House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  “You can tell me,” she said, and wondered why she was trembling.

  “It’s you I want to tell,” he said; and his tone made her pulse quicken. “You know how I’ve always been about Dolly? In love with her. Or thinking I was.” She did not trust herself to speak; and he said, almost hurriedly: “Well, she was there, at the Fort, with a captain named Pew.”

  “Yes, I’ve met him.”

  “There were two other ladies,” he explained. “Mrs. Tonne of New Orleans, and an English lady who had come to Wilmington to join her son. Dolly was ever so gay, more so than I’ve ever seen her. She told me that when she got to Wilmington with Jenny, on the way to the Plains, Darrell and Captain Pew took her to the theatre, and then Darrell persuaded her to go to Nassau with them——”

  Vesta asked quietly: “Was Darrell there that night, at the Fort?”

  “No, she said he’d gone up to Wilmington in a little sailing boat. Dolly had refused to go with him. She said she wouldn’t risk anything smaller than the Dragonfly. That’s Captain Pew’s ship.” Rollin met her eyes. “And Vesta, she told me she was going to marry Captain Pew.”

  Vesta was about to exclaim: “Captain Pew!” But she caught herself in time. No matter how astonished you were, you need not turn into an echo! “Really?” she said instead. That was stupid enough; but she could think of nothing else to say.

  He nodded. “Yes. That was after dinner. She and I were talking, and he came to join us; and she put her hand on his arm and said they were going to be married.” He hesitated. “So I said he was to be congratulated, and he bowed; but I thought he was surprised and angry. Then he said they must bid us goodnight and go aboard the Dragonfly so they’d be ready to catch the morning tide if the wind moderated, and Dolly said she hadn’t half finished her visit with me, and couldn’t I come with them; and he said there wasn’t a vacant cabin, but that I could join them next morning for the trip up river.”

  He drew a deep breath, and Vesta felt her pulse thud in her throat as he went on.

  “So at first light I got a boatman to take me out to the Dragonfly.” He held her eyes. “I’d already realized something, Vesta. I’d realized that I was glad Dolly was going to be married. I’d always sort of imagined I was wild about her; but now I was glad she was going to marry someone else.”

  He waited as though expecting her to speak, but she only nodded, as though this were a matter of course, and he said hastily: “Well, Bruce Kenyon was at dinner at the Fort that night, and he was going home on furlough, so next morning when he heard I was going up river on the Dragonfly he went out with me to ask if he could go along, and Captain Pew said certainly.”

  “Did Dolly know him?”

  “He’d never seen her till the night before, but she bowled him over. You could see that.” She nodded, and he went on. “Crossing the bar was pretty exciting. There was a line of waves and foam, and it looked as though we’d surely sink or something. We did scrape the bottom once, between waves; but then we were over, and we just whizzed up the river.” In a graver tone he continued: “But I could see that Dolly and Captain Pew had had a quarrel about something; and on the way up the river she led me off to the back end of the ship, and Bruce Kenyon came after us, and she laughed at him in her prettiest way, and told him to let us be alone.”

  Vesta watched him, intent on every word, half-guessing what he would say. He blurted it out at last. “Vesta—she wanted me to marry her.”

  Vesta found herself folding and refolding a pleat of her skirt. She watched her hands, drawing the fabric between her fingers, trying to control the great confusion in her mind. “But she’d said she was going to marry Captain Pew?”

  “That’s what I told her,” Rollin agreed. “But she said I surely couldn’t believe she would marry a blackguard.” He spoke heavily, slowly. “I think she wanted me to call Captain Pew out. I’m sure she did. But I didn’t do it. I wasn’t afraid—that wasn’t it.”

  “I know, Rollin.”

  “I just never wanted to see her again! I wanted to jump overboard, or run, or anything to get away from her. I’m ashamed of myself; but—well, that was the way I felt.” And he added miserably: “I didn’t say anything, but I guess she knew.”

  “Did she really come straight out and ask you, Rollin?”

  “Yes. Oh, she did it in a way that she could pretend was just a joke. After she sent Kenyon off she said: ‘You know what I wish, Rollin?’ And I said: ‘What?’ And she said: ‘I wish you and I were going to be married in Wilmington this morning!’ ” He colored. “And then she waited, and all I could think of was to laugh and ask her what about Captain Pew.”

  “Did she seem frightened?”

  “No, just sort of joking, but furious underneath.” He added: “But I’ve thought since then that maybe she really was frightened.”

  “What happened?”

  “Why, she said he was a blackguard, and waited, and I didn’t say anything; and she laughed and said she had always thought I was crazy about her! I still didn’t say anything, and then she said: ‘Well, you can never say you didn’t have your chance, Rollin!’

  “And then she went away along the deck and I just stood there, and when we docked she took Bruce Kenyon’s arm and walked off along Front Street with her head in the air. I was behind them. There are houses and yards and picket fences and trees along Front Street, and she and Mr. Kenyon were holding hands and she was laughing up at him. I turned off up Market and I didn’t see her again.”

  “Did they get married right away?”

  “I don’t know. I tried to find Darrell. He wasn’t at the Carolina Hotel, or at the old Purcell House; and no one had seen him. I didn’t know about her being married till somebody brought the news to camp here. Everyone knew Dolly, of course.”

  Vesta bit her lip. “No one knows where Darrell is,” she murmured.

  “Was it all right for me to tell you?”

  “Of course, Rollin.”

  He asked in a hushed voice: “Vesta—do you know why I wanted to tell you?”

  She knew; yet there was in this moment soft panic in her, and she was not ready to let him know how much she knew. She rose, suddenly poised and mature and infinitely older than he. “It’s time we retired,” she said. “Don’t be worried, Rollin. Not about anything. Come.”

  He followed her in silence. She turned out the gas and they went up the stairs together; and she felt him silent and shamed behind her, like a guilty boy. So at the stair head she relented a little.

  “Don’t blame yourself, Rollin,” she said. “If Dolly is in trouble, she made it for herself.” And she smiled at him and said: “And I’m ever so glad you don’t think you’re in love with her any more.”

  Thus, for then, they parted.

  11

  March—May, 1864

  TRAV through the dreary winter in Tennessee never long freed himself from the shamed memory of his violence to Enid; and he came to Richmond in March not as a stern and unforgiving husband but hungry to be forgiven. Lucy’s rapturous welcome and Peter’s proud gladness warmed and comforted him; old April laughed through tears to see him again; but when Enid came downstairs and he turned to face her, it was like a small boy expecting punishment.

  She met him with a confusing, humble sweetness; with a cheek for him to kiss; with a gentle word. “Why, Trav, how nice! We didn’t expect you.” Trav was grateful to her for making this reunion so easy. As long as the children were with them, asking many questions, eager for his answers, he was safe; but to put off the inevitable hour when he and she would be alone, he made the stories he told the children as long and as exciting as possible. There was little to tell except of cold and snow, but when Peter said in some disappointment that being a soldier didn’t sound very exciting, Trav spoke of the guerrilla bands active in Tennessee.

  “A lot of people there are for the Union, of course; and deserters from both armies hide in the mountains, and there are gangs of Yankees and Southerners all mixed together, and
they go around robbing and burning and killing.”

  “Why didn’t you just hang them?” Peter demanded.

  “Well, sometimes we tried to catch them. Once we found a woman and her children crying in the snow by the ashes of her house. That gang had what the leader called a ‘cash rope.’ They hung her husband up by the neck to make him tell where his money was; but he didn’t have any money, so he couldn’t tell; so they bored a hole in his skull with a gimlet, trying to make him tell. When that killed him, they burned the house.”

  “Did you catch them?”

  “Matter of fact, we did,” Trav said, and he laughed. “That was funny, in one way. We found out where the leader lived, and sent some soldiers to surround the house and search it. We didn’t catch him in the house, but one of the soldiers was sitting on a box out in the yard and he heard a noise underneath the box; so he got up off it, and the box moved. The man had a tunnel from inside his cabin so he could crawl out and get away, and the box covered the end of the tunnel. So we got him.”

  “Well, did you hang him?” Peter urged. Enid protested that Peter should go to bed, that he would not sleep a wink after such stories; but Peter pleaded till Trav assured him that that particular bushwhacker was well and duly hanged.

  When Trav and Enid were at last alone, Trav thought they were like strangers newly met who seek to discover shared interests, mutual acquaintances, anything that will serve as foundation for commonplaces. They talked for a long time; and he found himself protracting this conversation, needlessly elaborating every incident.

  For when this polite talk ended, they would go upstairs. What then? He could not answer this question, but at last it grew so late that to sit here longer was absurd. Enid was the first to rise; he followed her without a word. But in the upper hall, when they reached the door of their room and she laid her hand on the knob, he surrendered to his longing for confession and for absolution.

  “Enid,” he said humbly, “I’ve damned myself a thousand times for striking you.”

  When he spoke, her back was toward him; she was just opening her door. For a moment she did not move. It was as though she were still listening to the words he had spoken. But then she turned, at first slowly and finally with an eager, hungry haste; and she threw herself into his arms and her lips pressed his in a fierce, demanding rapture. “I loved it,” she told him, in a husky whisper. “I loved it, Trav. I always love you most when you’re mad!” Lips hot on his, eyes laughing up at him. “That’s why I torment you, darling! To make you mad! I hate you when you’re calm!”

  When Trav set out on the return to Tennessee, he was ready to believe that his life with Enid would be hereafter untroubled and serene. He joined General Longstreet in Petersburg, and they went by the South Side Railroad to Lynchburg, and by the Virginia and Tennessee to Greenville and Longstreet’s headquarters. Trav wished he might break the journey long enough to ride across the mountains to Martinston and Chimneys; and he confessed this desire to General Longstreet, telling him the sorry story of Mrs. Blandy’s death. “Her husband’s my good friend. I’d like to see if there’s—anything I can do for them.”

  But Longstreet shook his head. “It would take several days, and you might have trouble. The mountains are full of bushwhackers.” He chuckled. “A whacker behind every bush. No, I can’t spare you, Currain. I expect we’ll be moving back into Virginia presently.”

  “I suppose so. As soon as the roads are dry.” Trav gave up thought of Martinston.

  “Yes. And ’Lys Grant won’t wait longer than he must before putting his army on the move. If we sent a force toward Kentucky, we might break up his plans for the summer; and if we could make Grant waste the summer, Lincoln might be defeated in the fall elections. I proposed this, but the decision is against me.”

  “You think a move into Kentucky would give us hope of winning?”

  “I don’t think it with my head, no,” the big man admitted. “If we could concentrate our forces, much might be done; but our armies are scattered. Each state insists that its own borders be defended, so we have to keep an army in South Carolina, and another in Georgia, and another in North Carolina. We waste our strength by companies and regiments. There’s no victory in such a course. So my head says there’s no chance remaining.” His voice sang. “But, Currain, my heart doesn’t agree! The spring of the year always stirs my blood. There are battles ahead, and there’s always hope in battle.”

  At headquarters they found that during their absence the condition of the little army, as far as clothing and shoes were concerned, was much improved; but now rations were short. Hunger meant desertions. The day after his return, riding to inspect the works on the heights above Bull’s Gap, Trav saw in the valley below him men drawn up in a hollow square, and he heard the rattle of the volley as some culprit died.

  He rode on, saddened by the sight, toward a shoulder of the hills whence he could look far across the rolling countryside. The day was fine and clear and deceptively warm; one of those spring days which tempt fruit trees into premature blossoming, just as a coquette’s smiles invite advances which a moment later she repels. Off to the east, the mass of the Great Smokies notched the sky, and north and northeastward the rampart of Clinch Mountain marched into Virginia. General Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia lay far away in that direction in their camps along the Rapidan; and presently Longstreet’s First Corps would move to the railroad and go to join Lee for the summer campaign.

  Trav returned to headquarters still thinking of the poor fellow who had been shot that morning for his crime against the laws of war. In the two or three weeks that followed he had twice to serve on courts-martial; but the charges were minor ones; disobedience, theft and pilfering, insubordination, drunkenness, sleeping on the post. So the penalties imposed were trivial; confinement, ball and chain, the barrel shirt, bucking. The punishment might fit the crime. For insubordination, one culprit had to stand on the head of a barrel an hour a day for a week, reading aloud the Articles of War. For drunkenness another was required to ride a rail without a saddle while he was drummed three times around camp. A man who slept on post was ordered to wear day and night for a month an iron collar with spikes sharp enough to deny him any but the sleep of complete exhaustion.

  Longstreet himself this winter and spring had been diligent to keep up the morale of the army. Once when they captured a train at Bean’s Station and found a car loaded with coffee, he directed that after fifteen hundred pounds had been set aside for the sick, all the rest be distributed among the private soldiers, with none for the staff mess or the officers. He made regular visits to the hospitals and to the regimental bivouacs, doing whatever was possible for the greater comfort of the men. When the ground began to dry, he instituted drills by company and regiment and brigade and by division. Captain Blackford’s charming young wife had come on from Lynchburg to spend these winter months with her husband here; and when Longstreet one day ordered a march-past she sat with him to receive the salutes of the regiments; and she was so lovely that every man braced his shoulders as he came under her eye. Other wives were here for short stays or for long, so headquarters was pleasantly gay. As the time drew near when the army would have work to do, Trav thought the First Corps was at fighting pitch again.

  Late in March came the expected orders to prepare to join Lee’s army; and as though the orders were a signal, the weather took a turn for the worse. They marched through mud and a pelting snow to Zollicoffer, to wait there for the cars; and on the seventh of April the brigades began to entrain. But there were delays, for cars were scarce and the railroad was in precarious condition. Not till the thirteenth did Longstreet and the staff reach Lynchburg.

  There Captain Blackford had the ill news of his father’s death, and he asked permission to stay a few days and wind up Mr. Blackford’s affairs. “He worked himself to death,” he told Trav. “He was in charge of funding all the currency under the new law; and trying to satisfy people, and explaining the law, and telling th
em why they couldn’t buy six percents after the law went into effect, and making them take four percents, and keeping all the figures straight was more than he could stand. And he was handling money for a lot of his friends, so he had to watch the tobacco market, too.”

  Trav remembered regretfully that Mr. Blackford had managed some of his own transactions; so he had contributed to the burden the old man bore.

  Captain Blackford stayed behind, but Longstreet and Trav and the others of the staff boarded the cars to go on to Charlottesville; and on the twenty-second they proceeded to Gordonsville, and the First Corps established itself at Cobham Station. Sunday, Brett rode over the few miles from Barboursville, where the Third Howitzers were in camp, to hear from Trav the latest news of loved ones in Richmond and to ask many questions about the winter in Tennessee.

  Trav said that once Longstreet’s little army was settled for the winter the men were able to be comfortable. “But the retreat from in front of Knoxville was a hard business. We were short of everything. The beef we got was so poor that there wasn’t any grease left on top of the water you boiled it in. We had to take the shoes and the nails off dead horses to shoe the ones still alive, and we killed our own worn-out animals to get their shoes. The Yankees threw their dead horses into the river, and we’d watch for the carcasses coming down and drag them ashore and rip off their shoes. That was our worst pinch.”

  Brett nodded understandingly. “We can’t get along without horses, but they’re a lot of trouble.”

  “It was better after we went into winter quarters,” Trav said. “Major Moses found plenty to feed us. He seized the account books of the mills and traced out the wheat that way; and he got bacon by seizing flocks of sheep and trading two pounds of mutton that wasn’t fit to eat for one pound of bacon that was.”