House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  Anne protested. “No, no. I don’t like them.”

  “Oh, this is Mr. Lehman’s,” Mrs. Harrison insisted. “You’ll like him.” And somehow she hustled them through the doors. The room was already crowded; and except for gas jets over the auctioneer’s platform it was dimly lighted. They chose a corner where Julian could rest against the wall, and Mrs. Harrison and Anne flanked him. This auction seemed to Julian much like any other: an old man with a singsong voice indifferently parroting the bids; another man at a desk beside him keeping the records. “That’s Mr. Lehman at the desk,” Mrs. Harrison whispered. “He’s a good man.”

  Julian thought Mr. Lehman did not look the part; and it saddened him to see the things that one by one were put up and sold, sometimes for little, sometimes for much. They were a miscellany of household articles—china, silver, plate, pictures, furniture; but when presently a silver coffee service was put up, Anne exclaimed:

  “Why, Mrs. Harrison, that’s yours!”

  Mrs. Harrison nodded, for once not smiling; and they did not speak till the bidding ended and the auctioneer said: “Sold! To Mr. Streean!”

  Julian felt his cheeks tight with anger and shame that his uncle should be a bidder here; but Mrs. Harrison said: “Splendid! Now I must run.” They went out with her; and she told Anne: “Mr. Lehman gets the best prices for things! He’s really wonderful. If the bidding doesn’t suit him he nods to one of his men to buy things in himself, and then he sells them over again another day, and gives you credit for the highest price they bring.”

  Anne said sympathetically: “You must hate selling your things!”

  The older woman laughed, shook her head. “As a matter of fact, I don’t! I’ve been the slave of things all my life! I didn’t own them, they owned me. When the war started, every soldier on the march loaded himself down with enough things to break the back of an elephant; but now they’ve learned to get along with mighty little, and so have I! I never felt really free in my life; but I didn’t know I was a slave until I began to get rid of—things!”

  They laughed with her; but when they parted Julian saw her face, as she turned away and need no longer wear for their benefit that gallant smile, shadowed with bitter pain. Anne saw it too. “Major Harrison was killed at Sharpsburg, you know,” she told Julian. “She has two boys in Burr’s regiment. They had such a lovely home.”

  “She seems cheerful about it.”

  “She’s wonderful! But what little she earns must buy food for her and Mrs. Annabel and a baby and pay the rent of their one room besides. So I suppose she’s selling everything she owns. She was cheerful with us, but she’ll cry into her pillow tonight, you know.”

  As Julian grew stronger, their strolls extended. They liked the promenade along the canal toward Hollywood, where they could overlook the river and the tumbling rapids above the railroad bridge; and sometimes they climbed the steep hillside above the canal, laughing together at Julian’s struggles with his crutches, and found a vantage from which they could look back toward the city. The needle spires of the churches sharply pierced the sky, and the Capitol rose in a bold mass above the lesser buildings all around it, and the bulk of Mr. Libby’s warehouse where Yankee prisoners were confined frowned by the river front, and they could see the soldiers on Belle Isle in the river just below them guarding other prisoners there. Sometimes Julian told her about his own days as a prisoner in Washington when he lay helpless and ill and alone; till Anne saw pain in his eyes and silenced him.

  “Stop it!” she said. “You’re just making yourself miserable.”

  “Well, why shouldn’t I? So much I want to do, but a one-legged man can’t do anything.”

  “Nonsense! Oh of course there are lots of things you can’t do. But there are lots of things you can! Concentrate on them. You can’t run faster nor walk farther than other men, but you can learn to think straighter and truer. You can do a lot more, if you just forget the things you can’t do, than some of these silly ninnies who think they can do anything in the world when really they can’t do anything well at all!” He smiled, loving her earnestness; and she insisted: “Besides, there’s no better fun than trying to do things, even when you’re pretty sure you can’t. And anyway, no one ever knows what he can do till he tries.”

  He asked lightly: “What do you want me to try?”

  “Well, you can learn to do things with your head. Papa would be just as good a lawyer or a judge if he didn’t have any legs at all! We can read some of his law books together; and when we’re tired of reading we can take walks.”

  They came to spend many a rainy afternoon in Judge Tudor’s library; and they walked by the hour. Julian was increasingly at home on his crutches, and he accustomed himself to the curious glances of strangers, and to the kindly and voluble sympathy of chance-met acquaintances. Anne helped. She kept her quick tongue playing, talking so steadily and so gaily and so brightly that he forgot himself in his delight in her.

  She talked of many things in her childhood and in the present; of her quiet years with her father when they seldom saw anyone but Faunt, of the delights of their occasional trips to Richmond when she and Judge Tudor stayed grandly at a hotel or perhaps visited his sister, Barbara’s mother. She told him some of the tales Faunt had told her, of his scouting behind the enemy lines. She spoke of Faunt so often and with such frank affection that Julian knew how much the older man meant to her; so on that day when Faunt overtook them on Grace Street and mocked Julian so cruelly, he forgot his own hurt in hers. When Faunt had ridden away, Anne stared after him with streaming eyes, between anger and grief.

  “Oh he’s mean; he’s mean!” she cried.

  Not for Faunt’s sake but because he knew how it wounded her to see her idol shattered, Julian spoke in his uncle’s defense. “He was just joking, Anne. Trying to be funny.”

  “No he wasn’t! He was being mean on purpose!”

  Julian suspected that this was true. Uncle Faunt was too wise to be so witless without intent; and with some faint glimmering of the truth he said honestly: “I guess maybe he did do it on purpose, Anne. He’s too considerate to talk that way without knowing how it will sound. Maybe he thought it would be good for me to make a joke of it.”

  She would not so easily be appeased. “No, Julian! He wasn’t joking! He was just trying to hurt your feelings!” Her tears were dry, but sorrow blended with hurt anger in her tones. “I’ve always thought he was so wonderful. Oh I wish he hadn’t acted that way!” They moved on more slowly, silent together; till presently she laughed and tossed her head. “There, I won’t let it make us blue. Let’s not even think about him any more.”

  Julian told no one about that incident. His mother, or his father, would be made angry; and somehow he felt sure that there was an explanation if he could guess it. Early in March Burr came home for two days; and Julian and he were much together, and Julian asked:

  “Burr, do you see Uncle Faunt right along?”

  Burr hesitated. “No. No, he’s with Mosby now. Mosby has a partisan band operating behind the Yankee lines, raiding the railroads, attacking wagon trains, cutting up Yankee patrols. They’re making General Hooker plenty of trouble.”

  “I expect Uncle Faunt is good at that sort of thing.”

  “You haven’t seen him for a long time, have you?”

  “Just once, a month ago, on the street for a minute. His beard changes him, doesn’t it?”

  Burr nodded, his eyes abstracted. “Uncle Faunt doesn’t—well, all he wants to do now is kill Yankees. Mosby’s partisans get together for raids whenever Mosby sends them word; but in between times they never see Uncle Faunt. He just goes off by himself somewhere, works alone.”

  Julian asked wonderingly: “Works at what?”

  But the other shook his head. “I don’t know. Doing the enemy all the harm he can, I suppose.”

  Burr said no more than this in words, but his tone was so eloquent of disapproval that Julian thought it was remotely possible Uncle Faunt had mean
t to be as cruel as he seemed. But since Faunt never came to Richmond, or at least never came to Fifth Street, Julian presently forgot him in nearer things. He was acquiring the knack of walking with one crutch instead of two; and he was puzzling to devise some harness—a strap around his waist, or the sort of thing women wore—to which in default of any useful stump an artificial leg could be attached.

  Late in February, Rollin Lyle came one day to the house on Fifth Street. He had gone without a scratch through South Mountain and Sharpsburg and his regiment had a fine month along the Opequon, recuperating after that campaign into Maryland. “And at Fredericksburg we weren’t really engaged at all,” Rollin explained, “but I got a shell fragment through my shoulder, and it didn’t want to heal. So I’ve been down home since before Christmas.”

  “I’ll bet that was fun.”

  “In a way, it was,” Rollin agreed. “Papa’s there. He was too old, so they wouldn’t take him in the army; so he’s raising all the food he can, managing all the plantations. He had to move away from the coast, because so many of the people went off to the Yankees; so he moved the rest of them to Fallow Fields, up the Peedee River in North Carolina. It’s healthier there. He had twenty-eight negroes die last year, working the rice, and twenty-two of them were task hands. Mama likes it better at Fallow Fields, but it wasn’t the same as being at our real home.”

  When Vesta and Cinda appeared, they greeted Rollin delightedly. Cinda asked whether he had visited Camden.

  “Yes, I came around by Columbia,” he said. “I’ve been eight days coming from there—four days waiting for floods to run off, and four days on the cars.” But he had ridden from Columbia to the Plains to see Jenny and the children. Kyle and Janet were both riding, he reported; little Clayton was walking and talking a little. Jenny seemed well, and she was busy, and as fine and as beautiful as she had always been. Managing the Plains certainly agreed with her, and Mrs. Cloyd said no man could do it better. Jenny and Mrs. Cloyd saw a lot of each other.

  After supper Rollin went to call on Dolly, and Vesta and Cinda agreed that his long devotion to Dolly was his only flaw; but Julian said Dolly was an awfully pretty girl. “And Rollin, once he likes a person, is mighty loyal.” Rollin had promised to return to spend the night; and Julian waited up for him. When he came, Rollin reported that Dolly had had another caller, a Captain Pew.

  “I think he’s a friend of Mr. Streean,” he said. “He’s a blockade runner. He was still there when I left. Dolly seems fond of him.” Julian almost smiled at his tone.

  After Rollin left Richmond to rejoin his regiment along the Rappahannock, Julian’s rich hours and days with Anne continued. She was her father’s housekeeper, and when bad weather kept them indoors, Julian might sit with a law book on his knee while she puzzled over her accounts. In March she was scandalized to have to pay thirty-two dollars for a barrel of flour. “Papa says he’s a mind to move South,” she told Julian. “He says he’s just sick and tired of paying through the nose to these old extortioners!”

  But she was to be glad she had bought that barrel when she did, for a few days later the Government seized all the flour in the city’s warehouses. “I expect lots of people just simply haven’t got any at all,” Anne declared, and Julian found that this was true. Even Aunt Enid borrowed from his mother, and she was furious at the Government’s tyranny.

  “There’s going to be trouble, you wait and see,” Enid predicted. “The warehouses are just simply full of flour and we can’t get any! People won’t stand it.” The day one of the warehouses burned, she came to repay the borrowed flour and to say triumphantly: “What did I tell you? Someone set that warehouse on fire! I’m just as sure as I can be.” Cinda said she need not have hurried to repay the borrowed flour, but Enid said Captain Pew had brought her a barrel from Nassau. “He and Dolly came to supper last night. He just got back day before yesterday.” She was in the liveliest humor, her eyes sparkling. “Julian, that’s what you ought to do, go blockading! You don’t need two legs to do that, and Captain Pew makes heaps and heaps of money. He told us last night he took a load of cotton that he paid forty-three thousand dollars for, and traded it in Nassau for Yankee goods and some lead from England, and he got some gold besides, and put that in the bank at Nassau; and he sold the things he brought back for almost a million dollars! So you see!”

  Julian grinned. “Sounds like a made-up story to me.”

  “Well, it isn’t! Why, one of the sailors on his ship bought six gallons of gin in Nassau for twenty-five dollars and sold it in Wilmington for nine hundred dollars.” She laughed in sudden amusement. “Dolly just declares she’s going to get a little ship and go blockading herself and make a fortune! She could, too. Anybody can! Of course some people think it’s wrong; but Trav says if people didn’t buy blockade goods there wouldn’t be any blockade-runners, so he says you can’t blame them!”

  Cinda protested: “That doesn’t sound like Travis, Enid. You must have misunderstood him.”

  “Well, of course I never know what he really means,” Enid conceded. “But I know what he said! I know it’s true, too. I mean about blockaders making all that money.”

  When she was gone, Julian whistled. “Golly, Mama, how do you stand her? How does Uncle Trav stand her?” But Cinda did not reply.

  A winter’s snow melted fast; and Friday morning Anne stopped on her way to do some household errands and insisted that Julian go with her. It was still slippery enough so that he took two crutches, and he was to be glad he had done so. They were in Smithers’s dry goods store on Main Street when they felt rather than heard, a muffled, jarring explosion. They. hurried out of doors and saw people running down toward the river and heard far thin screams; and as fast as Julian could manage they followed the crowd till they were caught in a press of pushing people and Julian found it hard to hold his footing. Anne suddenly stopped and held his arm.

  “There, we won’t go any farther,” she declared. “I won’t have you jostled so.”

  He knew a quick delight at her solicitude. “I’m all right. Let’s go see what happened.”

  “I don’t care what happened. You’ll fall down.”

  “I’ll get up again.”

  “In this crowd? Julian Dewain, don’t be an idiot! Here, get into this doorway so people won’t bump into you.” And as he yielded: “I declare, you can be the most exasperating man!”

  His happiness overshadowed any curiosity about the explosion which had set this hurrying crowd in motion; but presently an ambulance passed them, and another, and the news of what had happened spread from mouth to mouth. Something ignited the powder in the cartridge factory on Brown’s Island and blew the sides out of the flimsy wooden building so that the roof fell in. The workers were almost all young girls and women; and many of them—no one yet knew how many—were torn by the blast, or crushed, or burned.

  Julian and Anne went home knowing no more than this; but the Saturday W hig said at least thirty girls had been killed. Sunday, Julian and Cinda and Vesta met Anne and her father at the church gates. Julian had not seen the W hig, but Anne had.

  “And one poor girl, Miss Burley, has simply vanished,” she told him. “Nobody knows what happened to her. I guess she was just blown to bits.” She said pitifully: “Oh Julian, they were all so poor! Think of having to work in that dreadful place to make a living! I’m so sorry for them.”

  He nodded, thinking she had never been so beautiful. “But do you know something, Anne?”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry for them, of course; but I enjoyed the excitement that day.”

  Her eyes widened in bewilderment. “Why, Julian?”

  “It was such fun having you boss me around and take care of me.”

  Her color rose. “Why, I think that’s horrid!” she declared, and turned to go into the church; but from the top step she looked back at him with a shy quick smile.

  When he took his seat he could see her sitting beside her father a few rows nearer the pul
pit, see the curve of her cheek past the border of her bonnet. To watch her was so absorbing that he paid little attention to the service. Until today, his thoughts had not cast ahead. To be with Anne as often and as long as possible had filled him with unquestioning content. But after this day there began to be a change in the rhythm of his pulse. They went together, he in respect to a gallant and a valiant man and she to keep him company, to Major Pelham’s funeral; and the measured tramp of many feet and the slow beat of the Dead March woke in him a hasting and an urgency. He seemed to hear a whisper: “Hurry, hurry!” Thereafter, when he could not be with her, this frantic sense of haste grew stronger. Thursday snow began again to fall; and by morning it was eight inches deep. He dreaded a day without seeing her; but presently she came with a laughing challenge.

  “Julian,” she cried, “General Hood’s Texans are marching down Main Street and having a snowball fight, right in the street. Come watch the fun!”

  He hesitated. Snow lay deep in the streets, and the very air was a scour of wind-blown flakes. “I don’t know whether I can, Anne.”

  “Oh you can do anything you want to do!”

  So he went with her, and they laughed together at his difficulties. To swing his foot forward, supported on his crutches, was easy enough unless he tried to take too long a step; but when that one foot was firmly planted, he had to lift his crutches high and swing them wide or they caught in the heavy, clogging quicksand of the snow. He was soon panting and breathless; but Anne gave him no respite, teasing him for his slowness, urging him on.

  There were half a dozen blocks to go. Hood’s men had started north to meet the threat of that Yankee thrust in which the brave Pelham had been killed; but now the Yankees were repulsed and they were returning to their camp across Mayo’s Bridge. Before Anne and Julian came to the corner where the Texans turned down toward the bridge, he was shaking with fatigue and his pulse hit hard. Anne’s hand slipped through his arm and she asked softly: