had been killed. Sunday,
Julian and Cinda and Vesta met Anne and her father at the church gates. Julian had not seen the
W hig
, but Anne had.

“And one poor girl, Miss Burley, has simply vanished,” she told him. “Nobody knows what happened to her. I guess she was just blown to bits.” She said pitifully: “Oh Julian, they were all so poor! Think of having to work in that dreadful place to make a living! I'm so sorry for them.”

He nodded, thinking she had never been so beautiful. “But do you know something, Anne?”

“What?”

“I'm sorry for them, of course; but I enjoyed the excitement that day.”

Her eyes widened in bewilderment. “Why, Julian?”

“It was such fun having you boss me around and take care of me.”

Her color rose. “Why, I think that's horrid!” she declared, and turned to go into the church; but from the top step she looked back at him with a shy quick smile.

When he took his seat he could see her sitting beside her father a few rows nearer the pulpit, see the curve of her cheek past the border of her bonnet. To watch her was so absorbing that he paid little attention to the service. Until today, his thoughts had not cast ahead. To be with Anne as often and as long as possible had filled him with unquestioning content. But after this day there began to be a change in the rhythm of his pulse. They went together, he in respect to a gallant and a valiant man and she to keep him company, to Major Pelham's funeral; and the measured tramp of many feet and the slow beat of the Dead March woke in him a hasting and an urgency. He seemed to hear a whisper: “Hurry, hurry!” Thereafter, when he could not be with her, this frantic sense of haste grew stronger. Thursday snow began again to fall; and by morning it was eight inches deep. He dreaded a day without seeing her; but presently she came with a laughing challenge.

“Julian,” she cried, “General Hood's Texans are marching down Main Street and having a snowball fight, right in the street. Come watch the fun!”

He hesitated. Snow lay deep in the streets, and the very air was a scour of wind-blown flakes. “I don't know whether I can, Anne.”

“Oh you can do anything you want to do!”

So he went with her, and they laughed together at his difficulties. To swing his foot forward, supported on his crutches, was easy enough unless he tried to take too long a step; but when that one foot was firmly planted, he had to lift his crutches high and swing them wide or they caught in the heavy, clogging quicksand of the snow. He was soon panting and breathless; but Anne gave him no respite, teasing him for his slowness, urging him on.

There were half a dozen blocks to go. Hood's men had started north to meet the threat of that Yankee thrust in which the brave Pelham had been killed; but now the Yankees were repulsed and they were returning to their camp across Mayo's Bridge. Before Anne and Julian came to the corner where the Texans turned down toward the bridge, he was shaking with fatigue and his pulse hit hard. Anne's hand slipped through his arm and she asked softly:

“All right, Julian?”

Fine.”

“I wasn't just being mean, making you hurry. It's good for you to do hard things. Isn't it?”

“You bet. You just keep after me.”

Then his eyes turned to the line of marching men. These Texans had won fame at Gaines' Mill and had kept that fame untarnished. The laughing warriors trudged through the heavy snow, and they made a frolic of their march. Snowballs were flying up and down the column, and sometimes the men broke ranks for a sudden furious skirmish. They yelled shrill challenges and bold defiances and shouted in hot triumph; and the crowd along the sidewalks laughed and cheered.

Then one of them saw Julian and levelled a pointing finger and sang:

Julian grinned delightedly. The rough derision of the song made a joke of his hurt; and it told him he was one with them and had their love and loyal comradeship.

There were five, and ten, and then twenty voices singing; and Julian joined with them and went on with them; and Anne, looking up at him in fine and tender pride through smiling tears, sang with him.

The Texans shouted their delight; and a tall young fellow in the ranks scooped up a handful of the soft snow and flung it over Anne, and she laughed with them and brushed the snow away and stood proudly close by Julian's side as the last of the column passed.

They went homeward more slowly, happy together, speaking little. At the house on Fifth Street, Anne came in for a while, and she and Vesta discussed housekeeping problems. Since Cinda was so much at the hospital, Vesta managed this house as Anne did her father's. Flour was thirty-eight dollars the barrel, and prices of all kinds of foodstuffs went higher every day. “I suppose we'd be sensible to go to the Plains,” Vesta admitted. “But—well, it's like running away. The poor people can't run away from Richmond. It doesn't help them any for us to stay; but they have to stand it, and if they can, so can we.”

Anne said sympathetically: “I don't see how they stand it. Specially having their children hungry.”

“Uncle Trav says some women down in Salisbury, not far from Chimneys, just broke into the stores and helped themselves,” Vesta told her. “They went in and offered government prices for flour and bacon and salt and things; and when the storekeepers wouldn't sell, the women just took them! There were hundreds of women, and they had hatchets, and no one dared try to stop them and lots of people cheered. And he says some women did the same thing at Boon Hill when they couldn't buy corn.”

Anne tossed her head. “I've been mad enough sometimes to take a hatchet myself!” she declared. “And I'm not even hungry!”

 

Thursday morning Anne came early to the house to take Julian with her to market. “I want to go before everything's sold,” she explained.
“And it's such a beautiful morning, I didn't even wait to have breakfast.”

Julian gladly agreed. The elms and the occasional sycamores along Franklin Street were gay with spring's first tender greenery, already casting some shade; the sun was at once brighter and kinder than on a summer day. The two young people crossed Franklin Street, intending to go on down Fifth; but from the middle of the crossing they could look down to Capitol Square, four blocks away; and even from this distance they saw an astonishing number of people gathered there, clustering around the base of the Bell Tower and standing or moving to and fro on the slopes beyond. They stopped to watch, and Anne wondered why so many people should be there so early, and Julian proposed that they go that way and see.