“Right in front of General Bragg?”
Trav nodded. “I suppose Mr. Davis thought no one would dare criticize General Bragg to his face, but General Longstreet doesn’t scare easily. He said he thought General Bragg would be a lot more useful somewhere else.”
“Good for him!” Vesta cried, but Cinda asked:
“Hasn’t Cousin Jeems had some trouble with his own generals?”
“Yes,” Trav admitted, and he added honestly: “General Longstreet didn’t agree with General Lee at Gettysburg, but he hasn’t much patience when his own subordinates disagree with him.”
Enid laughed. “I’m surprised you admit he has any faults at all.”
Trav looked at her briefly. “Why, I think everyone has faults, but I think he has fewer than most men.”
Lucy said happily: “Well, I just love him! He always makes me feel he likes me lots. I suppose that’s why.”
Cinda asked their errand in Richmond, and Trav said the General had come to discuss with General Lee plans for the spring campaign. “He’s urging that we strengthen the western armies and march into Kentucky. I believe he’s right. We might do something there.”
Vesta, listening, thought men never wearied of warfare and of war talk. Last summer, after the fierce shock at Gettysburg had left both armies so dazed that there had been since then no major action in the East, she had been secretly sure the war was lost; but now Uncle Trav seemed to look forward to new conflicts with confidence as high as ever. She remembered three years ago, and two years ago, and last year, when each success seemed to promise final victory till news from the West, or from Sharpsburg, or from Pennsylvania, shattered hope again. Uncle Trav was hopeful now; but hope was so easy—and so vain.
Trav stayed in Richmond till the midweek following. Longstreet, after his business here was done, went to Petersburg to see Mrs. Longstreet and his new son and Garland before returning to Tennessee; and Trav waited to go back with him. He told Cinda and Vesta that Longstreet’s proposals for a spring campaign toward Kentucky had been negatived.
“I suppose President Davis will never agree to anything if Longstreet favors it; so probably we’ll be back in Virginia with General Lee pretty soon. If we are, I ought to be here again before long.”
“I hope so,” Vesta told him affectionately. She felt that he hated to leave, and wishing to please him she said: “I like Lucy so much, Uncle Trav. She’s a, darling girl.”
His eyes lighted. “She seems wonderful to me.” He spoke to Cinda: “Enid’s pretty lonesome. I wish you’d see as much of her as you can, sort of keep her contented.”
Cinda hesitated. “Enid’s hard to—content, Trav.”
“Well, she thinks a lot of you. And she doesn’t seem to have any special friends.”
“Does she see anything of her mother?”
Vesta saw him color with slow anger. “No! I should hope not!” He hesitated, and looked at Vesta, and she suspected her presence prevented his saying what he might have said. “No, they don’t see each other.”
When he was gone it occurred to Vesta that he had not asked for any news of Faunt. “Did you notice, Mama?”
“I didn’t, no,” Cinda confessed. “It’s so long since any of us have seen Faunt, he might as well be dead.”
“We used to be such a close-together family,” Vesta remembered wistfully. “All of us together for Christmas, and for Grandma’s birthdays, and at every excuse we could find. We’re pretty badly separated now. Is it just the war, Mama?”
Cinda looked at her for a hesitant moment, and Vesta had again, as she had had with Uncle Trav, the feeling that there was something she was not to be told; but the older woman said wearily: “I suppose everything that happens nowadays comes one way or another from the war.” She leaned back in her chair. Her eyes closed, and her voice was low. “War’s a madness. It drives men to self-destruction, like the Gadarene swine in the Bible. But war’s only the beginning of misery, Vesta. This war will leave sores that will not heal in your lifetime, or your children’s. When boys fight, they’re often better friends afterward; but it’s not so with nations.” She said in a dull voice: “You see, when boys fight it’s just in sudden anger. But when nations go to war, everyone has to be taught to hate, so they will kill and kill and kill.”
“Like Tommy,” Vesta murmured. “But he never learned to hate. He wasn’t even carrying a gun when they killed him. He never killed anyone.”
“Men don’t like to hate,” Cinda assented. “I think men are naturally friendly. But women have a gift for hating. All of us women in the South are proud to hate the North, and I suppose it’s the same in the North, with the Northern women. They tell us lies about the Yankees, and they tell the Yankees lies about us, and we believe the lies.” She shook her head. “Some blackguard cut off Colonel Dahlgren’s finger, so Northern women will be told that all Southern soldiers mutilate dead Yankees—and they’ll believe it. When one Yankee bullies a Southern woman, we’re told that all Yankees are cruel monsters, and we believe it. So they hate us and we hate them. Of course, when we’re conquered they’ll stop hating us; but we’ll go on hating them. North and South will be one country, but we’ll hate the North and do all we can to hurt her, even though it hurts us too, as long as I live and as long as you live and as long as your children live.”
Vesta thought of little Tommy, and she thought of other children who would one day be born to her. “Does it have to be so, Mama?”
Cinda for a moment did not speak. Then her eyes opened. “There is one man who will make the hating end with the war, if he can. I pray to God he can.”
“Who?”
“President Lincoln.”
Vesta felt a deep astonishment. “Why, Mama, you sound as though you—liked him. You used to abuse him terribly!”
Cinda’s eyes held hers for a long time, as though in deep reflection; but she only said at last: “I’ve felt differently since I saw him. He’s a great, good, compassionate, tender man.”
While March drifted away, their days were filled with little things. Barbara wrote from Raleigh that people in North Carolina wanted to make peace. “Mr. Holden, the editor of the paper here, is running for Governor against Mr. Vance on a peace platform, and Governor Vance wants President Davis to try to make up with the North.” She said the North Carolina mountains were full of deserters. “They caught twenty-two deserters in Yankee uniforms in a fight at Kinston last month, and they hanged them all before Judge Preston could turn them loose. Governor Vance says President Davis sha’n’t suspend habeas corpus here as long as Judge Preston says he mustn’t. I don’t know what habeas corpus is, but there’s lots of talk about it.”
The babies, she said, were thriving. Virgil, though he was not yet two years old, was a perfect chatterbox, and little Burr was a buster. She hated to think of them all in Richmond with nothing to eat. Why didn’t they come to Raleigh? “Governor Vance won’t let the impressment men seize things here. He says North Carolina has a right to take care of herself.”
The papers day by day reported from all over the South a like resistance to impressment, refusal to recognize the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, anger at the more rigorous conscription law. Each state, jealous of its own rights, hindered or obstructed the central Government, and Vesta cried indignantly:
“But, Mama, how do they think we can ever win the war unless we all work together?”
“Oh, the South has always believed in states’ rights,” Cinda reminded her. “But unless the states give up some of their rights, there won’t be any South by and by.”
Late that month a thousand Southern soldiers returned from Northern prisons. They arrived on Monday. The day before, at St. Paul’s and in the other churches, the ministers asked everyone who could do so to send provisions to Capitol Square to feed them. Cinda and Vesta, enlisted by Tilda, helped manage that welcome. President Davis made a speech to the returned men and promised they would soon be with their old comrades in the army; and
Vesta, seeing among them many who were no more than boys, wondered whether they were as glad of this as they dutifully pretended to be. When in the confusion afterward she came near Mr. Davis and he bowed to her, she asked his opinion.
“Do they want to go back in the army, do you think?”
“They must go back,” the President said coldly. “We need every man.”
“Can you feed them? The army’s hungry all the time, even now.”
He smiled bitterly. “My dear young lady, it’s easy to feed hungry men. They’d as soon eat rats as squirrels. At Vicksburg, mules were considered first-rate fare. Of course we can’t spare our mules now; but our soldiers will be fed!”
She was furious at his heartlessness and thought General Longstreet was right in hating him; but when she repeated this conversation to her mother, Cinda said: “He’s desperate, you know, Vesta. He knows we’re lost. Be a little patient with the wretched man.”
“Wretched!” Vesta protested. “The poor prisoners were the wretched ones, so hungry and weak and dazed. I don’t think they ought to be made to fight again. They’ve done their share.”
“I suppose no man’s done his share as long as he’s still alive,” Cinda said in a low tone. “There’s no end to it, vou know.”
They had that week a long letter from Jenny. Affairs at the Plains went well, she said, except that it was hard to find clothes for the people. “The neighbors tell me you can buy silks and laces at the Bee sales in Charleston when the blockaders come in, but the blockaders don’t bring calico and linsey-woolsey and things fit for work clothes. We get some cotton from the Macon Mills, and we’ve put spinning wheels and hand looms to work; but they’re too slow to keep everyone supplied.” Needles were scarce, she said; and buttons too, though gourd seeds were a useful substitute.
“I can send her some needles,” Vesta declared. “I’ve seven and I only need a big one and a middle-sized and a little one.”
Jenny told them the news of Columbia and of Camden. “There’s a great to-do because General Lee wants our cavalry to go to Virginia,” she wrote. “Charleston’s getting up a petition of protest to send to Porcher Miles. They say if the cavalry goes, the Yankees will sail right into the harbor, as though the cavalry would be of any use against the Yankee fleet. Or for anything else, for that matter, as long as our bold young cavaliers insist on staying here. They spend their days riding around the country, and every farmer hates to see them come along, because they always want his likely horses. They wear their own horses out, they’re always in such a hurry to get nowhere. Of course none of them has ever been within miles of any Yankee, except Yankee prisoners. They call themselves our protectors, but they’re furious at the notion of going off to Virginia where they might have to do some real protecting. I hope General Lee insists. We’ll be well rid of them.”
She asked for news of Dolly, and Vesta said in surprise: “Why, I wrote her about Dolly’s being married.”
“So did I,” Cinda assented. “But you never know what will happen to a letter in the mails nowadays. We don’t seem able to manage so simple a thing as a post office, much less a war.”
They were to hear more about that matter of the South Carolina cavalry. On the last Tuesday in March, when an easterly gale drove sheets of rain blindingly through the streets, Rollin Lyle appeared at the house. He was soaked through, and Vesta and Cinda made him change into some of Brett’s clothes while old June took his uniform to dry. Then there was time for talk, and he said he was going to Charleston, where the Seventh South Carolina Cavalry was assembling to come to Virginia.
“I’ve transferred to the cavalry,” he explained. “And I’ll be in Major Trenholm’s squadron, with some of my friends from the coast toward Savannah. I’ve always wanted to be in the cavalry. I’ve carried a pair of spurs in my knapsack for three years now. So when this chance came, I asked for it.”
“I’m so glad you got it, if you want it.” Vesta thought there was something new in Rollin. Perhaps Dolly’s marriage had released him from long bondage. He was his own man now, with a high head.
“Why, I was lucky. I got mad at the right time.” And he explained: “I was riding one day with some cavalry officers, and we took a few fences and came to a bad one, on a hillside, with slippery mud for the approach. It was pretty high, and they decided not to take it. I suppose I wanted to show off. Anyway, I tried it, but my mare slipped in the mud. She made the fence all right, but she came down so hard the girth broke, and the saddle and I went over her head.” He grinned. “It must have knocked me senseless, or made me too mad to be sensible, because I didn’t even notice her saddle was gone. I vaulted on her back and took the fence without any saddle at all; and they were all laughing, and that made me angrier than ever. They said they were laughing to see a man jump better without a saddle than with one; so I threw the saddle on her back without any girth and took the fence twice. They said the cavalry needed men who could ride like me.” He colored. “Guess I’m bragging!”
“I like your brags,” Vesta told him affectionately. “You’ve never bragged enough to suit me, Rollin.”
He would stay the night, take the early train. When Cinda left these two together, Vesta to her own surprise found herself a little ill at ease, groped for any word at all. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here that night you left the note, Rollin. Did you find everyone well at home?” Her own carefully polite tone amused her. How ridiculous, to make conversation as though they were strangers!
“Why, they’ve had some trouble,” he said, yet so abstractedly that she knew he was thinking of something else; but he went on: “Papa’s had a hard time keeping them from conscripting his overseers. Last year he sold about a thousand tierces of rice to the Government or to North Carolina or South Carolina, and five hundred more in January, and he’s made four or five hundred bushels of salt. His taxes were over five thousand dollars. But even if the Yankees let him alone, he can’t keep it up without overseers.”
“I shouldn’t think so,” Vesta agreed.
“And of course negroes keep running off to the Yankees,” Rollin told her. “And he can’t work the swamps along the coast. He’s working too hard. Mama’s worried about him.” He said without a pause: “I wanted to see you that night too.” He looked toward the hall as though to be sure they were alone. “I was pretty excited, Vesta.” He hesitated, his color high. “I’d seen Dolly in Wilmington.”
“Oh?” She had not expected this. “In Wilmington?” How stupid I sound, she thought; repeating things like a ninny.
“Have you seen her?”
“No. She’s married, you know. She’s living down there.”
“I know. Bruce Kenyon. Julian knew him when they were cadets at the Institute in Charlotte.”
“Yes, he told us.” Julian had said Kenyon was a tall, easily embarrassed youngster. “He just couldn’t believe Dolly’d marry him, after all the beaux she’s had. Julian says he’s years younger than Dolly.”
“A year or two.” There was something guarded in Rollin’s tone; and she prompted him.
“How did you happen to see her?”
Slowly he found words. “Well, I was on my way back to duty.” He grinned. “You see, I had mumps while I was at home, so I was late starting back; and our train kept breaking down, so I stayed in Wilmington over Sunday.”
“They say it’s exciting there.”
“I guess it is. The town’s full of blockade-runners and speculators and English officers and thieves and gamblers, and everybody has his pockets full of money. I went to the Corner Celler and gave two months’ pay for a dozen oysters. Prices are worse there than they are here. Gold’s four hundred for one; but everybody seems to have plenty of money. There’d been two big auctions there that week. One was to sell the cargoes of three ships, the Pet and the Lucy and the Wild Dayrell.” His tone hardened. “I saw the lists of things to be sold. Nothing the army needs—just luxury goods. Reading the lists made me so mad I added up some of the figures. Ninety-one ba
les of prints; and I don’t know how many of broadcloth and alpaca and cassimere and mohair and flannel and satinet. And clothes: shirts, handkerchiefs, thread, buttons, pins, needles, shawls, gloves, ribbons. There were eighty-seven cases of shoes. And hogsheads of crushed sugar and coffee and tea and vinegar and oil and soap and candles and salt; and a whole shipload of liquor. Six casks of brandy, and eighty casks of Bourbon, and ten half-pipes besides, and eight pipes of gin, and eight hundred cases of wine and ale. And drugs, of course. But not a gun, or a pound of lead, or a blanket, or anything for the army! The blockaders can make more money bringing in luxury goods.”
She said gently. “You were telling me about Dolly, Rollin.”
“Oh, yes! I got so mad I forgot. Well, I ate my oysters and read the paper, and I’d about decided to go see Miss Eliza Vane in Lucretia Borgia when Bevin Ross came in. He said the play was pretty unpleasant and the afterpiece, Nan the Good-for-nothing, wasn’t as spicy as it sounded, and I’d better come down to Fort Fisher with him. He’s an aide to Colonel Lamb.
“So we started, but we had a time getting there. It was a fine warm day in Wilmington and we had a fair breeze most of the way, but there was a hard blow coming up and I thought we’d swamp before we got to the Fort.”
He hesitated, but Vesta did not prompt him. “Some of the blockaders had anchored in the lee of the Fort to ride out the storm,” he said at last. “Colonel Lamb always entertains the captains when they can come ashore, and some of them were there for dinner. Colonel Lamb’s a mighty handsome man. He wears a little chin whisker and a mustache, and he has big dark eyes and a slender, long face. He’s as beautiful as a woman.”
He paused again, and Vesta saw his color rise. He looked at her appealingly. “I probably ought not to tell you. I haven’t told anyone else.”
House Divided Page 140
