House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  “There’ve been two letters from Cinda. Vesta brought one over Friday evening. I left Richmond Saturday.” This was Wednesday.

  “Vesta’s home?” Brett asked eagerly.

  “Yes. Jenny stayed at the Plains.”

  “I knew she was going to. How’s Julian? When is Cinda bringing him home?”

  So Trav explained that Cinda when she wrote had not yet seen Julian. “They emptied the Washington hospitals to make room for wounded from Manassas. All the Confederate wounded were moved, but no records were kept, and Cinda hasn’t found out where Julian is.”

  Brett swore. “She must be half-crazy!”

  “Her letter sounded sort of—desperately calm,” Trav admitted. He had to answer many questions, till Brett reluctantly accepted the fact that the other actually could tell him nothing; so at last they came to talk of other things. “I spent a few days at Chimneys,” Trav said. “James Fiddler, my old overseer there, came to Richmond to say he’d left Tony. I judged there was something wrong, so I went down.” He paused, went on: “Tony has sold off some of the people, Brett. Chimneys was overstocked, and those we sent there from Great Oak had little to do. At any rate, he sold them.”

  “Well, that was probably good business.” Brett laughed in grim amusement. “We hear Lincoln’s going to set them free, anyway. Not that that will make any difference to them; but they’ll be worth less and less from now on. All the same, I wish Tony hadn’t sold them.”

  “Tony’s a lost man, Brett.” Trav hesitated, then went on: “He’s taken a negress into the house as his mistress, a bright mulatto girl named Sapphira. He tried to seat her at the table with me.”

  Brett felt the other’s sorrow. “Tony was lost long ago, Trav. He had his little time, captaining that Martinston company; but he was lost before that.”

  “He’d begun to have some self-respect. I suppose this Lincoln business knocked it out of him.”

  “When were you down there?”

  “I got back to Richmond on the ninth. We’d had the news of Manassas at Martinston. Richmond was still drunk with triumph, talking about hundreds of Yankees killed and captured, and hundreds of muskets and guns taken, and mountains of stores. People thought Lee’s army was marching into Maryland like conquerors, to seize Harrisburg and Baltimore and Washington.”

  Brett said drily: “The army might have done better if President Davis hadn’t announced two months ago that we were going to carry the war into Northern territory. Well, maybe time will teach us not to brag too soon. How long were you in Richmond?”

  “Two weeks or so. I’m not strong yet, and seeing the way things are at Chimneys took a lot out of me. I stayed in bed a few days. Vesta got there the Saturday after I did.” He smiled. “She was furious because Cinda hadn’t waited so they could both go to Washington. She showed me Cinda’s letter, and one from Burr. Have you seen Burr since Sharpsburg?”

  “Yes, he came through without a scratch. At Boonsboro and again at Sharpsburg, when we retreated, Fitz Lee’s men relieved the pickets. At Sharpsburg that meant extending the brigade along the whole line of battle, dismounting his men to stand to while the army crossed the Potomac behind them. For hours McClellan had nothing in front of him but that thin line of pickets; but they pulled back at dawn with no trouble.”

  “That must have seemed like a long night!”

  Brett chuckled. “Yes, even Burr admits it.” He asked: “How’s Enid, and your mother?”

  “Oh Mama’s happy as a cow in clover, managing the house to suit herself.” Trav did not speak of Enid. He seldom did unless he must, so Brett was not surprised. “Tilda’s bragging about Streean’s speculations,” Trav added, and he said thoughtfully: “You know, Brett, she brags so much about how clever he is that I think she’s a little ashamed of him.” Brett did not comment, and Trav said: “Streean apparently had a lot of salt that he’d bought cheap, and he sold it at a dollar and a quarter a pound just two days before General Loring drove the Yankees away from the Kanawha salt mines and the price fell to five or ten cents.” He added: “By the way, Dolly says Tony has gone into partnership with Streean, bought shares in a blockade-runner.”

  “Probably they’ll make money,” Brett said. “Streean seems to have a knack that way, and no conscience to hinder.” He asked: “Had Richmond heard about Sharpsburg before you left?”

  “Only through the Northern papers. The Philadelphia Inquirer claimed a victory and said Longstreet was wounded and Jackson a prisoner. Everybody assured everybody else that it was just a Yankee lie; but when we started for Gordonsville we began to meet trains full of wounded, and to hear some of the truth.”

  “We weren’t there,” Brett said. “We’ve hardly fired a gun.” Big Mill added a few sticks to the dying fire and Brett stared into the new flames. “We camped one night at Gainesville and I rode over to look at the Manassas battlefield. The Yankee dead hadn’t been buried. I’ll swear you could have smelled them ten miles down the road.” He set his jaw hard. “Lots of wounded still there.”

  “Ours?”

  “Theirs mostly. We buried our dead, but we couldn’t wait to bury the Yankees.” He added in a lower tone: “But we left our dead to rot on the field at Sharpsburg.” He wiped his brow. “There were hogs getting fat on the bodies at Manassas, Trav. I’d like to take some of the damned politicians who made this war and show them a week-old battlefield.”

  Trav asked: “What went wrong at Sharpsburg, Brett?”

  Brett looked around to be sure no one was within hearing. “I think General Lee asked too much of the men,” he said. “Half the army was worn out on the march from Manassas. They say Jackson gave orders to shoot stragglers, but a lot of men simply couldn’t stand the pace. I doubt if we had thirty thousand men at Sharpsburg when the battle opened, and McClellan had three times that. Lee and Jackson are alike. They want to fight—and to Hell with the odds! But it’s death on the men.” After a moment he added: “I hear Longstreet didn’t want to fight at Sharpsburg, but he did the work of a thousand men once they got at it. Give him my compliments when you see him.”

  The army lay inactive for a while. There was a drought in the Valley, all but the larger stream beds dry; and once or twice troops had to be moved to a better supply. But food and forage were plentiful, and the men complained of too much beef to eat rather than of too little; and there was time to bring from Richmond and Staunton new uniforms, guns, munitions. There was time, too, for Trav and Brett more than once to see each other. When next Trav rode out from Martinsburg, Brett asked at once:

  “How’s Cousin Jeems?”

  “Fine,” Trav smiled. “He wasn’t out of bed when I got to headquarters, the day I came; but Captain Goree and I waked him. He’s a sight in his night shirt, Brett. I noticed he was limping and he swore at himself for being such a damned fool that he wore a loose boot and blistered his heel and had to fight at Sharpsburg in carpet slippers.”

  “Any of your friends hurt?”

  “Major Sorrel got a shaking up from a shell burst. He tried to settle down and play invalid in someone’s home over in Shepherdstown where there were a couple of pretty daughters, but the Yankees shelled him out. Walton got a bullet through the shoulder, nothing serious.” He laughed at a sudden memory. “Major Fairfax rode a big stallion named Saltron, and a round shot struck it fairly in the rump and the Major came back swearing mad because the Yankees shot Saltron in the butt! Longstreet told him to be thankful he didn’t get shot in the butt himself!”

  Brett chuckled. “How does the General feel about things?”

  “He says the army will soon be better than ever; and he believes there never lived as fine a commander as Lee.”

  “That’s probably true,” Brett agreed, “unless Lee’s too fond of a fight. He certainly shouldn’t have fought at Sharpsburg. With the river behind us we’d have lost the whole army if they’d beaten us.”

  “He didn’t plan to fight there,” Trav said. “But a copy of one of his orders fell into McClella
n’s hands, so McClellan knew where we were and what we meant to do. It was a near thing whether he wouldn’t cut the army in two; but the fight at South Mountain gave Lee time to reconcentrate.”

  “I wish I could share Longstreet’s confidence in our eventual victory.”

  “He doesn’t believe we should ever invade the North,” Trav explained. “He says to win the war the North must invade the South, and that whenever she does so we can smash her armies just as we did McClellan and Pope this summer. His point is that we don’t have to conquer the North. They have to conquer us.”

  During the fortnight that followed, Brett began to believe Longstreet’s optimism was justified. Sharpsburg was surely a defeat; but this did not act or look or sound like a beaten army. Not only were the men better fed every day, and better equipped, but as soldiers who had straggled under the hard march into Maryland returned to duty, each company and regiment filled its thinned ranks. The army that had put a scant forty thousand exhausted and barefoot men into battle at Sharpsburg presently counted sixty-five thousand soldiers, rested and fit to fight again.

  Brett saw these things proudly, but he longed for some word from Cinda. In mid-October a chance came to go to Richmond. McClellan one day pushed out from Shepherdstown to feel for Lee’s army, and Lee himself barely escaped an encounter with Yankee cavalry on the road from Kearneysville to Smithfield. Two Parrott guns of the Howitzers were in action near Charlestown. A cannon ball tore Lieutenant Carter’s cravat without seriously wounding him, Burley Brown was killed, and Captain Ben Smith lost a foot.

  When Brett heard this he asked for and received permission to make the journey home with Captain Smith. They reached Richmond Monday afternoon. When they left the train, one of General Winder’s sentries officiously insisted that the wounded man could not be taken to his own home but must go to a hospital. Brett, seeking an overruling authority, went to George Randolph, who had been the first commander of the Howitzers and who was now Secretary of War. Brett was shocked at the other’s appearance. Randolph was younger than he, but the Secretary had lost weight so that his pale face was netted with a fine mesh of wrinkles and his small eyes seemed to have receded into their sockets.

  He greeted Brett with a warmth which suggested he would have preferred service in the field to this desk assignment; and he asked many questions about the fortunes of his old command.

  “It’s on account of one of the men, Ben Smith, that I came to you,” Brett said; and he related his experience with the sentry.

  Secretary Randolph made a hopeless gesture. “All authority is being taken out of my hands,” he said. “General Winder is the Czar of Richmond. My office can’t even issue passports now. But by God I’ll see Ben Smith settled in his own house or resign!”

  So Brett, satisfied that Captain Smith’s fortunes were in good hands, hurried home to Fifth Street. He found Vesta there, but no news from Cinda. Trying not to let Vesta see his disappointment, he asked questions about the Plains, and about Jenny and the children. Vesta said Camden was full of refugees from the islands along the coast, who had fled when the Yankees threatened landings there. “And they say lots of their negroes steal boats and row off to join the Yankees; so the rice planters are moving their people to plantations back from the coast. I expect Rollin’s father’s rice swamps are all abandoned.” She spoke of what had been happening in Richmond. Mrs. Lee and her daughters had gone to Hickory Hill, the Wickham place, when General Lee went north with the army; now they were at Warren County Springs in North Carolina. Richmond was as crowded as ever. Everyone just laughed at President Lincoln’s proclamation about freeing all the slaves on the first of January. “Why, Papa, the people don’t want to be free!” Vesta declared. “They wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they were.”

  Brett nodded. “I hear the price of slaves has gone up since the proclamation. Of course that’s partly because money’s worth less.” Vesta said she didn’t understand such things, and he smiled. “It’s a question of how you put it. You say two thousand dollars will buy a slave, but I say that a slave will buy two thousand dollars.”

  She brushed aside this puzzling quibble. Richmond was a sad city, she said, since Sharpsburg. There were thousands of sick and wounded in the hospitals. Yellow fever had been bad at Wilmington, and Darrell had gone blockade running with Dolly’s Captain Pew, and maybe he would catch it! Prices of everything were simply terrible. Sixteen dollars for a barrel of flour! “Oh and did you know Congress has raised your pay, Papa? Privates get four dollars more a month now. Don’t you feel rich? Just think, you can almost buy a barrel of flour with your next month’s salary.”

  They laughed together, and Brett said: “All the same, for a lot of our soldiers that extra four dollars is pretty important. Their families at home have to live on their pay.”

  “Well, I wish President Davis would do something about the old speculators’ putting prices up. They charge two dollars and a half for a pound of coffee, and you can’t get any, even for that. We’ve been toasting corn meal and making our coffee out of that.”

  “Probably better for you,” he said smilingly.

  “Oh, I always did hate things that were good for me! Now there, I’ve told you everything I know and you haven’t told me anything. How are Burr and Uncle Faunt and Uncle Trav?”

  So he told her about Stuart’s bold raid into Maryland. “Burr and Faunt were both along, of course. But now the whole army’s resting and skylarking. ’Specially the cavalry. Stuart’s headquarters are at old Colonel Dandridge’s place, the Bower, near Shepherdstown; and it’s one of the most charming houses in the Valley. They have dancing every night, charades, theatricals, plenty of pretty girls. You know how the girls love the cavalry; and of course the cavalry loves pretty girls. Every day is Ladies’ Day there.”

  “I guess they didn’t take ladies on that ride into Maryland.”

  “No, but there was a fine evening of dancing to welcome the heroes home; and now they have parties every evening. There’s a German, von Borcke, serving with Stuart. He’s a giant, but a great dancer and a great hand for entertainments. He and Colonel Brien put on a silhouette show the other night, von Borcke playing sick and Colonel Brien playing doctor, pretending to reach down von Borcke’s throat and pull out things he had eaten, antlers, a whole cabbage, a pair of boots, I don’t know what all. Von Borcke had stuffed his stomach with pillows. He was supposed to have indigestion.”

  “It sounds perfectly disgusting,” Vesta declared; but her eyes were twinkling.

  “They say it was funny to see,” Brett assured her. “Then another time von Borcke dressed up as a girl. He weighs two hundred and fifty, stands about six feet two; and he put on about twenty petticoats over his hoops, and some false braids, and simpered around on Colonel Brien’s arm. Von Borcke’s a clown; but he’s a hard fighter. Stuart likes him.”

  They talked late, and Brett slept next morning till the sun was high. After dinner he called upon Captain Smith, whom he had brought home to Richmond; and he stopped to see Enid and the children, to tell them Trav was well. Brett had always liked Enid. She was so young, and so anxious to please them all; and so often the things she did or said which Cinda resented seemed to him a pitiful sort of defiance of Cinda’s dislike. No matter how much he loved Cinda he was not blind to her faults; and her long fondness for Trav made it inevitable that she should be critical of Trav’s wife.

  He spent half an hour with Enid and Lucy and Peter; and when he came home, Cinda was there!

  In the first moment of reunion, Brett’s gladness was so great, and hers, that they could only cling together in a silent rapture; but while he still held Cinda close, he saw beyond her a tall young man whom for a moment he scarce recognized. Here was Julian, now overtopping Brett himself by an inch or so!

  Julian was balanced on his crutches, one trouser leg tucked up and pinned; and Brett wished to weep. But—no tears now; no laments, no sympathy! Then what should he say? What word could he find to reassure t
his fine boy looking at him so happily, yet with a secret terror in his eyes. Brett guessed Julian’s dread of vain condolences; and he had a saving inspiration. Someone, somewhere, on some occasion, had devised the pattern for a jest; and the pattern caught the army’s fancy. Did a man appear in unusually high boots? “Come out of those cisterns! I see your head a-rarin up!” Or in a top hat? “Come down out of that steeple! I see your legs a-hanging down!” Or to a man who waxed his mustache: “Take them mice out of your mouth! I see their tails a-sticking out!” So Brett’s first word now, to his maimed son, was jocose. “Come down off those stepladders! I see you up there! ”

  He felt Cinda stiffen in his arm’s circle, and look up at him in hurt surprise; but Julian understood, and grinned delightedly. “Don’t shoot, Papa! I’ll come down!”

  There were long fine hours of good talk together, with every word a sweetmeat to be savored to the utmost. Anne Tudor had gone home to her father. “She knew we’d want just ourselves here, the darling,” said Cinda. “She’s been so sweet, Brett. Hasn’t she, Julian?” Julian nodded happily. Vesta and Brett made Cinda begin at the beginning, but under their questions she forever harked back or skipped ahead. When she spoke of their journey from Warrenton to Centerville, Brett said:

  “The battle was fought right along that road, a few days afterward.” He was glad they had passed that way before the battle and not afterward, to see—as he had seen—those fields littered with hideous carrion.

  “I know. After we got to Mr. Gilby’s, we could hear the guns, and then the wounded came pouring into Washington and the place was crazy with panic, people running away as fast and as far as they could go.”

  Julian laughed. “That was the best medicine we had, in the hospitals, Papa; I mean where there were Southerners together. To hear how scared the Yanks were.”

  “Anne and I just had to stay indoors,” Cinda told them. “There were frightened people and drunken soldiers everywhere. But Brett Dewain, McClellan must be a great man! Inside a week he’d made an army again. I saw them march out H Street. Their uniforms weren’t pretty any more, but—they looked like soldiers! It scared me to see them! When the news of the fight on the Antietam came, I wasn’t surprised.”