House Divided (38 page)

Mrs. Currain left them to take her rest, and Vesta and Enid went upstairs with her. Clayton came down and Cinda said: “Remember Clayton, Major? He was at your wedding too; but of course he was only eleven or twelve years old, and you were much too excited to notice him.”

His eyes twinkled. “I must confess that my attention that day was a little distracted.” Cinda had asked her questions; now he had questions of his own. He led Julian and Tony and Brett to tell him of the affair at Bethel. “That was a fine beginning,” he remarked when they were done, and turned to Faunt. “Your duty was elsewhere?”

“Yes, for a while at Fredericksburg, then Western Virginia, in General Wise's command.”

“I hear there are ten thousand Yankee troops there.”

“General Floyd so reported.” Faunt added quietly: “We've not seen them, but Union sentiment is pretty strong. General McClellan is the Union commander.”

“An able man. I know him of old.”

“There's been some talk that we'll march against Parkersburg,” Faunt told him. “But so far, I doubt we're strong enough. We get no volunteers, or almost none.”

Longstreet nodded. “We'll have a problem in Western Virginia. In fact, we'll have many problems, in many places.” His eyes were grave again.

“Few people in the South understand that,” Brett suggested. “We think of war as a simple matter of fighting, and we Southerners like to fight. But war is much more than that.” Cinda wished they would talk of more cheerful things. “It's food and horses and wagons and railroads and money. Even in victory, we'll be bankrupt when this is over.”

Cinda, with a laughing glance at Brett, explained: “Mr. Dewain eats and sleeps and dreams money, Major.” But Longstreet waited in thoughtful attention and Brett went on:

“Our finances are unsound. The Montgomery Constitution limits the taxing power, and there isn't twenty-five million in hard money in the whole Confederacy. We're borrowing, and printing money; but there'll be a limit to that.”

“Money matters are beyond me,” Longstreet admitted; and Cinda, fighting to make them smile, exclaimed:

“Me too! As long as there's plenty of money to spend, I don't see what difference it makes!”

Brett would not be turned aside. “The point is, we're unready for this war. We were led into it by the politicians in the newly rich Gulf States, and tricked into it by Lincoln. He's a clever politician, Major. He knew the North wouldn't fight unless we provoked them—so he teased us with lies and false promises till we took Sumter, and that raised the North against us.”

“Clever people are always too clever for their own good in the end,” Cinda declared. “He'll live to be sorry!”

Longstreet, watching Brett, said in a tentative tone: “We had the right to secede.”

Brett colored almost angrily. “The right, yes; but sometimes it's folly to be right. I'd like to hear less talk of our rights and more of our interests; yes, and of our duties.”

“Yet I see you are in uniform?” the other said in a quizzing tone.

“Oh, yes, I'm a Virginian. I believed in the Union, but when Virginia seceded—so did I.”

Major Longstreet assented. “Most of us, in the end, stand with our own people.” He hesitated, seemed for a moment lost in thought. “There's much to be done, much to be done,” he said, more to himself than to them. “We'll need a good leader and good soldiers; and it takes time to find the leaders and to make the soldiers.”

Cinda said: “Clayton's on General Beauregard's staff.”

“Ah?” Longstreet spoke directly to Clayton. “I expect his army stands in need of many things.”

Clayton hesitated. “Why, yes, but we're better off than we were two weeks ago. We were so short of weapons then that the General insisted no more troops be sent to him unless they could be armed. We're still short of weapons, and of powder and ball, and of food. The day the army gets a square meal is the exception.”

Trav had been so silent that Cinda had forgotten he was here, but now he said strongly: “It's not food that's scarce. We may lack uniforms and tents and blankets and guns and powder and shot, but there's plenty of food. The difficulty is to put it where it's needed. I've done some figuring, and I don't believe there are carts and wagons and horses and mules enough in Virginia to feed a real army, once it gets away from the railroads. A man can't live and fight on less than five pounds of food a day, and that means five thousand pounds a day for a regiment.”

Longstreet looked at him in quiet appraisal, and Cinda explained: “Trav loves adding and subtracting, Major. Figures are as sweet to him as a song.”

“But he calculates to some purpose,” Brett amended. “He arrived at Bethel with wagonloads of food for the men just after the fight was over.”

“So?” Longstreet smiled. “That was well done.” He added, speaking to Trav: “I like figures myself, Mr. Currain. As paymaster, figures were my province. We need men in the army who can add two and two. Have you thought you might be useful in some such capacity?”

“Yes, sir.” Trav colored faintly. “I'm going to call on the Quartermaster Monday.”

Longstreet hesitated; he seemed to think as he spoke. “I saw the Secretary today.” His lips twisted in a faint smile. “Mr. Walker has zeal enough; but I fear he thinks more of form than of substance. I thought I might be useful in the Paymaster's department; but he seemed to think they had no place for me. So I went to Mr. Davis.” Cinda thought his tone was sharpened by an angry memory; she wondered whether President Davis had offended him. “After a brief conversation, he decided to commission me brigadier. I'm to report to General Beauregard Monday. Mr. Currain,”—his eye was on Trav—“I'll need helpers, a staff. If you will come to Manassas with me, I'll find work for you.”

There was an instant's surprised silence, everyone looking at Trav; but he said at once, as though he had expected the suggestion: “Why—thank you, sir. I will.”

Cinda, listening, felt a deep astonishment. It was not like Trav to make quick decisions. Something, some intangible force, must have
passed between these two men, drawing them together. Then her surprise gave way to sadness; for now Trav too would go to war.

So it was done! They were all gone, all these men who were dearest to her; gone beyond her farthest reach, gone beyond anything except her prayers. It was true they might return; but suppose only their lifeless bodies came back to her! Sumter, Bethel, these had been almost bloodless victories; but there would be blood, the blood of her husband, of her sons, of her brothers, trickling in dark rivulets through the grass roots, spreading in the dust, diluted by the rains, dried to dark flakes by the summer sun.

Because of one man! Abraham Lincoln! At the thought, hatred filled her like a choking flood, hatred of that man like an ape, that son of the meanest squatter, that sly, crafty, lying man in Washington. If they died, these men of hers, then as surely as though he pulled the trigger that sped the bullet to their hearts, he would have killed each one!

July, 1861

 

 

E
NID, through the bright excitement of the wedding and the through the bright excitement of the wedding and the merrymaking that followed, knowing herself beautiful and admired, thought she had never been so happy. This was her first deep draught of the pleasant gaieties of which she had so often dreamed. In her early girlhood her mother, in order to appear to be as youthful as possible, kept her a child. Enid by captivating Trav took her revenge for that, but as Trav's wife she found herself condemned to an existence even narrower than as her mother's daughter. Trav was older than she by seventeen years; but also he was older than his years, slow and silent, with no gift for laughter and no keen zest for anything except the patient routine of the farmer. You could no more hurry him than you could hurry a grain of corn from germination to bearing. You could no more swerve him than you could retard the sluggish pendulum of the years. The pursuits that meant so much to him; to ride the place, to watch the people at their tasks, to pore over his records and by a study of the past anticipate the future—these meant nothing to her. In their first weeks she often kept him company on his daily rounds; but when he became engrossed in some problem of the land he was as likely as not to ride for an hour in absorbed silence, without seeming to hear her attempts at conversation. To persuade him to accept an invitation from th Pettigrews or the Shandons involved so much persistence that eventually she abandoned the effort. Those who might have been her friends, he preferred to avoid; those who were his, she scorned. Thus at Chimneys there were weeks on end when she saw no one but Trav and Mr. Fiddler and the children and the
servants; and the removal to Great Oak, from which she expected so much, proved proportionately disappointing. Mrs. Currain's friends were of Mrs. Currain's generation. Enid was welcomed into their circle; but in Williamsburg as in Richmond, a wife, no matter how young and how attractive, was expected to remember that she was no longer a youthful belle.

So it was wonderful now to share these hours when under the spell of Burr's happiness and Barbara's, everyone liked everyone. Enid even took care not to distress Cinda by a too open devotion to Faunt. This was not altogether for Cinda's sake. At Great Oak after Hetty's death, when he came at her request to bid her good night, she had asked him like a weary child to kiss her; and when he did so, she clung to him, no longer like a child, till hastily he freed himself. He left Great Oak without seeing her again, and she read in that a warning. When just before the wedding he appeared at Cinda's, her kiss was more than sisterly; but after that she paid an ostentatious devotion to Trav, as though to assure herself, and Faunt, how much she loved her husband. Actually it was her delight in Faunt's presence which moved her; she was like a girl for the first time in love who becomes suddenly demonstrative toward her brothers or her father. But Trav's awkward pleasure in her tenderness touched and amused her and gave her a reassuring sense of power. Her mother was right; it was easy to manage a man by being nice to him.

But she sometimes forgot this wisdom. The evening after the wedding when Major Longstreet's arrival set the men to boring talk of the war and of the future, she went upstairs with Mrs. Currain and Vesta; and she was abed and drowsily near sleep when Trav came to her.

“Where've you been, Honey?” she murmured.

“We were—talking!”

“What about?”

Trav hesitated. “Why—Major Longstreet's going to be a brigadier general, and he wants me to serve on his staff.”

“On his staff?” At first she did not understand. “What's that?”

“Oh, to help him with his work.”

“What sort of work?”

“Why, the war.”

She laughed in light amusement, rolling comfortably on her side. “Doesn't he realize you have a family to take care of?”

He said slowly: “Well, a lot of men with families have gone into the army.”

“Oh, men like Brett, and Clayton, yes! But you're no soldier! What did he imagine you could do?”

“Keep his men supplied with food.”

She laughed again. “What does he think you are, a store keeper?”

Trav began to remove his clothes. “I told him I'd do it; that is, as well as I can.”

For a moment she lay still; then in abrupt comprehension, swept by a cold wave of terror, she sat up straight in bed. “Trav Currain, you didn't!”

“Yes, I did.”

“But what about me?” Her voice rose. “What do you expect me to do? And your children? And your mother?”

“Well, you can help Mama take care of things at Great Oak.”

“At Great Oak? You mean to leave us alone there with nothing but niggers? Why, I'd be just frightened to death!”

“Brett and Tony and Julian will be at Yorktown, right handy. You'll be all right.”

“I'll not stay there alone! I can't! I won't!” Panic shook her tones.

“Why—I guess you'll have to, Enid,” he said. “We'll all have to do a lot of things we don't want to do, for a while.”

“I'm not going to do it! You must be crazy!” But she knew he could never be turned from any decision. “You'll just have to get a house for us here in Richmond. We'll move up here!”

“Mama wouldn't do that.”

“Oh, she wouldn't, wouldn't she?” Fear sharpened anger. “But I suppose I have no choice! You expect me to stay way off down there, just because she's a cranky, unreasonable, half-witted old woman.”

“You'll have to,” he repeated. “There's no other way to do!”

“I won't do it! I just won't; that's all!”

He did not speak, opposing to her that solid wall of silence which she knew so well, which she could never break. She flung at him insistences which he ignored, entreaties to which he did not reply. When he turned out the lamp and came to bed she persisted till despair at
her own helplessness brought her to tears, and he touched her shoulder in a fashion meant for comforting. But she cried: “Oh take your hands off me!” She let her sobs diminish to pathetic hiccoughings of grief, waiting hopefully for his word of yielding or of surrender.

But instead he began presently to snore, and new anger swept her. Very well! She would show him, somehow, that he could not treat her so. She lay wakeful for hours, planning vain revenges.

 

Next day was Sunday, and Major Longstreet came to dinner. Enid, because she hated him for taking Trav away, sought to charm him, asking him many questions about Mrs. Longstreet and about his family.

“You'll like Mrs. Longstreet,” he assured her. “She too is a beautiful woman.” Enid smiled with pleasure. “She was the daughter of the regiment at Jefferson Barracks and I was a young lieutenant. Colonel Garland thought I ought to win my spurs before proposing marriage, so I went off to Mexico and came home a brevet major.”

“After having a leg shattered at Chapultepec,” Brett remarked.

“Pshaw, that just gave me a long and pleasant relief from duty.” Longstreet was so amiable that Enid, though she had determined to dislike him, found it hard to do so. When they left the table, she found him by her side; and he said: “I hope you'll forgive my borrowing your husband.”

“Well, I was furious at first, Major; but if he's going off to war I'm glad he's going with you! Will you need him long?”

His eyes for a moment darkened. “Long? Yes. Yes, it will be a long business.”

“Really? Why, everyone seems to think we'll just march up ta Washington and take it as easily as we took Fort Sumter.”

“In war, nothing is easy.”

“Bethel was easy,” she insisted. “Only one of our boys killed, and hardly anyone even hurt. And we killed hundreds of Yankees!”

There was sadness in his tone. “We will be hurt,” he assured her. “Time will hurt us. Had we been ready to use our time three months ago, much might have been done; but we were not, and time is unforgiving. From now on, it will fight against us—to avenge itself for our failure to appreciate its usefulness.”

She understood him only far enough to be sure he thought the war would be long and presumably dangerous; and she bit her lip, her thoughts taking a new turn. Trav might he hurt; he might even be killed.

Trav might be killed! What then? What would become of her? She remembered those desperate years of her childhood, when after her father died her mother was left almost penniless, not much better than a beggar, subsisting on the hospitality of her friends. But Enid shook her head. That would not happen to her. Even if Trav died, the Currain fortune would still remain.

And of course Trav would not be killed! He and Longstreet were talking now, and she watched him as though he were a stranger; the set of his head on his short neck, the thinning hair on his temples, the heavy brows, the strong line of his jaw, the mass of his shoulders. Mass, that was the word for him. How strong he was, how mighty in his strength! He cut a crumb of tobacco and put it in his mouth. Unlike other users—Tony, Brett, Faunt—he never spat; the tobacco seemed to be absorbed, leaving not even its flavor on his breath. There was always a cleanness about him, a clean smell like wine to her. His face as he listened to Longstreet was blank as a stone. She knew that blankness, yet knew how when she wooed him his eyes could glow. “The rivers are our worst enemies,” Longstreet was saying. “They run the wrong way for us. They're highways leading deep into the South. The Mississippi cuts us in two, and the Tennessee and the Cumberland. The Rappahannock and the York and the James penetrate deep into our territory. The North will build ships, use our rivers.” Trav did not even nod. She thought his very passivity attested the force of life in him. It was impossible that such a man as this could be brought to death. No, Trav would not be killed! He was a rock no chisel could scar, no axe could notch! She found herself, as she watched him, trembling with remembered ardors. Her eyes suddenly flooded. She rose and slipped away, to wait for him to come to her.

When next day Trav sent her and the children with Mrs. Currain back to Great Oak, Brett and Tony and Julian on their way to Yorktown riding escort to the carriages, Enid was between gladness and sorrow. Trav would no longer be her nightly bedfellow; she need no longer live in perpetual and nagging fear that she would have another
baby. Yet she might not see him again for weeks, for months; if Major Longstreet was right, it might be years before he came home. It was even possible, since in war anything could happen, that he would be killed; and she thought if he were killed she too would die. In first loneliness she loved him to the point of ecstasy!