The Wide House

by Taylor Caldwell

  In March, 1861, the seceded States formed their own union—the Confederacy.

  The South, intoxicated with its brilliant successes, with its conviction that it had done only that which was permitted to it by the Constitution, with its aristocratic and contemptuous anger against the hard-fisted Yankees, who had “brought this catastrophe upon America,” with the gallantry and simple dignity of its new President, retired into itself amid a mass of flags and into a kind of happy delirium and joyous resolution. No longer would it be the recipient of insults and threats from the Yankee industrialists, who saw the inevitable exodus of industry into the Southern regions of slave labor. No longer would the South be belabored by accusations of “barbarism and heathenish practices.” Only a few Southern gentlemen heard the murmurs of a hungry and rapacious Europe, and the stir in the capitals of the Continent three thousand miles away.

  “As the years pass,” said a prominent Southern nobleman, “the paths of the North and South must increasingly diverge. The North, which will become ever more largely polyglot and alien, will be to us a foreign nation, no longer one with us in our Anglo-Saxon Protestant race, our aristocratic British traditions. It is for the sake of our race, our religion, our traditions, that we must part company with the North.”

  The air of the whole country was electric with anger, dismay, fear, despair and treason. But no one yet believed that war would come.

  Mr. Lincoln, himself, said there was no crisis but an artificial one, that nothing was really wrong, that nobody would be hurt. He pleaded with the people to “keep cool.” And alone, in his great bedroom in the White House, he lay sleepless on his pillows and listened to the great rolling wheels churning down from the skies upon his country.

  Grandeville received all the news with a certain dull apathy and indifference which was to mark all its history. A number of men were frightfully disturbed and afraid. But the mass of the people, and even the surrounding farmers, were inert. They did not believe in the possibilities of war. Or they did not care. The issues involved were nothing to the slum-dwellers and the laborers. They gaped at the newspapers, and forgot them. Even when it was rumored that Mr. Lincoln, in person, was to visit Grandeville during his tour of Albany, Poughkeepsie, Trenton, New York, Philadelphia and Harrisburg, few outside of “elegant society” were interested. They knew, vaguely, that someone, somewhere, was making “an awful fuss” about “niggers,” but as they had rarely seen a negro, and knew nothing of slavery except their particular brand in Grandeville and their memories of another brand in Europe, the issue was to them as remote as the moon. Less than five hundred people in Grandeville had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Less than five hundred talked in parlors and taverns of the coming terror. Less than eight thousand had even voted in the last elections. Less than one third of the people even knew the name of the President of the United States. Sunken in a kind of peasant lethargy, which knew nothing but heavy and unremitting toil and occasional mad drunkenness and constant breeding, they were as absorbed in their minute little affairs and lightless meager pleasures and crushing work as the very farm animals on the land beyond the city. Nor was this sunken attitude conspicuous among the “foreigners only.” The Yankee farmers, laborers, dock workers and grain loaders showed little if any passionate concern with the state of the Nation. If a smarter neighbor spoke of it, his words were received with sluggish resentment or indifference.

  The fact that if war came thousands of them would be compelled to engage in it personally had not yet penetrated their insular hearts, nor caused their slow pulses to beat faster.

  Some few of these workers, however, did speak of it with concern and fear, and understanding. And these few were the Germans who had fled Germany in 1848, in loathing and disgust. Accustomed to alarms and calamities, to threat and insecurity, to despair and revolt, they smelled the first breath and heard the faint sounds of the coming frightfulness. It was ironical, then, that the children of these lovers of freedom were unconcerned with the approaching struggle, or, if they had opinions at all, these opinions were spiteful, sullen, resentful or traitorous. German fathers, remembering Bismarck, remembering a torn and gasping Germany, were helplessly appalled at the realization that their sons felt no passion for free America, though nurtured in America, and fed with the fruits of their parents’ resolution and indomitable faith in the rights of man.

  “Ah,” said the priest, shaking his head sadly, “I am afraid that amongst us there will always be those who hate goodness and kindness and freedom, and yearn only for cruelty and madness and murder. What shall we do with them? There is something terrible for America in this thought, I’m thinking.”

  In the South was jubilation, resolution, courage, and fire, and a passionate patriotism. In many large cities of the North was only resentment, listlessness, stupid ignorance, unawareness and cold disinterest. The shopkeepers, however, the industrialists, the merchants, and others whose profits depended upon peace and commerce, were alarmed. They hated the threat of war; they feared it. They muttered angrily among themselves, and cursed Lincoln, cursed the abolitionists, cursed the mad disturbers of a peace that had steadily filled their purses. While patriotism ran like a bright flame through the cities of the South, the cities of the North sat in dark and lumpish surliness.

  Mr. Lincoln knew of this. He saw the antagonistic faces that surrounded him during his tour of the Northern cities. He saw the thick, outthrust lips of resentment, the blank stare of bewilderment, the suspicion in empty or narrowed eyes. How was it possible for him to reach the hearts of this sullen people, to make them realize that the fate of America rested in them, and the hope of all the future? His heart sank deeply into despair. This people had no vision, no passion for justice, no patriotism, no pride, no courage, and no dream. It had only its rapacity. Rapacity, then, was the entrance to their stony souls. Let them once realize that if the South were victorious, their growing industrial empire might very well march South into cheap slave-regions, and their metallic fury might be aroused as it would never be aroused by the sight of a flag or the blare of a trumpet. A threat to a Yankee s purse would be heeded intently; inexorable economics spoke in a language he could understand.

  It was not for some months that Lincoln realized that a strange and horrible phenomenon was beginning to take form in the North, and when he realized this he was aghast. Racial and religious hatreds had, so far, never stained the history of the Republic. Now, in the North, he saw the cobra heads of these hatreds lifting from the dank marshes of men’s souls. At first he was incredulous. Who, among these many races, these diverse religions, had conjured up the cobras, had set their deadly heads to swaying? Who was the traitor? What was his design? Destruction threatened the Republic; she would need every hand, every firm heart, every stern voice, if she were to survive. And somewhere, in the black and steaming pits of men’s spirits, a hideous tongue was whispering, a tongue that urged disunity, strife, hatred, violence and cruelty in the very face of the storm which was darkening over the nation. What was this traitor’s design? What did he wish to accomplish? Did he not understand that such disunity would threaten the existence of America? Or was it possible that he knew only too well?

  It came to Mr. Lincoln, slowly but implacably, that the traitor knew only too well. A nation in the throes of war could readily lose the war if diverted by regional hatreds and regional violences. That was the plan, then. Somewhere, in the Northern cities, there lived men who hated their country, who wished to see America die. And so it was that they plotted to disperse her strength, to confuse her, to weaken her with regional strifes, so that she would be destroyed. Destroyed by the South? No. For the South, inevitably, would suffer from this frightful disease, and go down to death with her Northern and alienated sister. It was against all America, then, that the plot was formed, against Southerner and Northerner alike.

  Mr. Lincoln saw the shadow of the specter. He could smell its effluvia. But it vanished into shadows when he reached out his enraged and resolute
hands to grasp it. Its lethal whisper was everywhere, but that whisper died into silence when a searcher approached. Its red eyes leered from every alley, from every street, from every corner, and even from the shade of elms on distant farmlands. But at the seeking stare of the angry hunter, the eyes closed and were gone, to reappear elsewhere.

  Tolerance for the alien in race and creed was, Mr. Lincoln knew, most active in a homogeneous nation. From the homogeneous soil of England had sprung the Magna Charta, the Parliament, the belief in the rights of all men. It was the heterogeneous nation which was constantly in deadly danger, because of its inner and insulated groups who hated all other groups. The North was heterogeneous. It had long been the belief of romanticists that should diverse men live together, they would understand that all men are one, and differ radically in no way. This belief was shattered, in the Northern cities. The close association with strangers stimulated the natural hatred for their fellows which dwells eternally in all men. And some men, somewhere, were using this natural hatred of man for man to destroy America.

  Some men, somewhere, with tongues in their cheeks and evil in their eyes and hatred for America in their hearts, had formed the organization known as the Know-Nothings, whose driving force was alleged hatred for the Roman Catholic Church. Finally, as its circle grew, it included in its hatred every man with a foreign name, a foreign birth, or a foreign religion.

  While North and South looked at each other across the borders with fiery eyes of waiting suspicion and fear, the Northern cities knew anti-Catholic and anti-alien, riots. The haters of America prepared for her death. They prepared for her death as they have prepared through all history for the death of all that is noble and lovely, grand and heroic, wise and tender and just.

  To do this, then, they stimulated false and cruel hatreds, they invented perilous lies, they encouraged the North to remain confused and inert and resentful, they maligned Mr. Lincoln and hinted foul things about him. They used even the holy words of patriotism to accomplish their purpose. They talked of “saving America for Americans,” of ousting the “alien in our midst.” For the first time the phrase, “the alien element” was heard in the free and windy spaces of the Republic.

  They, the real plotters against the Republic, used the very shibboleths of the patriots, the lovers of America. And the hatred increased like a pestilence.

  The plotters crept Southward, death in their hearts. In the midst of the flags, the heroics, the trumpets, the mobilizations and the resolutions, the whisper circulated, and the South, halting dazedly from time to time, heard the voice of destruction.

  CHAPTER 52

  It is a sobering reflection, thought Laurie, gazing steadily through the train windows, how nature repudiates the passions and the hatreds of men. All things live with nature, and are part of her, but man. He is the eternal pariah, the outlander, the alien, a stranger to this planet, surrounded by suspicious creatures hostile to him, fearful of him, hating him, fleeing from him at the very scent of his flesh or the sound of his step. They say it is the “herd instinct” which makes him band together with his fellows, even though he hates them. But it is something deeper than the herd instinct which compels him to build his terrible stony cities and crouch in them, like a besieged murderer, a hunted criminal, shut out from the deep and living heart of the earth. It is his knowledge that nature has rejected him, will not speak to him in the universal language of other beings, has denied that he is numbered among her children.

  We are the evil, the dark and ugly thing. We were not created so. I know this. But, we have become so, with our wars, our horrors, our hatreds, our sleepless enmity for all things that live, our treacheries and our greeds, our monstrousness. We are the destroyers, the wicked and unspeakable enormity that the earth has cursed, and God forgotten. We are Cain, and have been expelled from the Garden.

  Laurie shivered, and though the private coach was warm, she drew her sable cloak closer about her. The train was travelling with noisy swiftness through the still spring landscape. How beautiful it was! The brilliant greening earth flowered, undulating, to the distance, where amethystine hills, trembling with light, stood against a sky of the softest blue-gray. Here and there, in pools of faint shadow, stood trees still empty, but brown, sinewy, bent, already flexible and blurred with the life that was beginning to pulse through their branches. A tawny light spread gently along their limbs. Among the green grasses of the quivering earth lay little blue pools of water, in which stood wild iris. Silent birds curved against the sky. If there were farmhouses about, Laurie could not see them. An intense and moveless peace lay over the earth, undisturbed, forgetting.

  When we are quiet, when we are not there, thought Laurie, the earth remembers peace, and forgets man lives. She stands in her beauty, dreaming and planning, with endless patience, creating and breathing, sighing with joy because she hears no man’s voice.

  Young Mrs. Rhinelander watched Laurie’s still carved profile against the pure light that poured through the coach window. She thought how static and unchanging Laurie’s face was, and had often wondered whether Laurie possessed any emotional warmth, any passion, any vehemence. She had known Laurie for four years, for Mrs. Rhinelander’s deceased husband had, before his death, been New York’s foremost patron of music. A strong friendship had grown up between the two young women, though Mrs. Rhinelander had never analysed why, or why she had been attracted to this cold, hard young girl who had made no overtures to her at all. Though Laurie could not be called secretive, she certainly never enlightened anyone about her thoughts, her desires, or her feelings. Even the ovation given her last week at the Astor Place Opera House, where she had made her American debut after her return from Europe, had not stirred or excited her. She had smiled, it is true, but it was a smile of remote ennui, and she had not bothered to thank the audience or to reply happily to the congratulations of her friends. When some enthusiastic young gentlemen had uproariously insisted upon unhitching the horses of her carriage, and had drawn that carriage themselves through the crowded streets, accompanied by other young gentlemen with torches, Laurie had sat back in the velvet and perfumed depths and looked genuinely bored and annoyed. This was not a pose. And her statuesque withdrawal and aloofness had, if anything, heightened the frenzy of her adorers. When she had unhurriedly alighted at the door of the Astor House, she had not deigned to look back at the great crowd which had roared its final ovation to her, and had not given a single glance to the heaps of flowers awaiting her in her suite. Young Mrs. Rhinelander, and her brother, Dick Thimbleton, had accompanied her to her apartments, and she had hardly been inside the door, and had just begun to remove her long gloves, when she had said to them with that blunt carelessness of hers: “I’m sorry, my loves, but I am tired, and so, if you will excuse me—”

  Mrs. Rhinelander had smiled wryly, and had shrugged, but foolish Dick had said quickly: “Of course, of course! We will go at once, Laurie. Goodnight, my darling.”

  But Laurie was not Dick’s darling. Elissa doubted she would ever be anyone’s darling. There was something dreadfully like stone in Laurie. Elissa had never seen her color change, or any thought that was ender or gentle in her face. She was hardly nineteen yet, and her beauty and her incredible voice presaged a magnificent career for her throughout the world. But when these facts were recalled to her, she only stared impassively, and shrugged as she turned away.

  She now had in her possession a contract that for munificence had never been known before in America, even in the case of the great Jenny Lind whose voice, it was conceded, had been surpassed by the voice of this young “American” girl. Laurie had sung in Tannhaiiser in Munich, and had there been given an ovation even more frantic than that accorded her in New York. The great Wagner, himself, had bowed over her hands, and had kissed them in mad gratitude. Laurie had sung in that opera in Dresden also, and the audience, though prepared to be coarsely insulting and derisive, had been silenced by the pure splendor of her Elizabeth. Later, it had become demen
ted. The first presentation in Paris, with another singer, had been a scandalous affair accompanied by cat-calls and howls and whistles. But Laurie’s extraordinary beauty, as well as her voice, had conquered the Parisians, also. The Princess Metternich, Wagner’s great friend, had invited Laurie to be her guest at her château, yet it was only the pleas of Wagner which had finally induced the girl to accept the invitation. Later, she was also the guest of King Ludwig of Bavaria, and had completely devastated that royal gentleman.

  Now Laurie was to interpret Tannhaiiser to America, and was to sing Elsa in Lohengrin. When she signed the incredible contract for her appearances at the Astor, it was with the same ennui with which she had received her ovations. She had risen from the little gilt chair in her suite, and had announced to the assembled and excited gentlemen that “she was excessively tired, and she prayed that they would excuse her.” In reality, her friend Elissa Rhinelander knew too well, Laurie never was tired. Her cold vitality was inexhaustible. She experienced no more fatigue than did a mountain or a stony cliff.

  Elissa had come to the stupefied conclusion that Laurie cared nothing for her music, her triumphs, her conquests, and that though she sang with the wildest passion and feeling, these were automatic and well-learned rather than from the heart and soul. She was a marvelous actress, but her passions were never involved. Or, were they? thought Elissa, as the train rushed through the darkening landscape.

  Laurie was as smooth and impassive as golden metal, and as hard. She shone and glimmered like that metal, and was as impervious. Yet Elissa could not forget the tumultuous passion in her singing voice and on occasion that strange, questing look.