House Divided (98 page)

From a trot to a rack, from a rack to a lope; hurry, my friend! Hurry to leave them far behind before your heart breaks. Oh, you left a hurt back there—but that hurt will heal. This hurt in him—this was past healing. With cruel jests he had thrown something long dear to him aside forever. But if Cinda were right, then perhaps what he did was well done. He nodded, grateful for one tally on the credit side, and rode on to the wars.

T
RAV'S Christmas at home brought him no content. When in Christmas at home brought him no content. When in October he departed to rejoin the army, Enid had seemed happy in their new home, and of course he wanted her to be happy; but beyond insisting that they present to the world a surface concord, he wanted nothing else from her. That on this Christmas leave she appeared to take pleasure in discrediting him to Cinda and the others did not surprise him; but sometimes when they were alone she seemed to wish to provoke him beyond endurance. She told him Captain Pew and Darrell were often at the house.

“But of course Dolly's always with them, and usually Tilda. I know you wouldn't want me to get myself talked about.”

“I know you won't.”

“Captain Pew has no eyes for anyone but Dolly, though to be sure he does say gallant things, just to be polite. And Darrell's so amusing. I know you don't mind.” He did not answer, feeling her eyes upon him. “If you do, I won't let them come again.”

“No, I don't mind.”

“I certainly can't imagine your being jealous.”

“I'm not.”

“They're really the only intimate friends I have, outside of your family. And of course Vesta and Cinda have their own friends.” He had an uncomfortable feeling that something was expected of him, but he did not know what it was.

In talk with Lucy, he might forget Enid till he felt the thrust of her eyes and looked across the room to where she sat watching them. She contrived to make him feel guilty because he enjoyed Lucy's company.
If he tried to include Enid in their conversation, asking her opinion on this point or that, she smiled patiently and said: “Really, I'm sure you and Lucy know best. I don't want to interfere.”

Even Lucy resented her attitude. “Oh Mama, what do you act that way for?” Once she cried: “Mama, what's the matter with you, moping all the time when Papa's home? You have fun enough with Cousin Darrell and Captain Pew.”

Enid protested, too humbly: “Lucy, don't be silly! You mustn't ever speak of such men in the same breath with your father, dear!”

Trav sometimes thought Lucy tried in her childish way to make up to him for Enid's manner, and he loved her for it. They drew close; but between him and Peter there was a barrier hard to define. The boy was seldom at home, disappearing early, coming home late; and to Trav's questions he gave evasive answers. Yes, he sometimes still drilled the boys in Butchertown, but that wasn't much fun in winter. Oh yes, they had snow fights sometimes, when there was any snow. Oh, they didn't do much of anything, just sort of fooled around. Jim Pedersen had a cave all fixed up with a stove made out of old iron, dug into the side hill above the creek, and that was fun. No, probably Trav had better not go there to see it. Jim didn't want too many people knowing where it was.

Trav thought he recognized the signs. To this war, boys, and boys grown up to be men, had at first reacted with an equal martial ardor; but in most cases that soon gave way to an easy liberty and license. For a hungry soldier to accept the gift of a good dinner, freely proffered, was one thing; but the next step was to ask for it, the next to forage for it, the next to steal it. No hen roost or pig pen or orchard or corn field anywhere near an army encampment was safe from marauders; and from stealing food to stealing other things was a short and easy step. Last summer in northern Virginia, by the testimony of Virginians themselves, Southern soldiers had done more damage than the Yankees. Fences were torn down, and doors and even walls were ripped off outhouses and farm buildings to be used as firewood, and gardens were not only robbed but trampled heedlessly. Not a fortnight ago a group of citizens of Fredericksburg had come to Longstreet's headquarters to complain that Confederate soldiers were wandering through the half-ruined town, stealing from abandoned houses
everything they could carry away; and Trav himself had been sent to post guards in the town. Thieving soldiers caught and convicted were forever facing court-martial, but their punishments were usually more ludicrous than painful: to ride a mule facing backward with a placard announcing their offense hung around their neck; to stand for hours a day, similarly labelled, on a barrel in the busiest part of camp; to forfeit their meager and now almost worthless pay.

Peter's evasions made Trav sure that the boy was ashamed of some of the things he did, but Trav knew the futility of empty chiding. He tried remembering or inventing youthful peccadilloes of his own and relating them; till Peter laughed and forgot to be afraid and told Trav enough to confirm his conjecture. Trav was careful to take these confessions lightly, to put his reprobations rather as friendly advice than as reproofs.

But Enid might, if she would, help keep Peter in hand. He risked a mild suggestion that it was too bad for Peter to roam the town like a stray colt.

“Why, I do what I can, Trav,” she said. “But a boy needs a father.”

She eluded him and baffled him and made his days wretched. It was a relief to come back to headquarters at Hamilton's Crossing, where the army lay in winter quarters along the Mine Road on the southward slope of the hills.

 

When General Longstreet returned from Lynchburg, Trav saw that these few days at home had been a tonic for the big man. Mrs. Longstreet was well, he said; and Garland's voice was changing. The General chuckled fondly. “Funny to hear him crack and squeak! He's a fine boy! Mighty good to his mother. Louisa says he's her beau. He's taller than she is now, of course; and she doesn't seem much older than he.” He added: “Louisa's coming for a visit, presently, if things seem quiet here.”

Trav shared the other's pleasure in this prospect, for the winter days were weary ones, snow and bitter cold and dreary rain. There was rain the day Fitz Lee's brigade of cavalry paraded in review; rain so hard that Lee and Longstreet and Stuart and their staffs were well drenched, and a man could not see fifty yards through the downpour. Trav met Burr afterward and Burr was furious. “Up before daylight
and march fifteen miles and then march back again for a damned show no one could see, and not worth seeing. But General Stuart's vanity had to be fed somehow, I suppose!”

Trav said appeasingly: “Take away General Stuart's vanity and he wouldn't be the great leader he is, Burr.”

Burr was too wet and tired and angry to be reasonable. “Let him have a one-man parade all by himself, then! The rest of us don't enjoy showing off in the rain.”

Ten days later Mrs. Longstreet came for that promised visit. She stayed at Forest Hill, the Hamilton place. John Marye, whose own Brampton stood on that hill above Fredericksburg against which in December Burnside had thrown his men in bloody, vain assaults, had married Jane Hamilton; and since the battle they lived at Forest Hill, and Mrs. Maria Page was usually there with them. The house was a quarter of a mile south of Mine Road, a little more than a mile from headquarters at the Crossing; so Longstreet was able to ride over every evening, to spend the night there and return next morning. He took Trav with him for Sunday dinner. The house was set on a bold southward-facing shoulder of the ridge that ran between Mine Road and the river, with a fine outlook across the valley white now with winter snows. Trav found Mrs. Longstreet even more charming than in the past; there was a gentleness in her which grief had warmed and nurtured. Her devotion to the General and his to her were manifest; and Trav thought that the year-old scars of that triple tragedy when their three children died within a week began at last to heal.

She said Lynchburg was full of refugees, and she told them laughingly of an incident in Mr. Kimble's church. “He announced from the pulpit one Sunday that the congregation didn't like refugees crowding into their pews, and asked all the strangers in church to take seats up in the gallery. They did, and then he read off the hymn, and the last two lines of the first stanza were:

“That made everyone laugh, and since then the wardens always try to seat refugees with the congregation, but they prefer the seats prepared above!”

After she was gone back to Lynchburg, while they waited to see what General Burnside would attempt, some of Longstreet's old joviality returned. There was again an occasional poker game at headquarters, and someone organized amateur theatricals. The army itself was in a mood for frolicking. When snow fell, mock battles were fought; and regiments that faced enemy fire unflinchingly, dodged and faltered under the white bombardment of flying missiles. Longstreet, watching one of these affrays, spoke of this.

“But it's natural enough, Currain. You can see a snowball. If bullets were visible, no regiment could ever be brought to charge.”

Trav sometimes felt his heart warm with pride in these ragged, men who were the army. He had seen Richmond full of “bombproofs,” young men who by influence or by purchase had secured some easy detail and an exemption from the conscription, and who endured no hardship except contemptuous glances. Here in winter quarters the few officers and men who had means could achieve a minimum of comfort; but they were few among the many. The soldiers huddled in their huts, two might share a single blanket, and in that snow battle he had seen many who were barefoot, with neither socks nor shoes. Their rations were plain corn bread and meat, but the meat was tough and stringy and sometimes it had begun to rot, and corn bread became deadly monotonous, and there was frequently not enough in the daily ration to satisfy a man. Except for the North Carolina regiments, most of the soldiers were inadequately clad. Body lice were a universal affliction from which not even officers could keep themselves free. Yet these hungry, cold, dirty, miserable men were ready at the least pretext for a jest or a frolic—or for a battle and wounds and death. Trav had learned at Chimneys to like and to respect the simple men who were his neighbors there; now that feeling grew stronger, like an enriching flood; filling him with love and faith. Men of the class of which he was a part had always distrusted the poor whites and even the small farmers, opposing any political change which gave their votes new weight. Jefferson Davis had been elected provisional and then permanent President of the Confederacy not by the vote of the people but by the vote of the states, each state casting one vote. The people were not trusted to make any important decision at the polls. Trav knew all the arguments in support of this point of view. Let all the people
vote? Why, that was ridiculous! Half of them were poor whites who could neither read nor write. Two-thirds of them did not own any slaves at all. No one except ignorant demagogues—like Lincoln, for instance—wanted to give such men any voice in affairs. Was it not obvious that with the extension of the suffrage, the demagogue replaced the statesman in public office? No gentleman would demean himself by pandering to an illiterate and unthinking majority; so the stature of men in public office must steadily decline. Even in Virginia, the good old days when none but gentlemen could aspire to political preferment were ended; and any nobody or the son of a nobody might be elected Governor, or sent to Congress. The state, yes and the whole South, was sinking into a slough of democracy. Trav had heard the phrase often enough. Governor Letcher was the son of a butcher; down in Georgia Governor Brown was a cracker from the red hills; in Mississippi Governor Pettus had made his office as common as the public rooms in a tavern. To be a successful politician one need only learn how to befool the ignorant; then the voters were easily led, as a blindfolded horse can be led from a burning stable. The nimble tongue was the key to victory. An unthinking audience forgot the speaker's matter in his manner, cared less for what he said than for the way he said it. To let ignorant men vote was to deliver power into the hands of the unscrupulous. The plain man was not fit for the suffrage. Trav had heard that assertion, in a thousand forms, a thousand times.

Yet watching these plain men who made up the Army of Northern Virginia while their betters skulked in safe details at home, seeing them every day through the weeks after Fredericksburg when no suffering could long subdue their high spirits or dim their silent valor, Trav thought they wore a certain grandeur. Lincoln was right! If the meanest men were capable of these greatnesses, then they were capable of having sound opinions, and of expressing them at the polls.

Longstreet, he found, agreed with him. “After all,” the General reminded Trav, “that's the theory behind the old Union: the idea that the majority is entitled to rule. The Confederacy doesn't accept it. We don't admit that because the North outnumbers the South it has a right to decide what the South shall do. When we seceded, we repudiated the rule of the majority and drew our swords. It's as though
we said: ‘There are more of you, to be sure; but we're the better men.' ”

“Suppose we lose this war?”

For a moment the other's eyes were shadowed. Then he said: “Why, we've appealed to the God of Battles. If He decides against us, we should accept that decision.”

 

During this interval of idleness Trav listened to long talk among his fellows on the staff about the lessons learned during the summer's campaign. For one basic weakness in the Southern soldier there was no remedy. He would follow a gallant leader anywhere, but he must be led, not sent. For a commander who failed to meet this requirement, the men had a scornful phrase. “Swap him for a brush pile, and set him on fire.” When a regiment faltered at Blackburn's Ford in the first major skirmish of the war, someone asked the men derisively: “Why did you run? Why didn't you hide behind the trees?” A soldier retorted: “There weren't enough trees for the officers.”

Yes, these men must be led. But the consequence of that fact was that too many good officers were killed, or so badly wounded that their services were lost forever; and the South had not enough first-rate officers to waste them needlessly. Already, even among the generals, the list of losses was a long one. Maxcy Gregg and Tom Cobb had died a month ago at Fredericksburg, and there had been many others. Suppose Longstreet were killed, or Jackson, or even General Lee. Lee had risked his life at Fredericksburg, making a dangerous reconnaissance within easy range of the Yankee lines.