The Beguiled

by Thomas Cullinan

  I can’t deny I was rather angry at his sudden decision, even though I was aware that the decision had been forced on him. I’m sure he was not at all eager to leave us at that time, but it certainly did seem that he had gotten over being upset about the situation awfully quickly. Anyway I had no further opportunity to discuss it with him on that afternoon because Edwina Morrow entered just then and, of course, Johnny McBurney was of no mind to continue conversing with me.

  “Oh, forgive me,” said Edwina, pretending, I guess, that she had expected the room to be unoccupied. “I was only looking for the volume of Shakespeare,” she said in a manner much shyer than her usual. “I noticed it wasn’t on the library shelf and thought I might have left it in here.”

  “It’s here all right,” Johnny told her with great fervor.

  “If you’re reading it,” said she, “I wouldn’t dream of taking it. I can wait until you’re finished.”

  “Not at all,” Johnny declared. “You must take it. You probably need it for your studies.”

  “I can wait a day or two,” she answered.

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” I said angrily. “You know you can’t possibly wait one more instant, Edwina. Why don’t you just sit down here on the settee with Johnny and you can both read the stupid book side by side to your heart’s content!”

  And with that I left the room and ran up the stairs. I don’t think I have ever been in my life as angry as I was on that afternoon—angry at Edwina and Johnny and the entire world, I guess, and at the same time just disgusted with myself for being angry. I was all the way to my room before I realized that Johnny had not tried to call me back and, of course, that made me all the more furious.

  I lay on my bed and wept for a spell while my roommate, who was serving out some punishment or other, sat propped up on her bed, silently watching me and eating a crab apple. When she had finished with the apple she threw the core out the window, which is a common practice of hers to get rid of the evidence.

  “Very little in life is worth weeping about,” she said finally, “unless some purpose is served by the weeping. I almost never weep unless I can gain something by it.”

  “I’m not crying out of unhappiness,” I explained after a moment, “as much as I’m crying out of temper.”

  “Either reason is a waste of time,” said Marie selecting another apple from a pile of them on her bed. It was evident that she had prepared herself for a long imprisonment this time.

  I told her then about Johnny’s having to go away and his willingness to accept it without protest and about Edwina and everything else that was on my mind. Marie made no comment until I had ended my story and she had devoured the second crab apple.

  “We could think of a way to keep him here, if that’s what you want,” she said at last. “Frankly it doesn’t make much difference to me. I’m kept in confinement so much here lately that I never see McBurney anyhow. I suppose we could get up a petition of some sort and all of us could sign it, but I rather doubt if that would have much effect on Miss Martha. On the other hand, since it is the condition of his leg which has made Miss Martha decide he is ready to leave, we might persuade him to have a relapse of some kind.”

  “Johnny won’t go along with that,” I declared. “He’s not at all deceptive.”

  “Is that so? Apparently you don’t know him as well as you think you do,” said my roommate. “Anyway it probably would have to be a genuine relapse or none at all, because Miss Martha would very likely investigate it very carefully. He’d have to break a few stitches, or get an infection or something like that—maybe even develop a little blood poisoning, just to be on the safe side.”

  “I would never go along with that,” I told her firmly. “I don’t want Johnny to reinjure his leg in any way.”

  Emily Stevenson passed by our open door then on her way down to dinner, and she had to come back and find out what we were discussing. Since it seemed a matter which concerned her as well as Marie and I, we explained the problem to her. Then just about the time we had finished, Alice Simms came along and we had to repeat the story again to her.

  “There isn’t any unsurmountable problem here,” said Alice. “Obviously all that needs to be done is to convince Corporal McBurney that he shouldn’t leave.”

  “Miss Martha will have the last word on that subject,” Emily remarked.

  “Let her,” Alice answered. “Let her have all the words she pleases. If Johnny refuses to go, there isn’t much she can do about it—especially if all of us are on Johnny’s side. After all, he is a man, isn’t he—or so I’ve been told.”

  “I don’t think it would be right for Corporal McBurney to disobey a direct order from Miss Martha,” said Emily. “That sort of conduct doesn’t sound very honorable to me.”

  “Why not, for Heaven’s sake?” Alice wanted to know. “She isn’t his commanding officer, is she? It might not be proper for students to disobey a direct order by their teacher, but I fail to see where Johnny is under any obligation to obey a person who, technically speaking, is his enemy. If you must drag your old honor in like some old cat—and if Johnny were the kind of person to be swayed by such old-fashioned ideas, which I doubt very much since he isn’t one of your fancy plantation gentlemen—it could always be explained to him that it’s more honorable to obey the will of a majority of ladies rather than a smaller number.”

  “I would appreciate your withholding your comments about plantation gentlemen since you obviously have never met anyone of that sort,” said Emily huffily. “And now please tell me how we could prevent Miss Martha from raising a clamor and sending for outside assistance if McBurney were to attempt to resist her?”

  “I would like you to know that I and my mother have had the most friendly relationships with the best plantation gentlemen from each and every state in this whole Confederacy,” Alice shouted, “and only a very dull witted person could fail to realize that there is nowhere for Miss Martha to send for assistance against McBurney. There are none of our soldiers around here anymore and she would be very reluctant, I’m sure, to call any Union soldiers in to help her. We might have a hundred Yankee guests then instead of only one!”

  “The prospect ought to be very pleasing to you,” Emily retorted. “Anyway, the whole thing sounds like insurrection to me and I’m not at all certain I want to become involved in it.”

  “It wouldn’t necessarily have to come to open hostilities between McBurney and Miss Martha,” said Marie who had been eating her apples and listening to the discussion with half amusement and half irritation. Marie always hates to go along with any plan which she doesn’t originate herself, although in this case—since she couldn’t think of anything better—she had to be content with modifying it.

  “What McBurney could do instead of openly refusing Miss Martha is just postpone his leaving for a while by saying he’d rather go next week or the week after instead of right now, and give some good excuse for it. For instance, he could say that he had learned that his own regiment would not be passing near here again for another month or so and he would have an easier time rejoining them at that time.”

  “Another thing he might do is decide that the time is not good for traveling just at present,” Alice suggested. “He could have had a bad dream or seen some evil omen somewhere—an owl or a toad in the woods, perhaps.”

  “Owls and toads aren’t evil,” I informed her. “It’s only superstitious people who believe things like that.”

  “And who is more superstitious than the Irish?” asked Alice. “My own mother, who is part Irish, is always reading terrible things in tea leaves.”

  “Well we have no tea,” said Emily, “but on the other hand Mattie knows a great deal about evil omens. She could very likely give McBurney some good suggestions on the kind of omens to look for.”

  “But we still haven’t solved the original problem,” I told them. “You
are all forgetting the fact that Johnny has already decided to leave.”

  “Then,” said Alice, “we will just have to change his mind about that. We will have to make things so pleasant for him here that he won’t even consider leaving us, until we decide, of course, that it’s time for him to go.”

  “Do you have any definite suggestions to make in that regard, Alice?” Marie asked her.

  Alice stared at her for a moment before she decided that Marie was not necessarily poking fun at her. “I have no specific proposals to make right now,” she said finally. “I’ll have to sit down and think about it.”

  “There is one thing we could do immediately, I suppose,” said Emily. “We might suggest to Miss Martha and Miss Harriet that it would be nice if Corporal McBurney could join us at the table for dinner. He must get awfully lonely eating all his meals alone there in the parlor.”

  “That’s a marvelous idea,” Alice declared, forgetting her dispute with Emily. “That is an excellent beginning.”

  I agreed and Marie did too, although somewhat grudgingly since she hadn’t thought of it.

  Just then Edwina Morrow appeared at the bedroom door to inform us that Miss Martha and Miss Harriet were waiting for us in the dining room and, of course, we realized—or at least I did—that we had been making plans for Corporal McBurney without consulting the one person it seemed to me he was most interested in. I had been very angry at her only a short while before, but I did feel that this was her business as much as anyone else’s and so, while Emily and Alice were hurrying downstairs—Marie, of course, was being confined again—I paused in the hallway to tell Edwina briefly what we had decided to do.

  “You want Corporal McBurney to stay on here indefinitely?” she asked me.

  “Yes, I do. Don’t you?”

  She backed me against the wall with her answer. “In some ways I want it very much—more, much more than you or anyone else in this place . . . and in some ways I wish he had never come at all.”

  “Why, Edwina?”

  “Because I’m afraid. . . .”

  “That something might happen to him?”

  “Not necessarily to him. Maybe to me . . . or anybody. Why can’t you idiotic girls stay out of other people’s affairs!”

  Without any doubt Edwina Morrow is the strangest person I have ever known. I would have expected her to be quite pleased at what we were doing but instead she was just as critical and nasty as she always is. However, I had no desire to argue with her. I merely stated that I felt Corporal McBurney’s welfare was of concern to all of us, hoping she would let it go at that.

  “His welfare, yes. But is that your main interest? Or do you want him to stay on here in order to keep you entertained—in your particular case maybe to tell you charming nature stories every morning in the garden—in between your gossiping about everyone in the house!”

  “That’s not true, Edwina,” I protested as civily as I could. “I’m sure I don’t gossip about anyone.” I was determined to keep my temper this time.

  “If you’re planning to ask Miss Martha to allow Johnny to join us for dinner, you’re too late anyway.”

  “Miss Martha’s not sending Johnny away tonight?”

  “You goose . . . you stupid little rabbit.”

  “Is she?”

  “He’s already in the dining room. Miss Martha was evidently fearful that she might have hurt his feelings a while ago, so she invited him to dine with us herself.”

  With that Edwina left me and continued on to her own room—to primp a bit more, I gathered, for this special occasion, although again in fairness I must admit that Edwina has always been more careful of her appearance than anyone else in this house. Emily is generally the best scrubbed person but Edwina, I think, would always take the prize for neatness and aptness of dress. Contrary to some opinions here I do admire neatness and cleanliness in other people even though I am sometimes a bit forgetful about such things myself.

  Anyway I was not thinking about those things at that time but only of the fact that Johnny was dining with us. Indeed I was halfway down the stairs when my roommate, racing headlong, managed to catch up with me. “I heard what Edwina said,” she whispered breathlessly, “and I thought I’d take a chance on coming down. I thought maybe in the excitement I wouldn’t be noticed.”

  Well, if she was noticed no one objected to her presence. Everyone just had such a grand time that evening and we were all so jolly and cheerful and lighthearted that I firmly believe if Marie had not come downstairs on her own risk and initiative, Miss Martha would very likely have paroled her and invited her to join us anyway.

  Because that’s just the kind of festive dinner party it was. It really seemed that each one of the students and both members of the faculty were so happy to have Corporal McBurney with us that we were all agreeable automatically and it was simply not necessary for anyone to make a special effort to get into that frame of mind. The entire school was just in a pleasant mood, that’s all, and, surprising as it might sound to anyone with any knowledge of the way our dinners customarily go, without Miss Martha suggesting it or any student consciously trying to achieve it.

  Dear Mattie had very willingly gone to extra trouble and on short notice, too, in order to prepare a particularly nice meal for the occasion. It included all the things which we knew by that time Johnny liked—sweet potato pie, I remember, and black-eyed peas and beaten biscuits and, in his special honor, Irish potatoes which we have never grown successfully in our garden but which Miss Martha had apparently been able to obtain at Mister Potter’s store.

  Johnny seemed very satisfied and proclaimed it the best dinner he had attended since his arrival in America. “Both for food and for company,” he added, which pleased everyone.

  Actually, I think no better meal was prepared for him at this school, or at least some things about it were better, but I won’t go into that matter now. Anyway, from the atmosphere of cordiality which surrounded the table on the night of Corporal McBurney’s first dinner with us you would have never dreamed there could be any question of his wanting to leave us or, on the other hand, of being asked to leave. As a matter of fact this thought occurred to me some time after the night of that first dinner: Supposing someone had just stood up on that night and said, “Miss Martha, it’s obvious that we are all having a grand time this evening at table. We have had an excellent meal and Corporal McBurney has told us a number of very charming and witty stories about his travels and experiences. There have been no arguments or disagreements of any kind this evening. You have not had to reprimand Miss Marie Deveraux even once this evening, which is highly unusual as you must admit. Clearly, it is Corporal McBurney’s presence here which has caused this evening to pass so pleasantly and I would like to propose that we guarantee many more such evenings at our school by deciding right now that Corporal McBurney must never leave us, or at least not for a good long time. I would like to suggest that everyone in favor of this proposal please signify their agreement by joining me in standing.”

  It has occurred to me that if I or someone had said those words, everyone at that table would have risen immediately, including Miss Harriet almost surely and maybe even including Miss Martha herself. And even if she hadn’t joined us instantly I’m sure she would have been so impressed by the sight of the rest of us that she would have been very reluctant to bring up the subject of Corporal McBurney’s leaving for a long while after that.

  Because I believe that if Corporal McBurney could have known that everyone here wanted him to stay things might have turned out in a very different fashion. If he had realized that he was being given a unanimous invitation to stay here for a long while, I’m sure his conduct would have been completely different. Also, and equally important, is the fact that one gesture of unanimous friendship such as I have described might very well have prevented some people here from deciding later that they had to show Jo
hnny McBurney some private kindnesses of their own.

  Well there is no point in talking of any of that now. I did not rise to speak out for Johnny at that dinner. In fact I never even thought of such a thing on that night and I’m sure no one else did either. I guess maybe it is only in the light of evil consequences that we can think so readily of the good we might have done. Anyway after dinner we all went to the parlor and sang a few songs and said our prayers and then shortly after that we all went to bed. Other things happened on that night but I was not a part of them. That night Miss Alice Simms and Miss Edwina Morrow were the chief characters in the story of Corporal Johnny McBurney.

  Edwina Morrow

  I felt that he was attracted to me. If you want a detailed analysis of that attraction, I cannot give it. I’m not at all sure now that he even liked me and at one time I was convinced he didn’t. We all know how people can be attracted by things they don’t like, such as spiders on the ceiling and warts on the cheek. At any rate my knowledge of his interest in me was a collection of little and, perhaps to some people, inconsequential things: the way he stared at me in the garden and elsewhere, the way in which he undertook to stand near me every evening during prayers; the way in which, I’m sure, he tried to find out everything he could about me from anyone at this school who was willing to supply him with information, and that I can assure you would have included every person here.

  I can’t deny that I was flattered by it. I also can’t deny that I was attracted to him. I will also admit that I liked him very much—at first—and that was one reason I tried to stay away from him. With very few exceptions I have never remained in mutual favor very long with people I have known well. They very quickly find things wrong with me, or I with them. And I suppose nowadays I anticipate the disillusionment of others by keeping free of any illusions myself.