House Divided (35 page)

“Well, then! Oh, Tommy—” She rocked with helpless, relieved laughter. “You idiot, why didn't you say so long ago?”

“Well, I guess I would have, probably, if it wasn't for the war coming this way.”

“But, Tommy darling, that's all the more reason!”

He shook his head, spoke more surely. “No, Vesta. No, it's all the more reason for not—doing anything. You see, I've got to learn how to be a soldier. I couldn't be a good one if every time I went to shoot a Yankee I started thinking about you.”

“Couldn't you fight all the harder if you were fighting for me?”

He found fumbling words. “I'm not very good at saying what I mean, Vesta; but—well, it looks to me as if I was different, somehow. The other men talk about killing Yankees as if it wasn't going to bother them at all, and I guess a soldier has to be that way. They talk as if Yankees were like sheep-killing dogs, that just ought to be shot.
But the chances are a lot of Yankees are pretty fine young men.” She wished to interrupt, hotly to contradict, but now at last he was completely vocal, and she was caught and moved by something behind his words. “I mean, some are a bad lot, probably, but that's so everywhere. I keep thinking that in the North there must be a lot of boys like me, boys that just want to be—well, friends with folks. But they're getting ready to be soldiers, getting ready to be shot at, and to shoot at us. I've got to learn how to be that way too. But if I were married—to you, for instance—any time I set out to shoot a Yankee I'd be thinking: why, maybe he's got a wife at home that seems to him as nice and sweet as Vesta seems to me, and if I shoot him she'll cry awful.” He shook his head. “I couldn't shoot straight, feeling that way. I have to learn to forget all about people loving people, their wives and their babies and their mothers and all that. I have to learn to just go ahead and try to kill people as if they were so many hogs I was slaughtering, and forget about their being young men like me. That's what it is being a soldier. That's what I have to learn. I guess wars are bad things, just on account of that. I mean because they make boys and young men learn how to kill other boys and young men without ever feeling bad about it. It's wrong, Vesta, to teach anything like that.

“But I have to learn it. And it's going to take me a long time as it is. I couldn't ever do it if—if I was married to you, if you'd ever showed me how sweet it is to have someone love you. I couldn't do it, Vesta.” He was silent for a moment, said then helplessly: “Well, I guess I can't really tell you just what I do mean.”

She had been when he began impatient, almost angry: while he spoke, retorts had come into her mind—and remained unspoken. Now they were forgotten. Her throat was full of proud tears and she dared not try to speak. Instead she rose and came to him, and he looked at her humbly, and she took his face between her hands and kissed his lips, once lightly, then with a fierce long pressure.

Then she could speak. “I know what you mean, Tommy. I think you're the sweetest, finest man in the world.” She laughed, like a sob. “I'll promise, cross my heart, never to ask you again to marry me.” And in a proud tenderness: “But if you ever ask me, Tommy, I'll marry you as quick as scat!”

He was quiet now and strong: “I will ask you, one day, Vesta. I will ask you soon.”

She faced him, straight and proud. “I'll be ready, Tommy. Oh, I will be so ready, my dearest, darling man!”

When he left her she stood in the open door to watch him stride away; and she lay awake for hours in a brimming happiness, till all the sounds of the city hushed and she could hear the murmur of the river singing along the rapids not far distant. Next morning she went early to Cinda's room, eager to share her secret. “Mama, I asked Tommy to marry me,” she said, all in a breath, her face transfigured; but then she hesitated, suddenly knowing that she could not tell even her mother this beautiful and sacred thing. Was this a part of marriage, then; to share with one other, and with no one else at all, that which your two hearts knew? “We talked it over,” she finished calmly, “and decided to wait a while.”

Cinda smiled, beckoned her near, kissed her. “They don't come any finer than Tommy, do they, dear?”

“They certainly don't!”

“It wasn't hard to talk to him, was it, when the time came?”

“Why, it just seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. I mean—well, after we got started, we weren't embarrassed or anything. He's wonderful, Mama.”

Cinda nodded. “Sit down and have your coffee.” Someone knocked and she called: “Come in.” So Jenny joined them; and during the hour that followed they laughed together over little happy things. Vesta thought they all laughed so easily because these two somehow shared the happiness in her. I thought I loved Tommy before, she told herself; but that was nothing! I never really did till now!

She and Cinda went to Dr. Minnigerode's church that morning; and when they sang, Vesta heard her own voice as though it were a stranger's, rising strong and rich and true. Perhaps this too was one of love's miracles, this inner enrichment; or was it just her own imagination that told her she sang so well? No, for as they walked homeward Cinda spoke of it.

“You must be very happy, Vesta. I never heard you sing as beautifully as you did today.”

When Tommy departed, Vesta was proud to see him go, understanding now how Jenny could be strong in the certainty of Clayton's love. Cinda went for a few days at Great Oak, and Brett was learning his duties as a member of the Howitzers; so Vesta was alone, yet without being lonely, for Tommy was always in her thoughts and Burr, training at Ashland, often came home.

“Yet I might as well stay in camp,” he told Vesta, laughing at his own words. “Barbara's too busy getting ready for our wedding to bother with me, says I'm just in the way.” Vesta suspected some hurt bewilderment in him. “Of course, she has to handle her mother.”

“There, Honey, you leave Mrs. Pierce to Barbara!”

“Oh, of course.” He added: “Barbara has a mind of her own, all right. She knows how to get her own way.”

Vesta smiled. Most men failed to realize that their sweethearts would not always be sweetly submissive. Burr was clever even to suspect the truth about Barbara while he was still so desperately in love with her. Barbara was nice as she could be, of course; but in the long run she would make Burr toe the mark. There was no doubt of that.

“Never mind,” she said, to comfort him. “After all, it's just that she's getting ready to marry you.”

One day after Cinda's return she spoke of this conversation to her mother. “Burr really sounded so bewildered, Mama. I was awfully sorry for him.”

Cinda smiled faintly. “Barbara's a quiet little mouse, but she knows exactly what she wants.”

Vesta said in sudden understanding: “You have to be pretty careful to like the people your children are going to marry, don't you, Mama?”

“Of course. But thank heaven I do like Barbara.”

“You know, Mama, there are some people you just love from the beginning,” Vesta suggested. “Jenny, for instance. And there are others you like, but you never quite dare love them, for fear they don't love you.” She added: “I like Barbara too; but sometimes I'm a little scared of her.”

She and Cinda had through this month of June many hours together. Sometimes Jenny was with them, but not always. Without ever seeming to withdraw into herself, yet although they shared the
same roof she lived a life of her own. “It's as though she knew we liked to be together,” Vesta told Cinda once. “And wouldn't intrude.”

In the city about them each day brought changes, and some of them were disturbing. Richmond was the gateway through which troops from the South moved to Yorktown, or to Manassas; and it seemed to Vesta that there were so many they must prove irresistible. But her father, when she said this, did not easily agree.

“They make a fine show,” he admitted. “All the bright new uni- forms, and officers on high-tailed horses galloping everywhere; but we need more men, and we need weapons. A lot of the guns we have are so old-fashioned and worn out they're not safe to shoot. The trouble is, each state wants an army of its own. Governor Brown of Georgia shipped the best muskets from the Augusta arsenal to Savannah before he turned the arsenal over to the Confederacy, and he won't let Georgia regiments take those muskets outside the state. If we had all the regiments and all the weapons in the South today up here where the fighting is going to be, we could march right to Washington before the North gets ready for war. But Alabama's keeping most of her regiments at home, and so is Louisiana and so's Mississippi, and North Carolina thinks she has to defend her coast, and South Carolina and Georgia are just as bad.”

Vesta remembered what Tommy had told her. “Some of the South Carolina boys just refused to come, in Colonel Gregg's regiment.” She added: “But I'm not sure there aren't too many soldiers in Richmond as it is. Those terrible Zouaves you and Mama saw on the train, for instance. Dolly and I went into Pizzini's for strawberries yesterday, and two of them had a fight right outside the door, slashing at each other with knives and spattering blood halfway across Broad Street. We were terrified!”

“They wouldn't annoy young ladies, you know.”

“Well, I think they fought over one. I saw them talking to her just before they started. She was a horrible-looking creature, too!” She saw his troubled eyes and added quickly: “Oh, we had escorts, Papa; two friends of Dolly's. We weren't afraid, really.”

He smiled. “Richmond's always been a quiet little city. Captain Wilkinson told me once he hadn't had to arrest a white man in four or five years on night police. The watchmen had to lock up a noisy
negro in the cage now and then; but the old building was so near collapsing that anyone could break out who wanted to. But of course, Vesta, there are twice as many people here as we used to have, and all of them are excited and full of fight. I don't think I'd go anywhere alone if I were you.”

“Heavens, Papa, of course not!” She laughed. “But with all the soldiers and all the excitement, I wish somebody'd hurry up and do something!”

It seemed to her in fact that anything would be better than this living at fever pitch, the streets forever full of marching soldiers and pretty girls, even the churches given over to groups of ladies sewing and chattering like so many magpies while their needles flew, everyone so sure that at any moment something wonderful would surely happen, everyone expecting each new dawn would bring confusion and disaster to the cowardly, villainous, ridiculous Yankees!

“It scares me, just to listen to them, Mama,” Vesta confessed. “Every girl I see is just as silly as Dolly, just perfectly idiotic about how brave and handsome and graceful our men are, and how wonderful war is! Dolly's not the only one who's having the time of her life, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” Cinda assented. “I've seen women my age, old enough to know better, just talk themselves black in the face.” She smiled a little. “I sometimes think that except you and me and Jenny, all the other women in the world are perfect fools.”

Each day was packed full of high moments when the pulse beat hard. Drills and parades were tremendously exhilarating for a while, but even Dolly said one day: “After all, when you've seen one of them, you've seen them all!” Then, when June was a third gone, Richmond had the fine news from Bethel Church, and exulted in that victory. Since only one Southern soldier was reported killed, Vesta had no concern for her father or Julian, or for Tony; so there were no fears to mar her delight and Cinda's in the first report—five thousand Yankees put to flight by a thousand Southern soldiers, hundreds of Yankees slain. Cinda said in a great relief:

“Well there, it was time we did something! I was sick and tired of hearing about Yankees in Alexandria, and the James River blockaded, and Colonel Porterfield getting chased all over Northwestern Virginia. The Yankee newspapers have been blowing their big bazoo about
capturing Richmond in thirty days! Maybe now they won't talk so big!”

Dispatches from Colonel Magruder and Colonel Hill emphasized the magnitude of this first success. The Richmond papers called Bethel Church the most remarkable victory in the history of warfare, and since it had been won by her father's Howitzers and by the North Carolina regiment in which Julian and Tony served, it was—as Vesta laughingly declared—strictly a Currain triumph!

But for them all, the tale was incomplete till after a few days Brett and Julian appeared. From them, with Brett the narrator and Julian forever interrupting, they heard the story.

“We'd been at Bethel since Friday,” Brett explained. “We slept in the church. The New York Zouaves had written a lot of abuse on the walls. ‘Death to Rebels' and—well, some things not to be repeated. And—–”

Julian broke in. “They'd drawn a picture of a gallows and a man hanging on it, right behind the pulpit, and it said ‘The Doom of Traitors' under it.”

Vesta exclaimed in angry protest at this sacrilege, and Brett went on: “Parson Adams preached to us on Sunday. He was the Baptist minister in Hampton till the Federals occupied the town. A lot of Hampton people are Unionists, but he isn't, and the Yankees wouldn't let him stay there to take care of his congregation, threatened to put him in prison. So he came to us. We couldn't all get into the church, so he stood up in his buggy and preached out of doors.” Brett hesitated. “I never saw a religious service anywhere that was so impressive.” Vesta nodded understandingly, and he went on: “We'd been building earthworks all the time. We only had a few shovels and pickaxes, but we kept them busy. Lucky we did, too; because plenty of cannon balls and bullets hit those earthworks during the fight without doing any harm.”