House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  “All right, Julian?”

  Fine.”

  “I wasn’t just being mean, making you hurry. It’s good for you to do hard things. Isn’t it?”

  “You bet. You just keep after me.”

  Then his eyes turned to the line of marching men. These Texans had won fame at Gaines’ Mill and had kept that fame untarnished. The laughing warriors trudged through the heavy snow, and they made a frolic of their march. Snowballs were flying up and down the column, and sometimes the men broke ranks for a sudden furious skirmish. They yelled shrill challenges and bold defiances and shouted in hot triumph; and the crowd along the sidewalks laughed and cheered.

  Then one of them saw Julian and levelled a pointing finger and sang:

  “ ‘Johnny, was you drunk?

  ‘Johnny, was you mad?’ ”

  Julian grinned delightedly. The rough derision of the song made a joke of his hurt; and it told him he was one with them and had their love and loyal comradeship.

  “ ‘What did you do

  ‘With the leg that you had?’ ”

  There were five, and ten, and then twenty voices singing; and Julian joined with them and went on with them; and Anne, looking up at him in fine and tender pride through smiling tears, sang with him.

  “ ‘I was chasing me a Yankee

  ‘To make him cry and beg.

  ‘Along came a cannon ball

  ‘And stole away my leg.’ ”

  The Texans shouted their delight; and a tall young fellow in the ranks scooped up a handful of the soft snow and flung it over Anne, and she laughed with them and brushed the snow away and stood proudly close by Julian’s side as the last of the column passed.

  They went homeward more slowly, happy together, speaking little. At the house on Fifth Street, Anne came in for a while, and she and Vesta discussed housekeeping problems. Since Cinda was so much at the hospital, Vesta managed this house as Anne did her father’s. Flour was thirty-eight dollars the barrel, and prices of all kinds of foodstuffs went higher every day. “I suppose we’d be sensible to go to the Plains,” Vesta admitted. “But—well, it’s like running away. The poor people can’t run away from Richmond. It doesn’t help them any for us to stay; but they have to stand it, and if they can, so can we.”

  Anne said sympathetically: “I don’t see how they stand it. Specially having their children hungry.”

  “Uncle Trav says some women down in Salisbury, not far from Chimneys, just broke into the stores and helped themselves,” Vesta told her. “They went in and offered government prices for flour and bacon and salt and things; and when the storekeepers wouldn’t sell, the women just took them! There were hundreds of women, and they had hatchets, and no one dared try to stop them and lots of people cheered. And he says some women did the same thing at Boon Hill when they couldn’t buy corn.”

  Anne tossed her head. “I’ve been mad enough sometimes to take a hatchet myself!” she declared. “And I’m not even hungry!”

  Thursday morning Anne came early to the house to take Julian with her to market. “I want to go before everything’s sold,” she explained. “And it’s such a beautiful morning, I didn’t even wait to have breakfast.”

  Julian gladly agreed. The elms and the occasional sycamores along Franklin Street were gay with spring’s first tender greenery, already casting some shade; the sun was at once brighter and kinder than on a summer day. The two young people crossed Franklin Street, intending to go on down Fifth; but from the middle of the crossing they could look down to Capitol Square, four blocks away; and even from this distance they saw an astonishing number of people gathered there, clustering around the base of the Bell Tower and standing or moving to and fro on the slopes beyond. They stopped to watch, and Anne wondered why so many people should be there so early, and Julian proposed that they go that way and see.

  They came down to the corner of Ninth Street, just across from the Square, and paused to watch and to speculate upon this surprising assembly. Hundreds of people were already here, and each moment the number grew as individuals and groups joined the thickening throng. The crowd was disturbingly silent, and almost frighteningly motionless; it was as though these hundreds were listening and waiting for something they all foresaw.

  “And they’re almost all women,” Anne pointed out. “Julian, let’s ask someone what’s happening.”

  Julian might have objected, but Anne led the way across toward the gates, and he followed her. The crowd was massed beyond the Bell Tower and in the lower part of the Square, and they came to its fringes and Anne spoke to a neatly dressed young girl with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes.

  “What is it? Some celebration?”

  The girl looked at her with an angry laugh. “Celebration?” She extended one hand, and Julian saw her arm was thin and almost fleshless. “Do I look as if I had anything to celebrate?”

  From the center of the clotting throng a woman’s voice rose in a sudden, hoarse, vehement harangue. Anne asked: “What’s she saying?”

  The girl’s face was stony and expressionless. “She says her name’s Mary Jackson. She’s a huckster in the market. She says we have a right to live, and we’re going to.”

  The crowd began to move, and the girl moved with them. Anne called after her: “What are they going to do?”

  The girl looked over her shoulder. “Get bread!” she said. “Get bread and eat it!”

  The mass of people, as though by a single impulse, flowed down the slope toward the foot of the Square; it flowed through the gates into Bank Street like a whirlpool draining from the fringes toward the center, and Anne and Julian were sucked into it. Julian had brought only one crutch today. Anne kept close on his other side. They were caught in the clot of people pressing toward the gate, and Julian saw frightening faces all around him. The countenances of these women—there were few men in the crowd—were white and strained, their eyes burned, their lips twisted with unuttered whisperings. Their garments were ragged and faded, and from the throng, even in the fresh morning air, a stale, sour odor rose. Where had they come from? He would not have believed such people existed. What folly on his part had let Anne become entangled in this hideous mob?

  He tried to hold his position, to let the women pass and thus extricate Anne and himself; but the current swept them on as gravel is rolled along the bottom of a rushing stream. They were carried through the gate and across Bank Street and on down the hill across Main Street, and still on.

  The hush was like the hush of a storm about to break; Julian and Anne lost any independent volition. They were entrapped by the cohesive force inherent in this union of many minds driven by a single impulse to a single end.

  On Cary Street this mass of people, meeting hundreds of men and women swarming up from the lower part of the city, doubled or trebled its numbers. At the same time its structure loosened, as the women and the increasing number of men who now composed the mob spread along the street. Julian and Anne were able to escape the onward pressure, to stand aside as spectators; and Anne said softly:

  “But if they want bread, Julian, they won’t get it here. These stores are all extortioners.”

  Julian whispered: “Look!” A woman had produced a hatchet, she smashed in the window of a store. As though this had been a signal, a hoarse cry and the crash of breaking glass sounded all along Cary Street, and violence swelled like the roar of a storm-scourged tide. There were drays and country carts and wagons caught in the milling mob. The drivers sought to whip their horses and force a way out; but desperate women snatched at the reins and bridles, and drivers in sudden panic jumped to the ground and lost themselves in the crowd. Cary Street was jammed for as far as Julian and Anne could see; and the clamor of many shrill, greedy, hungry, hysterical voices had a high and terrible resonance like the vibration of a taut wire about to break.

  The two young people stood still, too intent to move, while stores were broken open and looted and wagons and carts piled high. A woman shuffled past them with h
er arms full of cavalry boots. A cart, so laden with brooms, bonnets, dresses, cloaks, and shoes that it seemed likely to collapse, was guarded by men and women who tried to force a way along the street with their loot. A man with a roll of cotton cloth like a baby in his arms sidled along the walls, and a woman with a tanned cowhide under her arm and a hatchet in her hand brandished her weapon to clear a path through the swirling masses of shouting men and screaming women and wet-lipped Negroes and excited children.

  “They’re not after food,” Anne said. Yet Julian saw that most of the people had seized what foodstuffs they could find; sacks of corn or meal, loaves of bread, slabs of meat. Hunger was the spring which drove the mob; the looting was no more than incidental. A sudden new stir ran along the street, a movement of the whole mass, and Julian touched Anne’s arm.

  “They’re moving,” he said. “We’d better get out of their wary.”

  The crowd, having emptied the stores along Cary Street, flowed back up Ninth toward Main. Julian and Anne, in the mob’s path, tried to keep ahead of the pack; but they were overtaken. Someone brushed Julian so roughly that he fell and could not rise for the press of others thrusting by, and Anne fought to protect him, elbowing aside the hurrying stream, frightened by the staring eyes, the open mouths, the blank heedless faces.

  Then an enormously fat woman, sweating profusely though the day was chill, her sleazy black dress torn down the side, saw Anne’s plight and paused to help her, shouldering aside the crowd.

  “Get him up on that leg of his, darlin’,” she said cheerfully. “Get him into the door yonder, out of their way.” Anne, sobbing her thanks, helped Julian to the haven of the doorway; and their benefactor said: “There! Now have some sense, young ones. Stay where you are!” She hurried away.

  They waited where they were for the crowd to pass; and Anne, sure Julian must be hurt, was full of sweet solicitudes. He reassured her as he could. “Not hurt a bit, honestly! Bumped my knee when I fell, but that’s all.”

  “Honest, Julian?” She searched his eyes, she caught his hands. One of the knuckles on his right hand was barked. “Oh look!”

  He laughed. “Guess someone stepped on it. It’s nothing.” He sucked at it to clean the small hurt.

  “Are you really and truly all right?”

  “Well,” he drawled teasingly, “I might pretend, if you’ll make over me!”

  She colored. “Don’t! There’s nothing funny about it!”

  The stream of passers-by had thinned, and they could go on. Looking along Main Street they saw the mob at work again, smashing windows, breaking doors. Then the City Battalion marched down from Capitol Square, escorting a carriage with Governor Letcher and Mayor Mayo. The soldiers forced a way into the throng, and Governor Letcher shouted for silence and got a grudging attention; and Julian and Anne saw Mayor Mayo stand up in the carriage and read something, and heard snatches of Governor Letcher’s words.

  “—disperse!—five minutes—order to fire!”

  Anne whispered pityingly: “Oh, Julian, they can’t shoot these poor women!”

  “We’d better get away from here before anything happens.”

  “No, no, look. There’s President Davis, on that dray!”

  They were near enough to hear most of what Mr. Davis said. “Disperse and go to your homes, I beg of you. Do not force our own soldiers to turn upon our citizens the weapons that should be let loose only against the enemy!”

  A woman screamed, like an animal in pain: “We want bread for our children!”

  “I would share my last loaf with my suffering people!” he cried. Someone beyond him shouted in derision and threw a loaf of bread which hit him in the head and staggered him and fell at his feet. He picked it up, held it high. “You see! You’ve plenty of bread, enough to throw it at people!”

  A quick relenting laugh ran through the crowd, and the tension of the moment eased. President Davis had their ear, and he talked a little longer, till the packed press began to loosen. From the borders of the throng, first individuals and then groups and clusters moved reluctantly away.

  Julian and Anne went slowly homeward, sobered by what they had seen. “I didn’t know there were so many poor people, Julian. Oh, I’ve seen little cabins and miserable farms tucked away in the pine woods up home, of course; but I always thought they were just shiftless old poor whites too lazy to work. But people like us—Papa, and you, and all the men I know—we don’t do any work either! Do you suppose there are lots of real poor people like these everywhere?”

  “I suppose so,” he admitted. “If you stop to think of it.”

  “If it’s hard for us to get enough to eat, even when we have plenty of money to pay for it, it must be just hopeless for them!”

  “President Davis said the Yankees were to blame,” he reminded her.

  “I guess the war’s to blame, whoever started it.”

  “Well, old Abe Lincoln started it.”

  “I guess so. But Julian, do you suppose women like these cared anything about—oh, all the big words, secession, and coercion, and slavery and things?” She hesitated. “Papa says the trouble comes from letting ignorant people vote, because they elect bad men to office and then the bad men make the trouble.”

  “I don’t know much about things like that, Anne.”

  “I don’t either.” After a moment she asked thoughtfully: “Julian, is it just people like us who want to fight the Yankees?”

  “People like us didn’t even want to secede. Not till Abe Lincoln tried to make us fight against the South.”

  “I know,” she assented. “General Lee didn’t want to secede even then. Papa told me so. But Julian, even if everybody like us wants to fight, there aren’t many of us. And all those thousands of poor women on Cary Street today, I guess they’d like to see the war stop.”

  Cinda and Vesta, when the two young people came home to tell what they had seen, were as disturbed as they; but then Tilda and Dolly appeared, and Tilda was furious. “It was just outrageous!” she declared. “I don’t know why the soldiers didn’t shoot them all, show them their places.” She said General Elzey and General Winder wanted to bring troops into the city to keep the peace. “I think they ought to do it, or we’ll all be murdered in our beds! The Yankees probably sent spies to start the whole thing anyway. Southerners wouldn’t behave like that unless someone egged them on.”

  Next day there were still angry crowds abroad, and at noon the City Battalion marched down Main Street again to drive the women away. There would be other lesser disturbances, and Colonel Rhett’s command was kept ready to meet any new emergency. Even a week after the riot, two battalions of soldiers were marched into the city to keep the peace. At Cinda’s insistence, Julian stayed indoors. “After all, Son,” she reminded him, “you might have been badly hurt if Anne hadn’t been there to take care of you. You’d better not risk getting caught in a crowd again.”

  Until she said this it had not occurred to Julian to be ashamed of his own inadequacy; but for a while he no longer went to seek Anne, till she came one day to demand his company. “I guess you’ll think I’m just haunting you, but if you never offer to be my escort, I have to come and make you, don’t I?”

  Julian went with her, but he was so silent that Anne watched him with troubled eyes. General Wise had just driven a small Yankee force out of Williamsburg, and she said if the big house at Great Oak had not burned they could go back there. Julian reminded her half the bridges were gone, so no carriage could make the journey, and Anne retorted that it was high time he began to ride again, and he said he guessed he never could, and she cried in a burst of tender anger:

  “Of course you could!” When his face set, she pleaded: “Don’t be mad at me; but you can do anything if you try, Julian! You make me just simply furious!”

  He shook his head. “I’m not much use, Anne. I can’t even go downtown without you to take care of me!”

  Her eyes flashed at him, widening in a way that made his heart leap. “Juli
an Dewain, you’re just perfectly ridiculous! Besides, I love taking care of you!”

  Her tenderness was wonderful; but with a boy’s instinct to nurse his woe, he put it away from him and said remotely: “We don’t see so many women on the street corners now. Maybe they’re getting more to eat.”

  She hesitated as though resentful because he avoided the issue; but then she accepted his cue. “Things are cheaper,” she agreed. “I got a pound and a half of bacon yesterday for three dollars, only two dollars a pound. They say there’s lots of bacon and flour coming from North Carolina, but Papa says General Lee wrote to Colonel Northrop yesterday that the army is just starving. He says the men get just barely enough to keep them alive!”

  “Aunt Tilda came for dinner Sunday,” he said. “She bragged that Mr. Streean has just made a lot of money buying bacon in North Carolina for forty cents and selling it for a dollar here.”

  “Oh, who does he sell it to? I’d like to buy some as cheap as that.”

  “To the stores. They buy up all they can get from the cheating quartermasters, and sell it for what they can get.” He said grimly: “That’s why there isn’t any for the army.”

  “Oh!” She looked at him in quick apology. “I never thought of that. I declare I just won’t ever buy any more!” Yet then she added honestly: “But I suppose I will, Julian. Papa says breakfast just isn’t breakfast without bacon, and what little we use doesn’t matter anyway, do you think?”

  “Oh, Anne, I didn’t mean you!” They laughed together at the absurdity of supposing that he could blame her for anything.

  So their hours together were resumed, but now and then some sorry thing happened to remind Julian of his lameness. They were on Main Street the day Mr. Dixon, clerk of the House of Representatives, was killed in an interchange of pistol fire with a man named Ford whom he had discharged. The shots were fired on Bank Street, parallel to Main and half a block away; but one wild bullet came down through the intersecting street and wounded a man not a dozen paces ahead of Anne and Julian. When he heard the thud of that bullet and heard the man’s cry, Julian tried to step in front of Anne to shield her; but his crutch tripped her so that she fell to one knee, and when he tried to catch her arm to break her fall he lost his balance and came down fairly on top of her. The mishap seemed to Anne completely ludicrous and she would have laughed and forgotten it; and Julian, angry and shamed and hurt, made himself laugh with her.