House Divided (128 page)

“Oh, you couldn't look badly if you tried; but you do look tired.”

She made a careless gesture. “Don't let's talk about me. Captain Pew, I only just heard you were in town; and you hadn't come to pay your respects to me, so I had to come and see you!” Supper began to be served, and she cried: “Heavens, I must run! I had no idea it was so late.” Tilda, of necessity, urged her to stay, and Captain Pew said courteously:

“Miss Dolly and I will see you home.”

“I can't,” Dolly told him. “Lieutenant Barwick just insisted that I go to Mrs. Marmont's with him to do charades. But Captain Pew will be your gallant, Aunt Enid.”

Streean saw the Captain's jaw harden, but he said nothing; and Enid stayed, and when the waiters had been brought she asked: “Captain, didn't Darrell go to Nassau with you?” Captain Pew nodded, and Enid asked: “Where is he?”

“In Nassau. He had some business there.”

Streean, watching Enid, thought she might have asked another question,
but Tilda spoke. “Enid, have you heard from Trav since the battle?”

“Oh, I never get a word from him when he's away. I might as well be a widow.”

“It's about time we had Lee's report,” Pew remarked, and Streean said:

“The
Enquirer
claims President Davis had word that the invasion was successful and that we took eighteen thousand prisoners; but I don't believe it.”

Enid agreed with him. “Neither do I. Trav says you can't ever believe General Lee's brags. He says we always lose more than we gain, every time we fight.”

Tilda protested: “That doesn't sound like Trav.”

“Oh he doesn't say it to everyone, just to me.” Enid's tone was spiteful. “Of course, he's your brother, Tilda; but if you heard the way he talks when we're alone sometimes, you wouldn't believe your ears.”

“Well,” Streean commented, “we lost twenty-two thousand men when Pemberton surrendered Vicksburg; so even if we captured eighteen thousand at Gettysburg, the balance is against us.” He was watching Enid, and with a certain anger, resenting her readiness to criticize Trav. Streean had always liked Trav better than the other Currains. This was partly because he could feel toward Trav, who seemed to him a dull and stupid man, a certain condescension; partly because Trav was less likely than the others to show open disapproval of his words or actions. The fact that to them he was always “Mister Streean,” that sometimes as though sure he dared not resent it they let him see their dislike and their contempt, was too plain to be ignored.

He was handicapped too by a conviction of his own inferiority; yet he had good capacities, and once he had held ambitions of which he could be proud. If Brett and Faunt and Cinda had given him their friendship, he might have been much more than he was, and in worthier ways. If they had thought him admirable, he would have striven to become so; if they had liked him he would have labored to deserve their liking. Without pitying himself, nevertheless he sometimes thought that for his faults and his vices some of the blame was theirs.

Yet at the same time he accepted their unspoken verdict on himself, knowing that in their place his attitude would have been the same. In Virginia, when you asked who a man was, you meant who was his father, his grandfather; you looked first to the generations from which a man had sprung before you judged the man. A thousand, ten thousand times, Streean had heard conversations cut to the same pattern. “Mr. Cartwright Smith? Yes, his father was Judge Robert Smith, and his mother was Molly Case, and her father was Colonel Abernathy of King and Queen County. Her older sister married Jonathan Wright, and her brother married Sally Carter. Judge Smith's father was ...” So on and on, through many ramifications. He could imagine someone asking Cinda: “Who is your sister's husband?” And he could imagine Cinda saying: “Mister Redford Streean. His father, Mister Tolbert Streean, is a farmer, a very respectable man.” What more could she say and still speak the truth?

Streean accepted this tally of the generations as a proper test of a man's credentials, and he had hoped that marrying a Currain might somehow let him share their genealogical respectability; but Faunt and Cinda and even Tony had long ago made clear to him that it did not. Cinda's sharp tongue showed him no mercy, Tony sneered at him, Faunt was coldly courteous. Brett was friendly enough, but even Brett in the heat of discussion often let his dislike appear.

Of them all, Trav was the only one who seemed willing to accept him. Because this was true, Streean secretly thought there was a common streak in Trav; yet he was grateful, too.

So now he resented Enid's contemptuous tone. Certainly, her mother being what she was, Enid was in no position to be critical of anyone. He watched her with shrewd, hostile eyes. Tilda said the first of the wounded from Gettysburg had reached Richmond that day, that more would be coming; and then Lieutenant Barwick arrived and bore Dolly away, and after the brief confusion of their departure, Enid asked Captain Pew:

“Captain, how long is Darrell going to stay in Nassau?”

Streean thought she seemed almighty interested in Darrell. Captain Pew said he did not know, and Streean, his eye on Enid, inquired: “What's he up to, Captain? I supposed he'd come back with you.”

“I don't think he needs a keeper,” the blockader evaded. “He
seemed happy where he was. He said he liked the climate there, said Richmond was too hot for him.”

Enid's hand pressed her lips, and Streean half guessed the truth. By God, it was too bad of Darrell, even for a cruel jest, to involve himself with a woman old enough to be his mother; and it was worse of Darrell to injure Trav. Enid, as though suddenly conscious of his scrutiny, rose and said she must go; and Captain Pew dutifully went with her. Streean thought Darrell had probably found Enid easy game. Trav, for all his virtues, was not a sufficiently romantic figure to bind any woman in a long devotion. Enid had spoken of him tonight as venomously as though she hated him; and Streean with an enlightening memory, recalled the day he himself had begun to hate Tilda. It was after he wronged her by buying that wench, Sally, and bringing her home.

Thus now Enid hated Trav: Streean thought her hate was proof enough that his guess was true.

Streean soon forgot Enid in the contenting news of the next few days. Steady rain, which for a fortnight had drenched the city, continued; and up in Maryland Lee was backed against the river with an enemy in his front. A losing battle would mean disaster; and Vicksburg and Port Hudson and Gettysburg were disasters enough.

For Richmond knew now that Gettysburg had been a disaster. A dozen generals were killed and wounded, and hundreds or even thousands of lesser men had died. For a while, the defeat was not officially admitted; but Secretary Seddon, with heavy dark circles under his eyes, looking like a walking ghost, was unmistakably a man who had heard evil tidings. For further proof, President Davis on Thursday called all men between eighteen and forty-five into the army; and next day the announcement that Lee had crossed the Potomac back into Virginia was full confession.

Within a day or two, ten dollars Confederate would buy only one gold dollar; and Streean felt a cheerful satisfaction. As prices rose there was a rich harvest to be reaped; but so many others were bent like himself on profiting from the general distress that a man must be quick to seize the opportunity. Enid said one day that Trav had made money in tobacco, and Streean with a new respect for Trav considered investigating the possibilities of the tobacco market; but he decided
against it. It was wiser to continue to deal in commodities with which he was familiar.

Captain Pew stayed two weeks in Richmond, taking what favors Dolly granted him. For the evening before he was to depart he counted on her company; but she came downstairs, so bewitchingly beautiful that even Streean chuckled in delight, to say she was away to a moonlight picnic at Drewry's Bluff.

“I declare, I just hate to go, your very last night here, Captain; but I've promised for simply weeks, and it's going to be wonderful fun, a band, and dancing, and marvelous things to eat. Sally Pickering has two turkeys from her father's plantation, and chickens and everything. If you liked, I'd take you too; but you just think we're silly children. Well, I suppose we are! So good-by, Captain. Some day maybe Mama'll let me go to Nassau with you! Won't that be wonderful? Come back soon, and bring me lots of pretties. Here's a good-luck kiss, if you really want it!”

She offered him her cheek like a ripe peach; but for once she had exasperated him beyond control. He took her face in his hands and kissed her lips with a rough violence; and she pushed free of him and protested: “Why, Captain Pew!” Her word was almost a sob, and Streean, watching with a secret amusement, saw reproachful tears in her eyes. “You hurt me!” she whispered; and when Captain Pew would have touched her hand, she cried: “No, no!”

Then she turned and fled. Captain Pew swung sharply toward her father, and Streean said dryly: “Why not play Dolly's game with her, Captain? Beau her to these shindigs!”

Pew was still angry. “If I do, she props me in a corner and goes gallivanting off with some sprig who's still wet behind the ears. Short of calling them out, there's nothing I can do.”

“She'd probably relish it if you did just that. She collects scalps like an Indian.”

“I don't bully children,” Pew said curtly, and he added: “But I prefer not to be made publicly ridiculous, even by Miss Dolly.” He grinned reluctantly at his own discomfiture. “Of course she enjoys tormenting me! If she ever did go on a voyage with me I'd have to put her in irons, or she'd whittle me in little pieces and feed me to the sharks.”

“I thought a captain was absolute master on his own ship.”

Pew's eyes changed in a way that made Streean wonder what he was thinking; but after an instant he said amiably: “Oh yes, but no man's master of a girl as bewitching as Miss Dolly.”

 

Tilda did not come home for supper. Since wounded men from Gettysburg had flooded the hospitals she was absorbed in her work. So Streean and Captain Pew were alone, and they sat in talk a while. This had been a month of bad news for the Confederacy. Vicksburg was gone, and General Morgan's raid into Ohio had ended in disaster and in his capture, and Lee was back at Culpeper with his great venture lost. But the French had moved into Mexico and proposed to put an emperor on the throne there. “Plenty of Southerners would like to be included in that empire,” Streean remarked.

Captain Pew nodded. “They'd snatch at even that straw; but sooner or later the South will be dragged back into the Union. The only question is how long will it take.”

“Unless President Davis finds some way to feed and equip the army, they can't go on fighting. Quartermaster General Myers will soon be out of office. The public has been after his scalp ever since last November when he sent back General Wise's requisition for shoes for his barefoot soldiers and said to let them suffer. President Davis is so stubborn that the surest way to keep a man in a post is to urge Davis to kick him out; but Myers is going.”

“Ah! Then I suppose you'll take his place?”

Streean laughed. “No. I don't want to operate in the—what's the phrase?—the fierce white light which beats upon the throne. I'll creep around in the shadows and pick up the crumbs.” And he said: “By the way, speaking of crumbs, we can get its weight in gold for any railroad iron you bring in.”

“It's heavy stuff to freight.”

“The Government will pay any price for it. When the Yankees pulled back from the Rappahannock to go chasing Lee, we tried to gather up the rails as far as Acquia Creek; but we couldn't work without cavalry protection, and when the cavalry was available, we couldn't get men to do the work. But we've got to have rails. We're
taking those on the York River line to build the Piedmont Railroad from Danville to Greensboro. If the Weldon Railroad is ever cut, that will be our only road south.”

“They're not building that Greensboro road yet, are they?”

“Hell, no! Congress authorized it sixteen months ago, and North Carolina chartered the new road a year ago last May; but they've done nothing since then but make surveys and tie knots in red tape. They can't build it till they get rails.”

Captain Pew was sure easier profits could be found in less weighty commodities, and Streean eventually accepted his opinion. “But we want to take our profits while we can,” he urged. “By winter, Mississippi and Alabama will be in Yankee hands, and when we lost Vicksburg we lost everything west of the river. You've seen the crowds on the street here, heard the way men talk. A month ago everyone thought we'd won the war. Now everybody thinks we're licked, and they're trying to save something from the wreck.”

“Talk won't bring peace,” Pew reminded him. “All along the coast from Norfolk to Florida, outside of Wilmington and Charleston and Savannah, the country people are all for the Union; and Holden has a strong peace party in North Carolina, and there are peace societies all over the South. But Davis will hang on just as long as the army will stand by him.”

“The women will stand by him.” Streean thought of Tilda. He knew well enough her envious hatred of this world from which since she married him she had been excluded; but she was happy now in giving orders to these women who had ignored her, in seeing them grateful for being told what to do. Yes, Tilda was getting a lot of personal satisfaction out of the war; and you heard women every day insisting that the Confederacy would fight on and on. “But Davis will lose the army finally. The Yankees will kill them off, and the soldiers will desert every chance they get. They see a lot of the sons of the rich planters staying at home under the ‘twenty slave' law, or getting some safe detail so they needn't fight; and they hear from their wives that their children are starving, and they hear all this talk about people getting rich out of the war. I had a letter from a Staunton man today. He said the roads down the Valley toward Winchester are full of deserters,
most of them with their guns, so no one dares stop them. I heard in the War Department today that there've been close to forty thousand desertions this month.”