Brett said in a tone he seldom used to her: “Cinda!”
She bit her lip, and Burr tried to laugh. “It’s all right, Papa! I know the way Mama talks.” He kissed Cinda and she clung to him as though she would never let him go.
When Burr left, and Vesta and Jenny had gone upstairs, Cinda stayed with Brett and Trav, listening to their talk together. Brett, as soon as the cars were running to Danville, would start for the Plains. “Beyond Greensboro, I’ll have to travel any way I can, but I’ll get there.” He meant to contract with the Negroes who had been his slaves. “The price of cotton won’t break much this year, and Jenny says they baled last year’s crop and hid it in the woods, and she’s sure Sherman’s men wouldn’t find it. If I can get it to Charleston and ship it to New York, I ought to get fifty or seventy-five cents the pound.”
“The railroads can’t carry it, can they?”
“I’ll put it on barges and take it down river. Jenny says there are three hundred and seven bales. If the price holds up, that will bring forty or fifty thousand dollars.”
But shipment, until the railroads were restored, would surely be difficult; and they agreed that the railroads could not operate till some sort of civil government was re-established. Cinda was reminded of General Lomgstreet’s arguments with Judge Garland. “Travis,” she asked, “what does Cousin Jeems think is going to happen?”
“Well, he’s afraid the South will make trouble for itself. He says too many politicians, and preachers, and ladies, and men who got safe details and stayed out of the army, are going around saying we weren’t beaten.”
Brett laughed grimly. “I was beaten,” he said. Cinda remembered him as he had been when he came home to her, utterly exhausted, worn in mind and body and spirit.
“So was I,” Trav agreed. “I was ready to give in, and I was glad when we did. The trouble with wars is, politicians start them, but armies have to fight them. It’s the armies that get beaten. The people who don’t fight don’t take the beating.” Cinda thought those who stayed at home during these years had suffered to the limit of endurance; yet she knew what Travis meant. “Longstreet says we ought to admit we’re licked,” Trav explained. “He believes we should accept what he calls the verdict of the sword. He says we’ll talk ourselves into trouble.”
Brett nodded. “I know what he means. I hear men bragging that we’ll never do this, and we’ll never submit to that. Of course, in the end we’ll have to do what we’re told; but if we stop boasting about what we won’t do, maybe the Yankees won’t make us do it.”
“Well,” Trav explained, “Longstreet’s point isn’t so much that submission is expedient, but that it’s right!” He smiled at a sudden memory. “One day I was with him and Judge Garland, and Longstreet said that what the South needed was for some of her best men to turn Republican. I thought the Judge would explode! He said Longstreet was as bad as Jack Slaughter.”
Cinda asked: “What’s Mr. Slaughter done?”
“Oh, he’s the skeleton in the Garland closet. He hired substitutes, never went into the army. Two of the substitutes he hired were killed, and he jokes about it, says he was killed twice! Judge Garland won’t speak to him.”
Brett said doubtfully: “Longstreet goes pretty far. It will be a long time before any Southern man will dare admit he’s a Republican. Unless of course he’s a negro.”
“I know,” Trav assented. “But I think the General just said it for the sake of emphasis. When anyone disagrees with him, that makes him sure he’s right. And he is right about some things. New England in the North and the Gulf States in the South pushed us into the war. They were so far apart that they didn’t know the truth about each other; so when Yancey and Rhett told us all Northerners were cowards we believed it; and when Beecher and Emerson and Mrs. Stowe told the North that Southerners spent every fine day slicing the skin off a negro’s back with a rawhide whip, the Northerners believed that. Longstreet says when you begin to think you’re better than other people, you’re heading for trouble. And with nations, trouble means war.”
“He’s right, of course,” Brett agreed. “I doubt if any Southerner who really knew the North wanted secession.”
“The General said something, the day we rode away from Appomattox Court House.” Trav looked at Cinda, then at Brett again. “I’ve thought a lot about it. He said no nation as powerful as the Confederacy ever had as short a history.”
For a moment they were silent, till Brett nodded. “I suppose that’s true.”
Trav said, pride in his eyes: “He’s really a great man, Brett. Oh, he’s stubborn, and sometimes he’s wrong; but he’ll always stand up for what he believes.” He added uneasily: “The thing that bothers me, I think he’s glad we were beaten.”
Brett said thoughtfully. “I’m not sure I don’t agree with him. God knows I fought as hard as I could, and I know we had a right to secede; but the Union would never be a great nation as long as any state could drop out whenever she chose. When men or states agree to work together, they have to give up something. We’ve proved that, in the South; proved it by not doing it. Our belief in states’ rights would have destroyed the Union, if the Northern states hadn’t given up their rights in order to beat us; and even then we’d have beaten them if each Southern state hadn’t kept insisting on her rights. We fought it out our way, and they fought it out their way; and the war settled it.”
Cinda protested: “But does force ever settle anything?”
“When it settles things right, yes,” Brett declared. “And this question of secession has been settled right! The United States are really united now. I think that’s a good thing even for us in the South. Some day it may prove to be a good thing for the world.”
“I’m woman enough to keep remembering we had a right to do what we did.”
“This was once when to be right was wrong.”
Cinda laughed and rose. “When we start talking in riddles it’s time to go to bed. For Heaven’s sake don’t say such things to anyone else, Mr. Dewain. It will be a long time before the South can forgive the man who tells her she was wrong!”
Next morning, June said Big Mill was in the kitchen. Cinda when she came downstairs asked Trav where Mill had been. “You left him here to take care of us; but after things settled down here, he disappeared. I thought he had run away.”
“No, he came to Lynchburg to find me. He said you were all right, didn’t need him. I took him with me to Chimneys, thought he might stay there; but he wants to go back to Great Oak.”
“Oh, I’m glad. You know, Rollin and Vesta are going to farm the place. Rollin’s there now, building them a cabin.”
Trav had not heard this. “They’ll have a hard time.”
“They won’t mind. They’re young.” And she said: “If you don’t need Big Mill, send him to help Rollin. If he’d like to, that is. I keep forgetting they’re not slaves now.”
“He’s already gone,” Trav said. “Started this morning.” He smiled. “Mill says his feet are all wore out from trompin’ furrin ground. He says the old fields at Great Oak are as lonesome for him as he is for them. He said to me: ‘I got deep roots in dem fiel’s, Marse Trav. I’m gwine plant mah feets again an’ let ’em grow.’”
Cinda nodded, feeling her eyes sting. Brett joined them, and she said: “The negroes are wonderful, aren’t they? Has anyone heard of a single negro who made trouble for his white folks while the men were off to war?” Neither Trav nor Brett spoke, and she said softly: “Loyal, devoted, protecting Missy and the children while the men were fighting to keep them slaves. Did that ever happen in the world before?”
“I never heard of it,” Trav admitted.
“What will become of them now? What will they do without us?”
His eyes shadowed. “God knows! They’ll be some trouble, probably. We’ll have to have laws to—control them.”
Brett said dryly: “I’ve already heard some talk about those laws. The politicians plan to extend the vagrancy acts to c
over all negroes. As if the North would let us make them slaves again under another name!”
Cinda asked: “Why do we need special laws for them?”
“For their own good,” Trav said. “I learned something in the army, Cinda. I found out that to obey orders, to do what you’re told, never having to make decisions, is a mighty restful thing. When the negroes were slaves, we took care of them and did their thinking for them. Sometimes I believe it was really we who were bound; it was really they who were free. Now they think they’re free, but really, as their own masters, they’re more truly slaves than they ever were before.”
Brett added a word. “There’s no freedom except in doing your duty, accepting your responsibilities. The only way to achieve freedom is to surrender it.”
Cinda was puzzled. “I suppose you mean that now they’re free they’ll have to take care of themselves and their families?”
Trav said, half laughing: “Ask any married man about freedom. He knows!”
Resentfully she thought of Enid, and wished to retort that wives were the real slaves; but no word from her could help Enid. Travis would never change. She rose and left them, putting their conversation out of her mind. There were so many things she must learn to forget. The old years were gone, and already they seemed infinitely far away. When the newspapers reported that General Kirby Smith, away off yonder in Texas, had surrendered the remnant of the last Confederate army and fled to Mexico, it was like an echo from an empty room.
Thursday morning, St. Paul’s and the other churches held a service of mourning and prayer for President Lincoln. The military authorities had ordered that these services be held, that flags should hang at half-mast, that public buildings were to be draped and all places of business closed; but there was no compulsion on anyone to attend. Cinda went without compulsion; and when they heard her intention, the others except Enid decided to go with her.
“I wouldn’t think of going,” Enid said with a certain violence. “Pray for him? What I’d pray wouldn’t do him much good!”
But the others went with Cinda, and she found it fine to walk along Grace Street to St. Paul’s; it was heartening to enter these familiar doors, to turn to their own pew where even the red upholstery was like a friend’s smile; it was peace to sit in this holy place and let her thoughts drift where they chose.
The service began, mourning and prayer for dead Abraham Lincoln. Her own father had been that dead man’s grandfather. She remembered Tilda running down the stairs that night long ago at Great Oak with those letters in her hands. How different their lives since then might have been if Tilda had not found those letters! Travis of course would always be the same. He would take Enid back to Chimneys to live out her days an unwilling captive there; but doubtless he would have done that anyway. Cinda thought she herself had acquired a clearer vision, the ability to see weakness and folly here among her own people and to see some virtue in the North. Tilda certainly was changed, and for the better. From the wreckage of her life she had emerged with strength and resolution and—of all incredible things—a capacity for leadership and even for command. And of course that revelation had changed poor Faunt; or perhaps it had merely stripped off the handsome mask which for so long had deceived even Faunt himself. Tony? All his life Tony had followed shameful ways. If the knowledge that Abraham Lincoln and he were kin had made a difference in him, he could hardly have become worse than he was before.
Yet even without the knowledge of that kinship, these four years would have changed them all. Four years. What was it Cousin Jeems had said: That no great nation had ever had so short a history? Four years, and every day of those four years devoted to war.
Why had they fought? She tried to remember. For slavery? Yes, the Cotton States seceded because they wished to prevent the abolition of slavery. They announced that purpose openly, when their delegates came to urge Virginia to secede. But was that the only reason? She had heard men blame the tariff, which made Southern purchasers pay tribute to Northern manufacturers. Was that the reason? Brett Dewain had told her that some politicians in the Gulf States fomented war because they wished to set up a new nation for their own aggrandizement; and Trav had once suggested that secession was part of a design to stop the steady increase in the apolitical power of the common man.
Yet certainly Virginia had not fought for slavery, nor against the tariff, nor for any other reason except the necessity of fighting either with the Cotton States or against them. Standing between North and South, she was compelled to turn one way or the other; and in that dilemma, only one choice was possible to her.
So they had plunged into four years of pitiful, needless folly. But at least those four years were done, and they should be forgotten. Cousin Jeems was right. The South should accept defeat, forget the past. He had said to Judge Garland that it would be a good thing if some of the best men in the South turned Republican; and it would be like the big, stubborn man to do exactly that. Of course, if he did, the South would cast him out; for it would be generations before the South could hear that accursed word without a bitter rage. The South would never forgive, and never follow him.
But if Cousin Jeems thought he ought to turn Republican, he would do so, and accept the consequences; and that would be a grand and valiant deed to do.
A word from the pulpit caught her ear, the name of the man they were here today to mourn. She put her thoughts aside, content at last to listen; and listening, she came to a deep certainty that in that dead kinsman whom so many hundreds and thousands and millions of people mourned today, there had dwelt a greatness which to serve God’s plan would forever leave its mark upon the world.
Walking home afterward they were all silent till they came to their own door; but there Cinda paused, looking down Fifth Street toward the river, looking all around; and she stood thus for so long that Vesta asked softly:
“What is it, Mama?”
Cinda turned to face them all. “Why—I’m just saying good-by,” she said. “Good-by to the past. I made up my mind, during the service. I’m not going to think any more—if I can help it—about what used to be.” She had for a moment a prophetic vision. “If the South isn’t careful, it’s going to start feeling sorry for itself, and being proud and wistful, and boasting how brave our men were, and how beautiful our women, and what charming lives we led till the Yankees spoiled it all.
“But as long as we keep looking back over our shoulders, we’ll be forever stumbling. When we learn to forget, then we will go ahead.”
THE END
1 Every reader of this work in manuscript has remarked that Lincoln’s mother was not Lucy Hanks, but Nancy. But Mr. Howells, in the campaign biography they were here discussing, mistakenly said her name was Lucy.—B. A. W.
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