House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  “I know.”

  “I think Tommy’d be glad I like Rollin.”

  “I know he would.”

  Vesta turned to meet Cinda’s eyes in a long questioning. “Is it all right, Mama?”

  “It’s all right, my dear,” Cinda assured her. “Anything that makes you happy is all right.” And she added: “Tommy’d say so too, darling.”

  Vesta smiled and stirred and sat up. “If I don’t go to bed, I’ll be asleep right here. Good night, Mama.” She kissed Cinda, and went to her own room.

  The day Tilda came to tell them Dolly was married, Vesta was not at home. When she returned and heard the news, her first thought was of Rollin, and her first word too. “Mama, do you suppose Rollin knew, that night he was here?”

  “How could he, darling?”

  “Well, he may have come through Wilmington, so he might have seen her. Do you suppose he’s perfectly miserable?”

  “If he is, he’ll get over it.”

  “What did Aunt Tilda think about it?”

  “She was wretched, though of course she tried not to show it.” Cinda added in a thoughtful tone: “I never used to like Tilda, but I’m beginning to. I was so sorry for her.”

  Vesta murmured: “I wonder if Dolly’s—in a scrape.” But Cinda would not conjecture.

  In spite of dancing and charades and theatricals and many valorous gaieties, that was a sober month in Richmond. With the passage of the new currency bill, prices soared. Sugar rose to twenty dollars a pound. One morning somebody had written on the walls of houses along Main Street threats of riot and violence unless the famine was relieved, and someone set fire to the government bakery on Clay Street, and there were other suspicious conflagrations. They were blamed on Yankee agents, but Vesta thought they might have been started by poor desperate folk who thus sought revenge for their helpless suffering. Only the wealthy and those whose influence allowed them to buy from the government commissary had enough to eat.

  There were other complaints. The new conscription law had provoked an epidemic of evasion, and lawyers and unscrupulous physicians reaped a harvest. Judge Tudor told them of a lawyer in Lexington who handled sixty-odd cases in a month, at fat fees. “And every second-rate doctor is selling certificates of ill health. Rheumatism used to be a curse, but now men pay big fees to be told they have it. Gout too, but poor people can’t afford gout! Men who used to shave their gray beards so they’d look young are letting them grow now to prove how old they are; and men as spry as boys a year ago are hobbling around on canes.”

  Julian, fretting at his own helplessness to serve, damned these malingerers; and when General Bragg, as though to reward him for his disgraceful failures in Tennessee, was assigned to serve under President Davis as directing head of all the armies of the Confederacy, Julian was white with indignation. “It’s typical of President Davis to do a thing like that. From now on every soldier in the army knows that if the Yankees lick him he’ll be promoted! You can imagine how General Lee feels, and General Longstreet, and Johnston, and Beauregard. They win battles, so President Davis hates them; but General Bragg loses battles, so President Davis promotes him! It makes me sick!”

  Cinda laughed at his rage and accused him of reading the editorials in the Examiner; but Vesta saw Anne’s distress and advised Julian to be careful. “It bothers her to see you angry, you know; and you don’t want anything to bother her now.”

  “I know,” he admitted. “But I get so mad! I suppose the reason I get so worked up is because I can’t do anything.”

  “You’ve plenty to do, keeping Anne happy.” She kissed him. “And I’m very glad you can’t go off and fight any more. It’s nice for Anne and for Mama and me to have one of our men at home.”

  On the last day of February a cold rain came to end the long spell of bright weather, and Vesta welcomed relief from the dust that for weeks had been stirred up by every passing horse or cart or carriage, sifting into the house through every crevice. Next morning was dark with low clouds emptying themselves of rain; but before noon there was a sudden rumble of guns north of the city. Julian brought Anne in the carriage to leave her with Vesta and his mother; and he said enemy cavalry, a force of several thousand sabres, was reported approaching Richmond, and the local militia had been called out.

  “And even on crutches I can help man the fortifications,” he told them. “So I’m going. You keep Anne here.”

  Vesta would have protested; but since Anne did not, she and Cinda held their tongues. Julian returned before dinner time to say the enemy had fled, but that night they heard again the guns and musketry at some distance. The Dispatch reported that the raiders had come within three miles of the city, but the danger was now past.

  In the same paper Vesta’s eye lighted on a paragraph of praise of General Longstreet, which she read aloud to Cinda. “It calls him ‘one of the most sagacious and indefatigable of our military leaders,’ and it says: ‘His fame grows with a steady light, and the wider the field of action, the more are his rare qualities developed and demonstrated. It was always known that in battle his presence, like the white plume of Harry of Navarre, announced the post of honor and danger; but it remained for his management of a separate command to exhibit those faculties which constitute the great military leader.’ There, isn’t that nice? We must save it to show Uncle Trav. He thinks General Longstreet is so wonderful.”

  Cinda nodded. “I will.” She added honestly: “Yet—well, I’m fond of Cousin Jeems, but I can’t see that he’s accomplished very much in Tennessee.”

  “Papa said he was being an awful nuisance to the Yankees,” Vesta reminded her. “Just by staying where he is. They don’t dare let him stay there for fear he’ll march into Kentucky, and they can’t drive him out. And Congress gave him a vote of thanks two weeks ago!”

  “I suppose he’s doing some good, or he wouldn’t be there,” Cinda assented. “I’ll send the paper to Cousin Louisa to keep for him. I had a letter from her two or three weeks ago. It’s too bad, when she’s so near, that we can’t see each other more often. She says the baby is thriving. You know they’ve named it after General Lee.”

  “General Longstreet hasn’t even seen it yet, has he?”

  “No, it was born after he went west.”

  “I’ll bet he’s crazy to. He loves his children so.”

  Rain had given way during the night to snow, but when the sun broke through clouds the snow soon disappeared. Tilda came that morning with Dolly’s bitter letter. She was weak with tears, and they gave her what comfort they could; but when she was gone Vesta met her mother’s eye in a long glance.

  “Well!”

  Cinda bit her lip. “I ought to be ashamed of myself for feeling the way I do about that child!”

  “Do you suppose it was Captain Pew——”

  “For Heaven’s sake, Vesta, we’ve better things to think about, and talk about, than Dolly and Captain Pew.”

  “Aunt Tilda’s desperately worried about Darrell, too, isn’t she?”

  Cinda said sharply: “Good riddance to both of them!” She added apologetically: “Oh, Dolly may have some good in her, but I’m certainly not ashamed of despising Darrell!”

  By nightfall that day the Yankee raiders were surely gone; but everyone seemed to know that the enemy had meant to release the thousands of Yankees in Libby Prison; and the thought of what that might have meant was as frightening as the almost forgotten dread of a slave insurrection which had for generations haunted the South. Vesta remembered the thousands of hungry women, poor women with half-starved children clinging to their skirts, who tramped the streets. If the prisoners had been turned loose, these women might have joined them to loot and burn and kill. Enid came to tell them that hundreds of pounds of gunpowder had been placed under the prison to blow it and the prisoners to the skies at the first move to set them free; but Cinda refused to believe this.

  “We’re all just frightened into silliness,” she declared. “People are never so credulous�
�and never so cruel—as when they’re scared.”

  “But it’s true, Cousin Cinda!” Enid insisted. Vesta thought Aunt Enid began to look like an old woman, with her lifeless hair and the thin little lines around her mouth and the faint pouchiness of her throat. “I heard it from a dozen people this morning. I’m simply terrified, with no one in the house but Lucy and Peter and me.”

  “Big Mill will take care of you.”

  “Weren’t you scared at all, honestly?”

  “Not for myself,” Cinda said. “It’s a long time since I’ve taken time to think much about myself.”

  Her dislike of Enid was so plain that Vesta thought Enid must see and resent it. When the other was gone, she asked: “Mama, does Aunt Enid look old to you? She looks older than you do!”

  Cinda nodded. “Enid has always whined and complained and moaned and groaned,” she said. “After a while those things show in a woman’s face.”

  The clear cool weather held. Thursday there was another alarm, when General Butler was reported advancing up the Peninsula to attack the city; but nothing came of that. Then suddenly everyone knew that a detachment of the raiders had been ambushed at a ford near Walkerton in King and Queen County. Their leader, Colonel Dahlgren, was killed; and there was a rumor that he had meant to burn the city and kill President Davis. The Dispatch Saturday morning reported that an address to his command, found in Colonel Dahlgren’s pocket, ordered his men to “destroy and burn the hateful city, and do not allow the rebel leader, Davis, and his traitorous crew to escape.” It printed the address in full, and the detailed orders to burn mills with oakum and turpentine, to blow up bridges, to destroy the canal; and the repeated insistence: “The city must be destroyed, and Jeff Davis and Cabinet killed.” The Cabinet was sitting to decide whether the ninety prisoners from Colonel Dahlgren’s command should be hanged, and Secretary Seddon had written General Lee asking his opinion.

  Vesta, going with Caesar to buy provisions, heard furious voices raised in black anger at the infamous purpose of the raiders. When she came home Cinda had chanced to meet Mrs. Davis. “She remembers Colonel Dahlgren when he was a little boy,” she said. “Admiral Dahlgren, his father, brought him to call on her once in Washington. She says he was a charming little fellow, in a velvet suit with a lace collar. She just can’t believe the stories.”

  “Well, everyone else in Richmond believes them,” Vesta assured her. “They’re bringing his body to Richmond, and I heard one woman say when they do she’s going to go and spit on it!”

  Cinda pressed her hands to her temples, and she said wearily: “I think the worst thing about war is the way it makes credulous idiots out of silly women, and out of the men who stay at home and do no fighting. Mrs. Davis says Colonel Dahlgren and his men called at Secretary Seddon’s home on the way to Richmond; and Mrs. Seddon gave him a glass of blackberry wine and reminded him that she and his mother were schoolmates, and that his father was one of her old beaux. Yet if those silly orders are genuine, Secretary Seddon was one of those they meant to kill.”

  “Don’t you believe they’re genuine?”

  “Oh I don’t know. You can be sure of one thing, the South will always believe they are. Even if they are genuine, we’re at war, and I suppose they had a right to burn Richmond and kill Mr. Davis if they could; but I can’t believe even a stupid Yankee would be silly enough to carry papers like that when he knew he might be captured.”

  Colonel Dahlgren’s body came to Richmond Sunday afternoon by the York River Railroad. It lay in a baggage car till Wednesday before being secretly buried in an unmarked grave in Hollywood, and scores and hundreds crowded to see it, and for those three days every tongue was busy with the dead man and his deeds. At the hospital Cinda tended a wounded man who had been taken prisoner by Dahlgren’s troops and who later escaped.

  “He says they made a poor negro guide them, in Goochland,” she told Vesta. “And when the river was so high they couldn’t cross at the ford to which he led them, Colonel Dahlgren gave his own bridle rein to hang the negro with. Or so this man told me.”

  Vesta shivered. “They’ve put Colonel Dahlgren’s crutch and his wooden leg on exhibition at the Whig officer!”

  Cinda cried: “Oh surely not!”

  “Yes.” Vesta said in a lower tone: “And Mama, the men who killed him stripped off his clothes, and they cut off one of his fingers to get a ring he was wearing. Aunt Tilda told me. Mr. Streean saw the body.”

  “That might have been done by any blackguard, North or South,” Cinda commented. “That’s not so horrible, somehow, as keeping his wooden leg on show. And there’ll be people who will go to see it!”

  The hubbub of these happenings had begun to die down before at the week’s end Trav came home. He stopped at the house on Fifth Street, and Vesta and Cinda welcomed him with a surge of happiness and with eager questions.

  “I’m just off the train,” he said. “General Longstreet came to consult with General Lee and wanted my company.”

  “Oh, bring him for dinner tomorrow,” Cinda urged. “All of you come.”

  “I’ll tell him.” Trav hesitated. “I haven’t seen Enid yet. Are they all well?”

  “Just as you left them.”

  Vesta thought her mother might have been intentionally evasive, for Aunt Enid certainly was changed. She said quickly: “All but Lucy, Uncle Trav! She’s lovelier every day!”

  He smiled. “How’s Tilda—and her family?” Vesta told him of Dolly’s marriage as though it were happy news, and Cinda added an affectionate word about Tilda, but he was not satisfied. “See anything of Darrell?” he asked.

  The question surprised Vesta, but Cinda seemed unconscious of any strangeness in it. “No. He was at Chimneys for a while, but I don’t think he’s been in Richmond.”

  Vesta added: “He was at Chimneys when Uncle Tony was shot.”

  “Shot?” Trav was startled.

  “Yes. He’s all right now, though.”

  “Who shot him?”

  “It was a boy.” Vesta explained: “Someone had been stealing out of the smoke house, and Uncle Tony set a trap gun, and it was a woman named Mrs. Blandy, and it killed her.”

  “Ed Blandy’s wife?” Trav came strongly to his feet.

  “Why, I think so.”

  “My God!” Then in quick apology. “I’m sorry. But—Ed’s my good friend. I wouldn’t have had that happen. I’d rather be shot myself! Who shot Tony?”

  “Why, her little boy, when Uncle Tony took her body home.”

  Trav nodded sorrowfully. “That must have been Eddie. He isn’t as old as Lucy. I wonder who’s taking care of those children. Ed’s in the army.” He shook his head. “Oh, that’s too bad. I wish I could go down there.”

  He asked more questions, till they had told him the little they knew. They agreed, after he was gone on to Clay Street, that he looked well; but Vesta commented: “It’s funny he came to see us before he went home.”

  “Well, after all, Enid’s there.” Cinda’s tone was dry with dislike, and Vesta laughed.

  “Now, Mama, you say too many cutting things just to be clever. Aunt Enid’s all right! Shame on you!”

  “I despise her.”

  “Maybe if you didn’t she’d be nicer! Everybody’s nicer if you like them and tell them so.” And next day when they met Trav and Enid and the children on Grace Street on the way to church, Vesta put her own precept into practice, insisting they must come to dinner after the service. Enid eagerly agreed.

  Vesta counted fourteen generals in the congregation that morning, and General Longstreet was among them, so he too came to dinner. Cinda spoke of Cousin Louisa, and of the baby General Longstreet had not yet seen.

  “But I mean to, before I return to East Tennessee,” he assured them. “Louisa intended to go to Augusta for the cold weather. I’ve some cousins there. But she wasn’t well enough to travel, so she’s still in Petersburg; but I shall send her off to Augusta. The fighting this summer will come nearer Richmon
d, make living harder here; but the war hasn’t touched them down in Georgia.”

  “I’ve wanted to see her,” Cinda said. “But even Petersburg seems a long journey now. I can understand her dreading a trip all the way to Georgia.” And she asked: “You think things will be hard this summer?”

  He nodded. “We can’t keep all the holes stopped, and the Yankees are pressing in everywhere. Down in Mississippi, the little town where my sisters live is the state capital now. The legislature, the Governor, the state archives, everything has been moved from Jackson to Macon.” He added thoughtfully: “It might be wisdom if Richmond too were given up, if we drew our armies nearer together so they could support one another.”

  Vesta saw her mother’s eyes shadow, and she urged: “But, General, you’ve done some good in East Tennessee, haven’t you?”

  Longstreet chuckled. “Oh yes, we’ve been in General Grant’s beard. He hated to waste the time and effort necessary to crush us, but we’ve kept three times our number of Yankees occupied.”

  “Was the winter hard?”

  “No. No, we had a secure position at Bull’s Gap, and a rich countryside to draw on. General Lee tells me his army has been on short rations all winter; but since we didn’t have to depend on Colonel Northrop, we were well fed. And we’ve burned just enough powder to keep the men interested.”

  He left at once after dinner, but when he had gone they heard from Trav that these months had not been so idyllic as the General suggested. “He’s tried two or three times to resign,” he said, and to Cinda’s question: “Why, mostly disgust with General Bragg. Bragg would have lost Chickamauga if General Longstreet hadn’t driven ahead on his own responsibility. He was great, that day. Some of the European officers with the army thought his tactical formations were wonderful.”

  Cinda smiled. “What do you know about tactical formations?” Her tone was affectionate.

  “Not much,” he confessed. “I’m just telling you what others said. But after the battle President Davis came out there and called all the generals into council and asked General Longstreet to say what he thought of General Bragg.”