House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  To wait a while; to ride out one day along the road to the Soldiers’ Home and meet a carriage in which rode a certain apelike man; then if he lived, to return to Nell again. If it were for the last time, let it be so. Life was a weary business and he was sick of it.

  Lomas would be at Guy’s tonight. At first dark Faunt went to await him there. It was no long time before the other appeared; but Lomas said they must ride at once for Port Tobacco, must find Tom Jones to set them across to the Northern Neck, and make haste to Richmond.

  “I’ve horses waiting,” he explained. “I should have gone directly, but I didn’t want to leave you here.”

  “I shall stay here,” Faunt said. “I have some business to attend.”

  “Then I’ve wasted precious time.” Faunt saw the haste in him.

  “Why?” he asked. “What has happened?”

  The other had already risen, but he hesitated. “I play a double game, you know,” he said, and sat down again. “I’m trusted in Washington as well as in Richmond. For four years now, every scrap of information from Richmond has been forwarded to Washington or to Grant. Grant knows our decisions as soon as they are reached. Did you ever hear the name of Miss Van Lew?”

  “Of course. Everyone in Richmond knows she’s a Union agent.”

  Lomas nodded. “Yes. So she has been watched for years; but we’ve found no proof against her, apart from her admitted and open partisanship for the North. But Lee’s plans, every movement of his forces, every shift in his lines is reported instantly to Grant; so someone in Richmond is the center of the web of conspiracy against us. We’ve known that for a long time; we’ve even known her nickname. She is always referred to as ‘The Quaker.’ Today in Washington I learned her real name.”

  “Her name?” Faunt emphasized the pronoun. “A woman?”

  “Yes. Till now she’s never been suspected, yet if what I hear of her is true she should have been suspect long ago, for a thousand reasons.”

  Faunt looked at his hand limp upon the table; he wondered why his fingers were not shaking. His voice was steady enough. “You know her name, you say?”

  “Yes, Albion. Mrs. Albion.”

  Faunt felt no surprise, he was at once sure that what Lomas said was true. He remembered that man he met outside Nell’s house the day he started with Stuart for the ride around McClellan’s army, and whom he had seen hanged as a confessed spy on the way to Second Manassas. When he questioned Nell, she admitted the acquaintance, relying on his love for her to blind his eyes. He remembered other matters. When he himself told her where Mosby’s headquarters were, at the Chief’s, and then at Glen Welby, each time the Yankees struck within the month! Faunt even remembered that she had first questioned him about his plans and thus assured herself he would not be caught in the traps she set.

  She had cozened him with tenderness and listened to his wagging tongue and sent the information she seduced from him straightway to her masters! There was a curdling bitterness in his throat, the burning taste of bile. He rose, Wilkes Booth and his mad project all forgotten. He spoke with a cold precision.

  “You’re right, Mr. Lomas. You should make haste to report this. And it occurs to me that I too have pressing business in Richmond. Let us take the road.”

  19

  February-March, 1865

  CINDA came home to Richmond in time to share with the capi tal city the last agony of the Confederacy. Dusk was already the early darkness of a stormy evening when the train on which she and Jenny and the children and the servants had made the last stage of their journey splashed lamely into the depot and to a weary stop. The cars were packed with refugees like themselves, flowing north before Sherman’s advance, and equally exhausted by days and nights of insufficient sleep and rest and food. This driven, homeless host had kindness in it still, and a readiness to share what comfort could be had; yet Cinda was glad, as she descended to the platform and the crowd thinned, to feel no longer so many bodies pressing close around her and be able to fill her lungs with clean, untainted air.

  Even the warm drenching rain was grateful, like happy tears or welcome; for though it might wet them through, it seemed to wash away long-accumulated grime. She had been unable to send word ahead, so there was no one to meet them, and no conveyance. They set out to walk through the pelting downpour. The way up Fourteenth Street and Main was increasingly steep, with a last hard pitch up Fifth Street to the house. Jenny carried little Clayton, too sleepy to move his feet; Cinda led Kyle with one hand and Janet with the other; and behind them June and Anarchy and old Banquo bore heavy burdens.

  There were no gas lights burning in the streets, but even in the darkness Cinda detected a difference in the scene and in the tone of people’s voices. The voices were higher pitched than she remembered, almost shrill; and there was an unnatural amount of laughter in the air. She wondered how much little Clayton would remember of this night, of these years. He was almost exactly as old as the war, born soon after Trav brought Clayton’s body home from Manassas. Thinking of Clayton who was dead made Cinda wonder whether Burr still lived, and Trav, and Vesta’s Rollin. She had had no word of any of them for so long. Eagerness hurried her steps, and they came to the familiar doorway, and Caesar heard the bell.

  The bright confusion of that hour made them for a while forget, in happiness and sparkling questions, that they were wet and tired and hungry. Burr? Travis? Yes, they were safe; and so was Rollin, and so was Brett. Cinda laughed. “I’ve worried about the others, but not about him,” she confessed. “It never entered my head that anything could happen to Brett Dewain.”

  Everyone talked at once, and Tilda took little Clayton in her arms; but he began a fretful whimpering, so Anarchy bore him away to bed. Vesta sent word to Julian and Anne, but Cinda warned her to tell them not to come tonight. “None of us are fit to talk,” she declared. “We’re wet through, for one thing. Bath and bed and a bowl of soup, that’s all I can stand; that and a good night’s sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow. We’re here, and you’re here, and everyone’s well. Nothing else matters for now.”

  Next morning she slept late, refusing to wake till at last she heard young Clayton’s cheerful voice upraised, and his scampering feet along the hall outside her door; and she heard Anarchy catch him up and hush him, so she called: “It’s all right. I’m awake. Let him make all the noise he wants to. Bring him in.”

  Vesta appeared with them; but Clayton, having dutifully submitted to be kissed, raced away. Cinda smiled fondly. “How wonderful to be that age! He’s forgotten he was ever tired. I don’t think my old bones will ever stop aching.”

  Vesta said Jenny was still asleep, and the older children; and Tilda had gone to work at the Soup Association. June brought breakfast, and it was a delight to have this hour with Vesta alone. “Tell me things,” Cinda bade, busy with cornbread and bacon and coffee. “Wherever did you get this coffee, Vesta?”

  “Some I’d saved for an occasion. This is the occasion.” And while Cinda dallied happily over the first hot breakfast she had eaten in days, Vesta told her of their loved menfolk, and of the weary waiting for the inevitable end. “But now we’re together, so we can face anything, Mama.”

  “After the last few weeks, anything will be a relief!”

  Vesta took the waiter away and came back to curl up on the foot of the bed. “I expect you’ve had a terrible time, but don’t talk about it unless you want to.”

  “Oh, maybe I can talk it out of my mind and forget it,” Cinda declared. “I’d like to. The trip down was easy enough.” She amended that. “At least it seems so now. Of course at the time it was exasperating. There was a ladies’ car as far as Danville, but it was full of soldiers on their way to Wilmington. The new railroad from Danville to Greensboro is just simply ramshackle, and terribly rough. I expected the train to jump the track any minute, and we rattled around like dried peas in a bladder; but we were only four nights and five days to Columbia.”

  She paused, pressing her hands to her eyes as
though thus easily she could banish memory. “We began to hear the Sherman stories there, Vesta. Columbia was full of refugees. You know the first thing Sherman did was to drive out of Atlanta all the civilians except negroes; almost a thousand ladies, and men too old to fight, and more than a thousand children. He just sent them to General Hood’s lines. I saw Sam Hood in Columbia. His eyes are sadder than ever, now. He said that was the most horrible thing he ever saw, hundreds of women and little children homeless, with no shelter and no food and nowhere to go.”

  “What did they do, Mama?”

  “Oh, some of them died, and some of them lived. People took them in till every house was filled. But of course when General Sherman started for Savannah he burned almost every house, and destroyed all the grain, and killed or drove off the cattle and horses and hogs. I met a young lady, Miss Cuyler of Social Circle, who had come from Americus after his army passed, right across its track. She said for fifty miles there were hardly any houses left, just the chimneys. ‘Sherman’s Sentinels,’ people call those blackened chimneys. There were so many dead animals killed and left to rot that the smell was sickening. Every farm building had been burned, except a few houses; all the gins and packing screws, and hay ricks and corn cribs and stacks of fodder. She said there weren’t even any chickens left to eat the corn Sherman’s cavalry horses spilled along their picket lines; and people picked up the corn and parched it and ate it, or pulled turnips in the fields, anything they could get.”

  “Why didn’t she stay in Americus? Didn’t they have anything to eat?”

  “Yes, there’s plenty of food in southwest Georgia; but her father, Colonel Cuyler, was afraid Sherman would send raiders to release the Yankee prisoners of war at Andersonville and that they’d murder everyone, so he was bringing her to Danville, to his sister’s.”

  “Why do people scare so easily, Mama? The prisoners wouldn’t murder them!”

  “They might have,” Cinda confessed. “They’ve been starving to death. In December there were already over thirteen thousand graves in the prison cemetery. Miss Cuyler met Father Hamilton, from Macon, and he had worked there. He told her the prisoners lived in holes in the ground, and some of them hadn’t even any clothes, and sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty of them died in a day.”

  “Do you believe it?” Vesta challenged.

  “Miss Cuyler says it’s true. She kept insisting that the prisoners had as much to eat as our own soldiers; but our soldiers here are hungry because we can’t bring food to them over the wretched railroads. There wasn’t that excuse for not feeding the prisoners, because even Miss Cuyler says there’s plenty to eat all around Americus, and they could surely send some to Andersonville.” Cinda added soberly: “But of course people are hungry everywhere else. I talked with a Mrs. McDonald who had refugeed from Atlanta. She kept her family alive by picking up bullets on the battlefield and taking them to the Yankee commissary and trading them for food. Wherever there’d been battles, there were lots of bullets, and the lead was worth its weight in sugar and coffee and flour and meal and lard and even meat.” She tried to laugh. “It made my mouth water to hear her! I was hungry myself, often enough. But then the commissary moved on, following Sherman’s army, so Mrs. McDonald had to go somewhere or starve. She brought her children to Columbia.” Cinda added thoughtfully: “Georgia has suffered more than any other state, now, except possibly Virginia; and yet Georgia people have wanted for a long time to go back into the Union. It’s a joke on them, in a way. But not a very funny joke.”

  Vesta, to turn her thoughts in a happier direction, said: “But, Mama, you’re way ahead of yourself. You haven’t told about getting to the Plains or anything!”

  Cinda smiled gratefully. “To be sure. Well, so June and I got to Columbia, and they said Sherman was at Hardieville. We stayed in Columbia overnight and Mr. DeSaussure sent us on to the Plains in his carriage.” Her tone was lively now. “And what a welcome I got, Vesta! It was worth all the trouble, just as getting home again now is worth all we’ve had to endure.”

  “Hush! Stop skipping around! You’re at the Plains. Go on and tell about that!”

  Cinda nodded, laughing. “All right, then, I got to the Plains; and just in time, too, because next day it began to rain as though it would never stop. Then we heard Sherman was at Branchville. Most people said we’d be safe at the Plains, but I didn’t believe them; so I decided we’d all better go to Columbia where we’d at least be on the railroad. Jenny had plenty of Confederate money, but people were beginning to refuse to take it, so I went to Camden to the branch bank. Mr. Shannon wasn’t there, but Mr. Doby—–”

  “Who’s Mr. Doby?”

  “He’s the cashier. He changed about twenty thousand dollars of ours for three hundred and fifty dollars in gold. Everyone will take gold, of course.

  “Then we buried all the silver at the Plains; Banquo and June and Jenny and I. We did it in the middle of the night, down below the garden toward the creek. Heaven knows whether we’ll ever find it again, but Banquo was sure no Yankee would ever find it, and that’s the main thing. Banquo hitched a team of mules to the wagon to carry us to Columbia. The horses are all gone. Our cavalry took some, and some were just stolen. Jenny had the children’s ponies stabled right under the side piazza, because she thought they’d be safer near the house; and Kyle and Janet wanted to ride them to Columbia, but we decided to leave them behind.”

  “Poor ponies! Poor Kyle!”

  “He was brave about it. We left them with Mrs. Nickerson. I suppose Sherman’s men will kill them. They kill everything they don’t steal, and they steal anything they can carry. People say Sherman brags that he stole twenty million dollars’ worth of things between Atlanta and Savannah, and wasted and destroyed eighty million more.”

  “We’ve heard terrible stories, even here.”

  “You’ll be hearing them the rest of your life, Vesta; you and your children. Yes, and their children. This will never be a united country again, not as long as women have memories. Men are not so apt to hold grudges, but Southern women will tell these tales for generations. Yet with all the terrible things that were happening, Columbia was gayer than I’ve ever seen it.”

  “It’s that way here,” Vesta agreed. “Just as gay as it was last winter, Mama. There’s a dancing party somewhere almost every night. But people aren’t so gay in the daytime.”

  Cinda nodded. “I suppose it’s the same everywhere. In Columbia they were having a bazaar in the State House. They’d been getting ready for weeks, making things, and collecting things to be sold, to raise money for sick and wounded soldiers; and each state had a booth, and the sale went on for days. Heaven knows how much money they made. People would buy anything, because of course no one had anything. Even at the Plains we had no candles, just terebene lamps, and you know how terribly they smoke. But everyone had plenty of Confederate money, so they’d pay any price at all.”

  “It’s the same everywhere. I’ve sold those things out of the Christmas trunk for thousands of dollars, actually.”

  “I suppose we’re all crazy, Vesta. Delirious. Columbia turned into an insane asylum, just in the few days I was at the Plains. Thousands of new people had come, refugees from Sherman, so it was hard to find any place to stay, but Colonel Trenholm took us in. De Greffin never looked so lovely; and of course the Colonel had everything in the way of luxuries. I suppose he gets the pick of whatever his blockade-runners bring in. He even had horses! General Hampton was in Columbia with his cavalry, but he hadn’t enough horses to mount all his men.”

  “Rollin has gone to South Carolina to try to get some horses for his regiment.”

  “He won’t be able to find any, I’m afraid. General Hampton couldn’t, to save his soul; and if he couldn’t, nobody can. Everyone loves him, poor man. Preston killed, and Wade hurt, and the General had to just kiss his dead son good-by and go on fighting. And I told you General Hood was there. He seldom speaks, just sits and sweats at his own thoughts.”
/>   “He must be heartbroken, losing his whole army.”

  “It made me weep to see him. But I soon saw we’d better get out of Columbia. I wanted to come home, and if we waited till the last minute there’d be such a mob we couldn’t possibly get into the cars. Colonel Johnson, the president of the railroad, helped us, and Mr. Hayne. Sherman was already at Orangeburg, so the cars were so crowded none of us could sit down. We had to stand all the way to Charlotte, and then we couldn’t go any farther, so we took the train to Lincolnton, because everyone said Sherman would go toward Fayetteville and that Lincolnton would be safe.”

  “I thought you might go to Raleigh, to Barbara and Mr. and Mrs. Pierce.”

  “We couldn’t get beyond Charlotte, but I don’t think I’d have done that anyway. Of course it’s my fault, but I just can’t seem to love Barbara, or her family either, running off down there and living com--fortably all this time.”

  Vesta laughed at her. “Idiot! It wouldn’t have made things anv easier for us, having them miserable here.”

  “Well, at least Burr could have seen her oftener! But anyway, we went to Lincolnton and thought ourselves clever; but we found that others had had the same idea. The town was crowded; but I got two rooms, bare floors, feather beds but no bedsteads, a few chairs.” She hesitated, and after a moment went on. “We were there when Sherman burned Columbia. People kept coming to Lincolnton, each with a new story worse than the last. Some of them sounded like the truth, and some sounded like hysteria.” She smiled weakly. “But I was beginning to be a little hysterical myself. I had what seemed like a brilliant idea, to get a wagon and go north to Chimneys. Chimneys would surely be out of the way, and Tony wasn’t there, so we could make ourselves at home.” She filled her lungs with a deep breath. “Well, Banquo got a wagon with two mules. I don’t know how, and I didn’t ask questions. That old man could always work miracles. I gave him a hundred dollars in gold and told him what I wanted, and that night he walked us all out of town into the blackest woods I ever saw, and there was the wagon and a man. I didn’t even see the man, it was so dark; but his voice was white. He put us on what he said was the right road, and said we were to turn north after we crossed the Catawba River and that would bring us to Statesville. So we went on all night, up hill and down, mud and cold and woods. Anarchy and June and Jenny mostly walked. I couldn’t. The mud was full of sharp rocks that hurt my feet. Walking was easier than riding, though. The wagon had no spring, so it almost shook our teeth out; and not even Banquo and his miracles could make the mules hurry. June somehow had filled a hamper, of course; so we didn’t starve, but it seemed to me it was either pouring rain or freezing cold all the time. I don’t know why we didn’t all die. I know I wanted to.”