House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  Trav stared at him, feeling the slow pound of pulses in his throat. With the rushing of his blood his vision blurred, so that Streean’s face went out of focus. He set a hard control upon himself, turned to join Enid and the children with Tilda and Dolly in the hall. He had Tilda’s good-by kiss and Dolly’s. Then they were out of the house, turning toward home.

  He did not speak. Enid chattered pleasantly; the children walked in silence. But for Trav, Streean’s word was a key that unlocked the door to understanding. Streean had meant him to understand, and absently he wondered why, and guessed that anger had prompted the other to this malicious revelation. But no matter. Streean had meant him to know the truth. Well, now he knew.

  And he remembered that the children knew, as much as children could know, and April knew, and Mill knew. He remembered Lucy at the train. “Mama had a headache.” Her young eyes mature and stern. Peter: “Oh, she’s not lonesome. I guess she is now, though!” And Lucy’s instant warning: “Peter!” that silenced him. Trav thought he could have forgiven Enid any crime but this, thrusting evil knowledge into Lucy’s mind.

  At home Enid went at once to her room, but Trav kept the children with him. “Lucy,” he said, “you and Peter go to Aunt Cinda’s. Tell her we’re inviting ourselves to supper. Tell her Mama and I will be over pretty soon.” He added, like an afterthought: “But tell her not to wait for us!” Lucy’s eyes widened in surprise, and in alarm too; and he forced himself to smile, controlled his tones, spoke to Peter. “Like that, would you, son?”

  Peter clearly sensed nothing wrong; Lucy yielded obedience without understanding. When they were gone, surely gone, out of sight and around the corner where they turned into Fifth Street, he went up to the bed room. He entered without knocking. Enid had removed her dress, her hair was down, she lay along the couch by the window. When he shut the door behind him she said angrily: “Must you always burst into my room?”

  He said harshly: “Get up!” She did not move; and he caught her arm, jerked her to her feet, asked in a low tone: “What’s between you and Darrell?”

  She freed her arm. “You’re hurting me!”

  “Answer my question.”

  She hesitated, but only for an instant. “Between me and Darrell?” She looked up at him with mocking eyes, as angry now as he. “Don’t you wish you knew?”

  That was confession enough. Trav struck as a snake strikes, with an unleashed violence. By his blow she was swept against the couch and fell over it, rolling across the floor. She lay there unconscious, her eyes half-open, seeming not to breathe. Her petticoats were disordered, her corset cover was split across her breast, her legs sprawled.

  In that moment, if she had moved or cried out he might have killed her, but since she lay senseless he let her lie. Yet to do so, to be passive, was a thwarting bafflement. He was trembling with passionate and terrible anger for which he had now no outlet. He sat down on the couch, head in his hands, elbows on his knees, watching her and hating her.

  After a while his pulses slowed; and after a while she began to breathe, heavily at first, her breast heaving with her deep inhalations. Then that stertorous gasping eased, and her half-open eyes closed, and then they opened and fastened on him, and seemed to try to recognize him; and then into her blank eyes sense and remembrance came, and she sat up, pushing herself desperately away from him across the floor till she was backed against the wall. She crouched there, her cheek swollen and flaming red where his palm had struck, her face elsewhere white as ice, her mouth working soundlessly.

  Trav watched her for a long moment; but—she had been his wife. He could not kill her. Without a word he rose and left the room. He found April. “I’m going to supper at Miss Cinda’s,” he said. “The children have gone.” April’s eyes turned questioningly toward the stairs, but he made no explanation. April was full of years and wisdom. He need tell her nothing.

  At Cinda’s he said Enid had decided not to come, that she was tired. He was sure not even Cinda guessed the turmoil in him. When he and the children walked home through the pleasant mid-September night, he made them laugh, telling them how soldiers on a weary march would trudge in sagging silence for a while, till someone wailed in exaggerated woe: “I’m tired of walking and I want to go ho-o-ome,” and someone would answer: “I’m a sick little boy and I want my Ma-a-ma!” and the doleful wails would go on till the men forgot they were tired. He told them about the day General Longstreet tried to shame a soldier running away from a fight. “He said: ‘You’re acting like a baby,’ and the soldier began to cry and said: ‘I don’t care, General, I wish I was a baby—and a gal baby at that!’ ” Dredging his memory for incidents that would amuse them, he went on: “One day one of the men tried to cook some rice for his mess. This fellow was a fast talker. They used to say he talked like molasses in July. He didn’t know how much rice to cook, but he thought a gallon would be about right; so he put the rice to boil and it swelled till the kettle was full, and kept on swelling; and he kept dipping it out into tin cups and into his hat and every hat he could borrow, and the more the rice swelled the faster he talked, trying to explain what was wrong.”

  Their delighted laughter rang through the dark streets, and when they came home they sat together for a while and Trav strove to please them in every way he could, giving them a feast of himself upon which their memories might feed while he was away.

  For he must leave them at dawn, leave them with Enid; he must leave them to face what new knowledge? What new shame? While he played his part with them, he sought alternatives. Take them to Cinda? To Tilda? No, there was no recourse but just to leave them here, no one in whom he could confide the truth, no one he could enlist as their protector. He even considered appealing to Mrs. Albion, but of course that was impossible.

  No, they must stay and he must go. He would have said good-by to them tonight, but Lucy promised to breakfast with him. When they had bidden him good night and gone upstairs, he sat a longer while. If Enid were awake, she might come down. But she did not, and he did not go to her. He had no word to say to her. To depart without a word would be more eloquent than many words.

  When he went upstairs he listened at her door and heard no sound; yet he thought she must have heard him. The silence had a listening quality. He went into the room beyond hers. There was a connecting door between. The children slept across the hall. He undressed and lay down, but he did not sleep. Through the long night he sometimes wondered whether, a few feet away in the other room, Enid lay wakeful too.

  At dawn old April tapped on the door to rouse him; not on the door of the room he and Enid shared but on this door behind which he lay. How did the servants always know so well what their white folks did? He heard her rouse Lucy, too; and before he himself was ready Lucy went downstairs.

  Then the door between his room and Enid’s opened. His back was turned that way when he heard the sound; he swung and saw her. The red morning sky threw a crimson radiance that touched her; and she had made herself beautiful, her hair smoothly brushed lay loose about her shoulders, her soft garment was fresh and delicate, her color was bright; even the swollen cheek was made inconspicuous with powder. He stared at her and felt his anger ebb, and then she was clinging to him, kissing him, sobbing with flowing tears, beseeching him.

  “Don’t go, Trav! Don’t go! Don’t leave me all alone, Honey. Please!”

  He dared not speak. With a violence barely held in bounds, he thrust her away and hurriedly caught up his coat and opened the door into the hall. Her wailing cry made him look back; he saw her in a small woeful heap upon the floor. He turned and went quickly toward the stair.

  After their quiet breakfast Lucy walked with Trav through the empty streets of early morning to the depot where he would board the cars. He did not speak to her of Enid, for what could he say? “See a lot of Anne, and Vesta, and Aunt Cinda, Lucy,” he told her. “You and Peter both. I hope Peter and Julian get to be friends. If you ever wish you could talk to me, talk to Aunt Cinda. She and
I are a lot alike, you know.”

  “I just love you both, Papa.” He wondered how much a child could comprehend; but Lucy was no longer quite a child. “Take awful good care of yourself, Papa. I’d die if anything happened to you.”

  “No, you wouldn’t, Honey.” For something might happen to him, and she must be able to go on alone. “Everybody has to live his own life, her own life. Nothing that anyone else does, even if they do it to you, really matters; not as long as you go on being yourself.” The train was about to start. “There, Honey!” Her warm arms were tight around his neck, her lips under his. “Good-by.”

  Thus he left all that bitter and all that sweet behind him. At the station in Pocahontas, Big Mill met him with news that General Longstreet’s departure would be delayed till next day. Mill had put Nig in Ragland’s Livery Stables, by Powell’s Hotel on Sycamore Street. Trav nodded. “You stay with Nig and bring him to the Union Street depot tomorrow to put him on the train,” he directed, and went to report to Longstreet. The General explained the delay.

  “Pickett’s division is not to go with us after all. It’s still below strength, and short of officers.” He smiled. “But when he expected to go, General Pickett persuaded Miss Sally to marry him before he left, and we’ll wait to see the knot tied.”

  Trav tried to find something to say. “How’s Mrs. Longstreet?”

  “Why, real peart, Major.” Trav saw a fine happiness in the big man. “Yes, she’s comfortable, feeling fine. I’d like to stav a week or two, see the new recruit when he arrives; but we’ve got our work to do. We’ll leave tomorrow.”

  The hours till they boarded the cars were a torment of churning thoughts, despair and shame and rage. There were moments when he wished to return to Richmond and set his hands on Enid’s soft throat and rip the flesh away; and above all he wanted to lay his hands on Darrell. Some day he would.

  But suppose Darrell came back to Richmond while he himself was away, for weeks or perhaps for months in Tennessee? Suppose Darrell came again to the house on Clay Street, and Enid welcomed him, and Lucy and Peter had again to hear them laughing together in the drawing room. He imagined Lucy in her bed, across the hall from her mother’s room, lying awake in the listening night, hearing low laughing voices belowstairs, hearing stealthy footsteps on the stair and the soft click of a latch and then muffled whispers and half-smothered, breathless cries. To realize what Enid had already done to these children made him halfway mad. This that had happened in the past must not happen again.

  But if he were far away, how prevent it? Brett, Burr, Faunt, they would not be here. Julian was a helpless cripple. Yet somehow, for Lucy’s sake, a way must be found.

  He found it, and finding no other, desperately bent on protecting the children from new shame, he accepted it. Next day when he came to the depot Big Mill was already there, gentling Nig in the car with Longstreet’s Hero and the other horses belonging to the staff. He called the Negro aside and laid a charge upon the man.

  “Mill,” he said, “I want you to do something for me. You may get hurt in doing it, or afterward. After you’ve done it, come and find me. I’ll protect you if I can.” The Negro’s eyes were calm and unafraid. No gray tint of terror touched his lips; and Trav said: “I want you to take care of—everything of mine. And Mill, if Mr. Darrell Streean comes to the house while I am gone, kill him.”

  He saw Mill’s throat muscles work, saw the man’s eyes set and burn, and he saw in them a sort of joy. Mill said gently: “I ain’t nevah kilt a white man, Marse Trav; but I kin if you say so.”

  “I do say so.” They were in this moment no longer master and man, but friends.

  Big Mill nodded. “Yassuh, I will. I will, Marse Trav. You go on an’ whup dem Yankees an’ rest yo mind.”

  4

  August-November, 1863

  THROUGH that summer’s heat, Faunt had been ridden hard by a persistent cough; by weakness and a treacherous lassitude and an alarming failure of his energies. Sometimes he knew that he was parched by fever; and more than once Major Mosby, as though hiding secret solicitude behind a jesting tone, told him his cheeks were pink as a girl’s. Faunt was wise enough to suspect the truth, but he thrust it into the background of his mind.

  Late in August he rode with Mosby and his men toward Annandale for a raid on some unguarded bridges. They saw an opportunity to cut off a herd of a hundred horses being taken forward on lead to Meade’s army, and divided for the attack. At the last moment the guard on the horses was reinforced by the chance arrival of twenty or thirty Union cavalry, and the sharp fight that followed took an ill turn; for Major Mosby himself received a disabling bullet through the side.

  The led horses were captured, the Yankees driven off, Mosby borne away to precarious hiding; but the sharp work of the day had been exhausting, and when Faunt began to cough uncontrollably there was suddenly a sweet taste in his mouth and bright arterial blood stained his handkerchief.

  He turned off the road into a sheltering pine forest, and lay hidden for a day and a night, waiting for strength to come back to him. Clearly he must rest a while if he hoped to resume the violent exertions which his work as a scout involved; and he accepted this necessity. Moving slowly, conserving what strength he had, he came from behind Meade’s lines and passed through Lee’s army and rode slowly toward Richmond.

  It was well past midnight when he reached Nell’s door, tugging at the bell, holding to the door frame with both hands till Milly came to call: “Who dere?” A moment later she and Nell were helping him into the hall.

  When they had bathed him and put him to bed, Milly brought warm milk fortified with wine and a beaten egg. He drank it slowly, and Nell said he must sleep and sleep; but he made her sit a while. “Just seeing you, hearing your voice, letting your hand touch mine is the medicine I need most. Stay, let me talk myself to sleep.” So she stayed, stroking his hand between hers; and he told her of things done and seen in the weeks since they were last together. Lee’s army was recruiting its strength after the invasion of Pennsylvania. “He had seventy thousand men of all arms on the first of June,” he said. “By the time he got back into the Valley after Gettysburg, he was below forty thousand, not counting cavalry. Now he has close to sixty thousand again, feels strong enough to send Longstreet’s best divisions to Tennessee and face Meade with Ewell and Hill.”

  “We’ve heard General Lee will go to Tennessee himself?” she suggested.

  “No, Lee won’t leave Virginia. Longstreet will go, with McLaws and Hood and probably Pickett. They’ll join Bragg, hit Rosecrans hard.” He smothered a cough, for he tried always not to cough. To do so might tear apart the fragile web in which his life was precariously hung.

  “You’d better not talk,” she said, and her lips touched his brow. Her lips seemed cool, so he knew fever was on him. Doubtless she too knew. She talked in low easy tones, monotonous and soothing. Everyone was depressed by the reverses of the summer. From the deep South—Alabama, Mississippi—letters to Mr. Davis were full of lament and the forewarning of disaster. The Yankees, having failed at Charleston, now meant to try Wilmington; for it was to and from these ports that the blockade-runners came and went. Governor Vance was threatening to call home all North Carolina troops to defend their own state. While she talked, sleep rose like a tide to drown his senses; her low voice faded from his consciousness.

  When he woke it was full sun, and she was still sitting by his bed. He said she must be tired, but she would not let him talk. There was food, and milk to drink, and he slept again. For days, while she and Milly tended him, he seldom fully woke, sleeping as easily as a dog. It was a week or more before his wakeful intervals began to extend themselves into hours when he and Nell had the rich communion of long talk together.

  When she feared this would tire him again he said: “No, I need it. Away from you, I’m a solitary person, Nell; seldom talk with anyone. I’m starved for it.” He said slowly: “I’m surfeited with scouts and raids and dodging bullets and killing Yank
ees; but I’m starved for quietness and tenderness and—talk. I’m starved for you.” He smiled. “I’m like a baby, wanting nothing but to be fed and loved and fondled.”

  Yet he was soon hungry too for news; so though most of all they talked of themselves, he made her tell him what was happening outside this secret, happy room. Longstreet was gone to Tennessee; but a general named Frazier had shamelessly surrendered Cumberland Gap to the Yankees, so Longstreet and his men had to go roundabout. “I never heard of General Frazier,” Faunt commented; and she said no one had heard of him till this craven surrender. When word came of victory at Chickamauga, they exulted together; and she shared his dry rage because that victory, like so many others, was left, for lack of bold pursuit, a fruitless and an empty one. But she said that to be angry was bad for him; and she told him about the little kitchen garden which Rufus had made and strictly guarded, and from which came the fresh vegetables she gave him to eat from day to day. They had tomatoes in plenty, and lima beans. The cabbages were slow to head up, but Rufus picked the leaves to boil with bacon. Red peppers and okra gave a fine flavor to the rich soups Milly concocted, and Faunt gained strength every day.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are to have me taking care of you,” she told him proudly. “Not many people in Richmond get such nice things nowadays. Prices are so high no one can buy what little the stores have to sell. A barrel of flour costs sixty dollars!”

  Yet she gave him not only vegetables and bread but bacon and beef and everything he desired; and he told her she was a maker of miracles.

  “They’re very simple miracles,” she assured him. “It’s just the miracle of having money. I bought this beef today from Mr. Moffitt. He’s one of Colonel Northrop’s agents. He buys for the Government at twenty cents or less, and sells to the stores—and to people who keep on his good side, as I do—for fifty cents. Of course, the stores charge two or three times that.”