House Divided (13 page)

Out of respect to Mrs. Currain's wishes, no one at supper or afterward spoke of this which was in all their minds; but that night, to Brett, Cinda said wearily:

“Oh, Brett Dewain, I'm so scared, and so confused! What does it mean?”

He was slow in replying. “Faunt and I rode into Williamsburg this afternoon,” he said. “Mr. Lively at the
Gazette
office says the men who made the trouble were killed or captured this morning by the marines under Colonel Lee. The leader was a man named John Brown. Lieutenant Stuart recognized him. You probably never heard of him, but he's supposed to have murdered half a dozen men in the Kansas troubles; took them out of bed and chopped them to bits with sabres.” She clung to him, and he added slowly: “Brown is a fanatic, probably insane. There can't be many men even in the North who would try to start a slave revolt—or who would think it possible to do so.”

“Don't you think it's possible? I do. I never feel I know what the negroes really think of us.”

He said firmly: “No, it's not possible. For one thing, even if the negroes had real grievances, they've no leaders.” He added: “But—men on both sides, North and South, will be angry now; angrier than ever. Even Faunt was in a deadly rage today.”

“Will this—start us all fighting?”

He hesitated. “There's no reason why it should; but of course the politicians will make a great to-do.” He added in an even tone: “Faunt and I are going to Richmond tomorrow, and Clayton will go back to the Plains, in case this stirs up any trouble there.”

She shivered. “I don't like being left alone.”

He held her close. “You'll feel better in daylight. I wouldn't leave you if I thought there was any danger.”

“Trav will be here, of course,” she reflected, “and Burr and Julian.”

“I'll probably go to the Plains with Clayton,” he told her. “I'll send Caesar and June to Richmond and some of the people. You'll need them to help unpack the things from England. You can stay at the Arlington till the house is habitable.”

She laughed in quick fondness. “Clever Brett Dewain, trying to get my mind on other things. You always know how to comfort me. And you're right, of course. If I keep busy, I won't have time for worrying.”

October–December, 1859

 

R
ICHMOND, beautiful on rolling hills, had not yet felt the harsh touch of coming winter; but here and there the trees began to put on brighter colors, just as a woman conscious of encroaching age chooses new cosmetics and becomes more beautiful for a while before she fades. Faunt, happiest at Belle Vue, seldom came to the city; and today he found the crowded, dusty streets, with groups of men in hot discussion everywhere, disturbing and oppressive. The very air seemed to him heavy, as it may be on a sultry afternoon before a thunderstorm. Redford Streean had offered them hospitality, but at Faunt's suggestion they put up at the first hotel they came to, the Exchange on Franklin Street, two blocks down the hill from Capitol Square.

“I always get indoors as quickly as I can, whenever I come to town,” Faunt confessed. “I'm jumpy as a fresh-broken colt in crowds, ready to sheer across the nearest ditch at any alarm, wall-eyed as a scared darky.”

Neither Brett nor Clayton shared this feeling. “I suppose living with Cinda has made me used to crowds,” Brett remarked. “She's a crowd in herself. And Clayton here is young enough to enjoy being in the middle of things.”

Clayton assented. “Yes, I like it, seeing so many people, watching their faces, wondering about them.”

“Strangers?” Faunt objected.

Clayton held his ground. “Yes, strangers! I like to try to guess what their—well, what they're thinking. What do they hope to make of their lives? What do they dream about? Do they think they're pretty fine fellows? No one can ever really know any man but himself, I suppose;
but trying to guess about strangers seems to me mighty interesting.” He stood at the window, watching the throngs on Franklin Street and up toward Capitol Square. “Look at them, ladies, gentlemen, children; some going one way and some another. Where are they going? Why?”

The older men exchanged glances and Brett crossed and touched Clayton's shoulder, a deep affection in the gesture. “Well, I can tell you where I'm going, and why.” There was a chuckle in his tones. “I'm hungry. Come along, son.”

In the dining room and through the hours that followed they heard the attack on Harper's Ferry discussed from every point of view. Indoors and out, till the hush of night belatedly descended, there was a clamor of excited and passionate voices in the air. By the more accurate reports it developed that the original version had been wildly exaggerated. Instead of two hundred white men and five hundred Negroes, there were only a score or so in John Brown's party. Sunday evening they seized the town, stopped the twelve-forty train, killed a Negro porter, the ticket agent, the train conductor, two or three others. Monday morning the first troops came; the rioters took refuge in the engine house. That evening Colonel Lee and a small detachment of marines arrived; at daylight Tuesday morning, after a fruitless parley between Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart and John Brown, the engine house was stormed by marines, the raiders were all killed or captured. Now John Brown and the other survivors would be tried and hanged.

But these scant facts were the grains of wheat in a bushel of chaff; there were a thousand rumors. John Brown, the butcher of Osawatomie, had hoped to rouse the slaves to bloody insurrection; Northern abolitionists had backed him. That was the flagrant, the frightful, the unforgivable. Everywhere, in each excited group, furious voices rose.

Faunt and Brett during the evening became separated from Clayton, so when the two older men came back to their rooms they sat in talk for an hour or so. “I'll probably not sleep anyway, till Clayton comes in,” Brett explained.

“That's a fine son of yours, Brett.”

“Well, Cinda and I are almighty proud of him, don't hesitate to admit it. In fact, we're proud of all our children.” He added: “Clayton's done a lot of living in his twenty-three years, Faunt; known all
the nobler emotions—except sorrow.” His tone softened on the word.

Faunt nodded, reading the other's thought. “Yes, I'd loved and lost a wife and a baby at his age.” His eyes were serene. “I've lived pretty well inside myself, since; but I don't think I ever did have Clay's interest in—other people. Friends, family, yes; but outside the close immediate circle of my world, people could do as they liked for all of me.” He met Brett's glance. “There's a wonderfully comforting and satisfactory peace in solitude, Brett; in living close to the earth, your daily intimates the fields and forests, the trees, the blossoms in your garden, fresh ones opening to greet you at every dawning, the birds that seem to know you, calling a musical ‘God bless you' as you pass. But I begin to wonder if it isn't a selfish life. I wonder if to live so isn't to dodge your responsibilities to—well, to the human race of which you are a part.”

“Except in stormy times, a man is free to do the thing that most contents him.”

“I don't come close to men—or to women.” Faunt, in an unaccustomed self-searching, was thinking aloud. “Oh, we have a mannered intimacy; we smile, we say good morning or good evening; we exchange what might be called opinions. But I'm careful not to challenge the opinions of others—or to intrude any possibly disturbing opinions of my own. I sometimes feel—especially when I'm with adults—like an actor, playing the part expected of him. I'm more at ease with children.”

“Not many men are.”

“Perhaps they're abashed at discovering in children something they themselves have lost. Children have so many gifts. They're able in fancy to create for themselves in a moment a world complete and satisfying.”

“That's true. Our children as babies were forever drawing pictures, telling each other stories, making poetry. But they got over it.”

“They do, yes. Why, Brett? Do we somehow stifle them, smother all those powers, reduce them to futility? I suppose my closest friend is a child, Judge Tudor's daughter, Anne. Their place runs with Belle Vue on the west, you know. She and I have pleasant hours together, meeting casually when I ride that way, talking nonsense ever so seriously—or speaking of serious things lightly, as though to pretend we're
not serious.” He added: “But she's growing up. I think she's fourteen now, almost a young lady, so we're not so comfortable together, not such good companions as we were two or three years ago. Why do children change?”

“Oh, we all change. Either from inside ourselves or from outside. We grow—or shrink. Or something happens to change us, some event, some force outside ourselves.”

So they came back to the thought foremost in their minds. “This present event, for instance? It means changes, Brett.”

Brett shook his head. “It's just a piece of outlawry, to be handled like any other outrage done by violent and lawless men.”

Faunt was not so sure. “You're a man of business. Your instinct is to smooth over everything which disturbs the surface composure of the world.”

“Possibly. Certainly after this, my South Carolina neighbors will be waving the bloody flag.”

Faunt nodded. “I too felt at first just plain rage—till I realized that my anger was rooted in fear. As I said yesterday at Great Oak, this fear of a slave revolt lies somewhere deep in all of us in the South. I suppose basically it rests on an unadmitted sense of guilt. No man can honestly defend slavery—except perhaps upon the selfish ground that it shows a profit. In our hearts we know this; so we feel guilty, and so we fear the blacks, and so we are angry at anyone who reminds us of that fear.”

Brett hesitated. “In England I was sometimes put in the position of defending slavery. Of course I was able to remind my English friends of conditions in England and Ireland, quoting their own authorities; the
North British Review
, Sir James Clarke, Douglas Jerrold. I could remind them of women and little girls in their coal mines, chained to the cars they dragged through those underground corridors; girl children put to such work at eight or nine years old, carrying coal up ladders on their backs, working twelve hours on end, day and night; no education, no religion. And the metal workers in Birmingham and Sheffield, children there too, whipped to their tasks. Children as young as seven set to lace making for as much as fourteen hours a day, living in terrible sinks and cellars, starving. Ireland's worst of all, of course. But reminding the British that their white wage slaves were treated
worse than our negroes neither convinced them nor satisfied me. Yes, I know that sense of guilt, and even a little of that fear.” He spoke reluctantly. “We're so quick to boast, and threaten, and utter loud defiances. Probably the noisiest among us are the most afraid.”

They were still deep in talk together when Clayton presently returned. He had gone with young Jennings Wise to the Marshall Theatre to see Maggie Mitchell. “She's charming,” he told them. “The whole town's wild about her. We were too late for the first piece—
Milly, the Maid with the Milking Pail—but Beauty and the Beast
is what we went to see. It's a sort of fairy spectacle, and Miss Mitchell sings beautifully. Then afterward we went to the Powhatan Hotel. The actors live there, some of them. Jennings Wise knows them all, and two or three of them were with us. It was a mighty interesting evening for me.” He was full of talk, and Faunt saw with affectionate amusement the bright excitement in the younger man, stimulated by this new experience.

Next morning Brett had business with Mr. Haxall at the Farmers' Bank, and Clayton proposed to Faunt that they climb to the roof of the Capitol. “I always do, when I'm in Richmond,” he explained. “Jenny and I came here on our honeymoon, and we went there two or three times.”

Faunt agreed, glad to escape for a while from the excited talk in the streets. He found that the vantage to which Clayton led him offered an outlook far across the rolling country, with the river a silver thread winding through meadowland and forests. The city itself was spread below them, and Clayton like a proud proprietor pointed out this landmark and that: the scattering houses of Manchester across the river, Belle Isle, the waterworks dam, the slate roofs of Tredegar Iron Works under a black smoke pall. “It's mighty beautiful, isn't it, Uncle Faunt?” His eyes were shining.

“Everything but the city itself,” Faunt agreed. “The world's a beautiful place, Clayton, except where men have herded together and produced their special ugliness.”

The younger man laughed. “We'll never agree on that, sir. People interest me. I like them, whatever they do.”

Clayton and Brett delayed a few days their departure for the Plains; and after they were gone Faunt stayed on, listening to the talk he
heard. John Brown's plans had been elaborate: his store of arms was found and seized; it was said he had written out a constitution for the political community he expected to organize; he had a supply of commissions in blank to be issued to the officers of the armed force he hoped to raise among the Negroes. The
Dispatch
in an editorial Thursday morning said of the Northern abolitionists: “They have, no doubt, their agents in every Southern state, and if this lesson at Harper's Ferry is lost upon the South it cannot say in the future that it was not forewarned.” It called upon “the reflecting men of the North” to “deplore such calamities and to exert their best energies in preventing their recurrence.” The editorial seemed to Faunt surprisingly temperate; certainly it did not mirror the angry vehemence of the utterances he heard on every hand, where each new rumor provoked new rage. He met Redford Streean in Capitol Square and found him afire with the most recent report.

“There's an abolitionist plot started to attack the jail and free the rascals,” Streean declared. “Word came from Harrisburg last night.” Tilda's husband was sweating with excitement, his voice harsh. “By the Almighty, we'll know how to meet that! Unless we act, they'll set the red cock crowing all across the South!” Faunt wondered whether Streean believed his own words. “Our wives, our children helpless on lonely plantations everywhere; and the North wants to turn the blacks loose on us. Afraid to fight us themselves, they'll rouse the niggers, arm them against us. But we'll crush the egg before it hatches!”

Others, attracted by his excited tones, had paused to listen; and Faunt drew clear of the crowd, yet stayed to hear their talk. At once —and he guessed that everywhere, in many another group, the same seed began to root itself—the obvious counter measure was proposed. A rescue? Why then, act before that rescue could be attempted! A few determined men, a few lengths of stout rope, a convenient tree!

Faunt thought what they threatened was worse than what had happened. This John Brown and his band, they in themselves were nothing. Even in the North, he was sure, responsible opinion would condemn them. But to answer lawless violence with lawless violence could only provoke new violence in turn; like ripples from a chance-tossed pebble, death would be spread in all directions. Redford
Streean, talking to these men here, was dangerous; such men as he were dangerous everywhere, as dangerous as poor, crazy, blood-drunk John Brown himself.

He moved down toward the Exchange, threading his way past other groups like this which had gathered around Redford Streean; and as he approached the hotel he saw a larger crowd collected and heard a man's voice declaiming words at once familiar.

He paused to listen, and Jennings Wise greeted him and made way so that Faunt saw the speaker, a darkly handsome little man in a fur-trimmed overcoat—for the day was chill—which seemed too big for him. But Faunt forgot this, caught by the magnetic quality of the other's voice and the extraordinary way in which, by simply changing his tone, he became another speaker.