Watchfires

by Louis Auchincloss

  Frank Halsted fascinated her as much as his refugees. He seemed never to tire, never to falter, never to show the smallest sign of impatience or frustration. To her he glowed, like the figure of Christ in a Rembrandt etching, in a world of shadows. And he had time for everybody. No matter what his schedule he could pause to talk with her, giving her what seemed the very core of his attention. And yet she saw him do exactly the same thing with others.

  "Do you know what I was able to do with that wonderful gift of five thousand dollars?" he asked her. "It supplied the down payment and first two trips of a vessel I've chartered to make a regular run between here and Montreal. And all thanks to you, dear Rosalie!"

  "I'll get more!" she exclaimed. "I know I can get you more."

  "You mean your husband has become a sympathizer? I hadn't dared to hope for that."

  "Not exactly. Let's just put it that he owes me something."

  One Sunday morning after church Mr. Handy walked up Fifth Avenue with Rosalie to his house, while Dexter and Joanna strolled on ahead of them. Directing a level stare at his son-in-law's back, Mr. Handy remarked that he felt as if they were all living above a cellar packed with dynamite. Rosalie was surprised, not only at what he took for granted, but at what he assumed that she did.

  "What makes you so sure that Dexter is misbehaving?"

  "What makes you? Do you think your loving father can't tell when there's that sort of trouble in his family?"

  "I don't know what I think. I have no facts."

  "What facts do you need? Haven't you and Dexter talked about this thing?"

  "Not a word."

  "Unimaginable!"

  "Well, what could I say, Father?"

  "You could tell him to behave himself or you'd go with the boys to my house. You know how much I have cared for Dexter. But if he were my own son and you my daughter-in-law, I'd take your side in a case like this!"

  "And supposing I threatened to leave him? Supposing he took me at my word? Supposing he and Annie flung their intrigue in the face of New York?"

  Mr. Handy pursed his lips in a silent whistle. "He has us there, I suppose."

  "Of course, he does! You must leave it to me, Father. You must trust me to work it out."

  Her father squeezed the hand under his arm. "My own dear girl. Do you know you're a heroine?"

  "No, I'm not. But I know what a heroine is. And I didn't always."

  "And what is she?"

  "Every female slave who flees her master!"

  "Good heavens!" Her father threw up his hands in disgust. "You sound just like Joanna!"

  But there was another reason that Rosalie wanted to leave her husband alone, and one that she was not going to impart to anyone. An ambivalence had crept into her feelings for Frank Halsted. He was not only the leader of the parish house; he was becoming for her a romantic figure.

  A romantic figure to a plain, otherwise sensible woman of forty-one, the mother of two schoolboys? Of course! Was not such a woman just the sort to be moved to folly, or at least to the dream of folly? She knew that what she had to fight was less the emotion than the shame. Her first reaction to libidinous thoughts was always shame of it. But she had learned through the years that such fantasies were basically harmless and the shame quite unnecessary. Was it not, after all, partly Halsted's fault? He was always talking of "love." He called the volunteers, including herself, by their Christian names, usually preceded by a "dear" or "dearest."

  "We really have done very little for the poor slaves," he told her. "It is ourselves whom we've benefited. For we have learned to love. Before, we lived in a loveless city. But now we have been brought closer together. I love you, dear Rosalie, and I am not ashamed to tell you so. I love Joanna, and I am not ashamed to tell her so."

  "I think, if I may make a suggestion, Frank, that it would be wise not to overstress that tone. My sister is, after all, something of an old maid, and it might excite her unduly to be so warmly approached by a handsome young clergyman."

  "Rosalie! What a suspicion. For shame!"

  "But I know whereof I speak."

  She reflected afterwards, in a talk with Joanna, that she did indeed.

  "Isn't he adorable?" Joanna asked, in a kind of ecstasy.

  "He's very sentimental," Rosalie retorted tartly. "He's even rather slushy."

  No, the shame was not downed yet. The roughness of her tone showed that. She had still some arguing with herself to do. She conducted an inner debate: if she chose to imagine herself as young and desirable and coveted by an adoring Halsted, all the more charming for being embarrassed by his uncontrollable passion for her, what harm was there in that? To her sons or family? She certainly did not have to concern herself with the adulterous Dexter.

  She and Dexter, a few years back, had fervently admired the great Rachel, who had brought her French repertoire, including Phèdre, to New York, and now she found herself indulging in a game of mental play-acting. She would recite to herself the famous declaration scene, just as it was written, except that Hippolyte, when confronted with his stepmother's passion, instead of rejecting it with scorn, would stammer out his own reluctant reciprocation. But on what followed next she would drop her curtain. She would close her fantasies on the ultimate scene, for she had an inner censor that forbade her from going too far.

  "I wonder what you are thinking of now, dear Rosalie." Frank had silently entered the dispensary to find her looking out the Gothic window at the rain. What was that scene but a sentimental print?

  "I was thinking what a great actress Rachel had been."

  "Wasn't she! So full of passion. Did she express your soul, Rosalie? Is that what lies under the placid exterior of good women? Do you seethe inwardly?"

  "That's it. We seethe."

  "You seethe at injustice! You seethe for the cause!"

  "Exactly."

  "God bless you, Rosalie!"

  She was honest enough to admit that her little game pre-empted her from too rigid a condemnation of her husband.

  "After all," she told herself, "do I know how I should behave if Frank were to approach me, as my little slut of a sister undoubtedly approached Dexter?"

  But didn't she in fact know? She would have spurned him, as the real Hippolyte had spurned the real Phèdre! For if the old puritanism of the Handys and Howlands had been diluted in her to the point of excluding the sin that existed only in the mind, or at least of ranking it as less culpable than its robuster brethren, the ancient sense of guilt had been replaced by an equally sharp horror of seeming ridiculous. That was the real reason that her censor lowered the curtain on her tumbling mental pictures of an abandoned cleric and a matron who had put by her staidness. Oh, yes, she was safe enough, even against the unimaginable! She was the victim, even in fantasy, of her own steely sense of what was fitting. And she always would be.

  The little game, in any event, was not destined to last. As the wet dreary winter dripped into spring, she began to apprehend that her minister was not the man she had pictured. A romantic fantasy could not exist independently of its too much altered model. Rosalie could adjust for minor differences, but not for major ones. Just as the imagination would not put hair on a bald model, or teeth on a toothless one, so it would not provide sense and balance where there was only extravagance.

  She was beginning to suspect that she was working with a fanatic. Halsted never spoke or thought, so far as she could make out, of anything but slavery. What she had at first deemed a fine, even a holy ideal, began to emerge as an obsession. And she discovered that his love of the enchained was more than balanced by his hatred of the enchainer; that the former might not have even existed without the fire with which he nourished the latter. She had spent a morning listening to the tale of an intelligent and beautiful negress from a plantation near New Orleans, and she was too full of her story not to bring it to Frank. "It's unimaginable!" she exclaimed. "That girl was the daughter of her own master, and he was going to sell her!"

  "I'm afraid that
's only too easily imaginable."

  "But how could a man have no paternal feelings? He was going to sell her to his own son! A young man whom she had every reason to suspect of having improper feelings for herself. His half-sister!"

  "They don't see their slaves as human beings. That's the curse of the South. In Catholic countries, where slavery existed, the church always insisted on the equality of souls. But our Southern Protestants see heaven as an extension of earth, with the same class divisions. If the slaves are permitted eternal life, it is only that they may continue to serve. And if a brother and sister commit fornication and incest, don't forget that it may result in a valuable asset!"

  "They manufacture their own slaves!"

  "Exactly. It is the blackness of the slaves and the whiteness of their owners that gives the institution its peculiar horror. In Rome, where slaves were often of the same color as their masters, and frequently better educated, they could be treated almost as equals. But when slaves are brought here black and ignorant, and kept in ignorance, they become degraded in mind and soul as well as in body. Can you think that the men who have done this to them will escape eternal damnation?"

  Rosalie was startled. Even her grandmother Howland had never talked about damnation, and she had been about as stern on the subject of morals as one could imagine. "Damnation? Oh, I don't like to think that anyone is really damned. Punished, yes, if you like. For years and years, maybe. But how could anyone, in one mortal lifetime, do enough evil to deserve everlasting retribution? No, not even Simon Legree!"

  "Oh, but I believe they can, Rosalie! I believe in hell. Eternal hell! Remember, I've been there!"

  She turned away from the glitter in his eyes. "If you got out of it, it can't have been eternal."

  ***

  One morning Joanna called in Union Square in a great state of agitation. Halsted was transferring the refugees at the parish house to other hiding places. He had received a warning from a friend in the police force that Saint Jude's had fallen under suspicion at last. Someone had chattered.

  "Be sure not to go there!" Joanna warned her. "It may be that they don't know who Frank's volunteers are, and you may be needed to hide somebody."

  "I suppose I can fix up the attic," Rosalie mused. "I'll see to it right now." But she paused, as a thought struck her, on her way to the stairway. "If Frank is suspected, can he drop his disguise? Can he come out now and tell the world where he really stands on slavery?"

  Joanna clapped her hands. "Oh, my, yes! He's going to do it on Sunday. Right there in the pulpit at Saint Jude's. It will be a tremendous moment. You'll go with me, of course? Or will Dexter insist that you go with him to Trinity?"

  "He may make a little scene, but I shall ignore it. Certainly, I shall be with you at Saint Jude's."

  Rosalie was good as her word, and that next Sunday at eleven she and Joanna were seated in a front pew at Saint Jude's. Frank, radiant in his glistening surplice, spotted the sisters as he took his stand in the pulpit and did not hesitate to send them his warmest smile. It was plain that he was intensely happy. The delights of his forthcoming revelation must have been actually sweetened by a year of odious pretenses. He had earned his reward at last. Now he would enter into the kingdom of God on earth.

  He started his confession so softly that for a while his congregation did not realize that anything out of the usual was happening. As he gradually made it clear what he was about to say, a profound silence settled over the church. He told his parishioners, just as he had told Rosalie on her first visit to the parish house, how he had been possessed by the forces of darkness, and how he had been redeemed by a vision of the light, right here where he was now standing, and while he had been delivering his Sunday sermon. His voice began to soar as he developed his new concept of the sacred duty of every Christian to fight slavery. This duty, he maintained, was not confined to opposing the spread of slavery in the territories or newly admitted states; it embraced the march of abolition right into the heart of Southern strongholds. This was to be accomplished by law if possible, but if it could not be done by law, then with God's will, it would have to be accomplished by force of arms!

  At this a quarter of the congregation arose and filed indignantly out of the church.

  Rosalie felt alone and bleak. She had yielded up her fantasy. It was as if the attracting male force of the man in the pulpit had escaped from his body in the silver words of his impassioned oratory and left him now, another angry priest. And she had had her fill of priests.

  17

  DEXTER, on a warm May afternoon in 1860, attended a meeting of his father-in-law's "Save the Union" committee. Some fifty gentlemen, including the delegates from Richmond and Atlanta, were seated in double rows of gilt chairs facing each other across the floor of the picture gallery to discuss the crisis created by the Republicans' nomination of Lincoln. Dexter had come in late and had not been introduced to the visitors. He sat near a partially opened window to enjoy the gentle breeze from the avenue, only half attentive to the speechifying. His eyes took in the painting of Catherine de' Medici inspecting the corpses of Saint Bartholomew's Day. So, he reflected grimly, might some Northern dowager, in a year or more, stroll forth to inspect the toll of war. The queen-mother's widow's weeds showed that she had survived her husband; the dead were all young males. Who said it was a man's world?

  Mr. Handy was on his feet now, addressing the group. He did so gracefully, mellifluously, forcefully.

  "There are those who claim that we men of affairs are concerned only with profit. That is not so, but if it were, would it be so bad a thing? What makes for profitable banking and commerce? Peace and harmony! Who profits from war? The suppliers of arms and munitions, admittedly. But they are only a minority among industrialists. Most of us are hurt, if not actually ruined by it. I retort, gentlemen, to the yellow journalist who wrote that our organization was motivated by greed, 'Aye, but what kind of greed? A good greed. A divine greed! We are puffed with a greed for all the good things of this life: rich crops, warm houses, sound currency, happy men. We wish to live at peace with our neighbors and with good will to all!'"

  Dexter's eye caught the satyr teased by naked wood nymphs, and he half closed his eyes to dream of Annie. But would she ever come to South Vesey Street again? She had missed their last appointment and never explained. Would he have to crawl to her on his knees? And accept the probability that she was seeing the wretch, sitting in that chair by Mr. Handy, from which he kept his eyes rigidly averted? Yet to observe whom else had he come?

  His attention was now attracted to his brother-in-law, who took the floor.

  "We have had the Compromises of 1820 and 1850," David Ullman was saying. "Is there any valid reason that we should not work for the Compromise of 1860? I propose settlement of the slavery question in the territories by vote of the settlers." David was leaning back against the wall, his long legs, clad in spotless, neatly pressed light gray, casually crossed. There was a protesting murmur from some of the men. "But isn't that the democratic way? Aren't the settlers the people most concerned? And I propose in return a compromise of the fugitive slave question by a statute of limitations. One year after a slave has come to live in a free state he should be a free man!"

  Dexter fumed. How could a poor negro hope to hide out for a whole year? He would be bound to be run down, caught and sent back to his master. Was there nothing that David would not advocate to curry favor with Mr. Handy's friends and save his own loans to Southern businesses? Dexter was about to raise his hand to ask a biting question when he saw his father-in-law's meditative glance upon him, and he was stilled. Was he in any position to irritate Mr. Handy?

  In the intermission period, while the delegates were helping themselves to drinks at the long bar table put up at the east end of the room, Dexter, who had remained alone by his window, stiffened suddenly as a stocky figure in a black coat with a big dark head and tousled hair approached him. The man was actually holding out his hand in greeting! Dexter put
both of his own behind his back.

  "Very well," Bleeker said, coming to a halt. "Just as you wish. I only thought that the principle of this meeting was to bury hatchets, not to brandish them."

  "Are you a Southerner now, Mr. Bleeker?" Dexter asked coldly.

  "You might almost say so. I've developed a good deal of sympathy for their point of view. In fact, if it weren't for slavery, I'd say Virginians were the most civilized people I'd ever known."

  "Rather a big 'if,' isn't it?"

  "Perhaps." Bleeker shrugged. "Yes, I agree that's a tough one to swallow. But all your screaming abolitionists aren't making things any easier. Anyway, I'm a great admirer of your father-in-law. He's doing all he can to avert disaster. How's Annie?"

  "Mrs. Charles Fairchild is well, thank you."

  The wretch actually winked! "Do you remember what I told you at our last meeting? That I'd almost forgive you if you'd done what you did to me out of passion? Well, it looks as if I'm going to have to almost forgive you."

  "I have no idea what you're talking about."

  "You don't? Well, the reputation of your prowess has traveled farther than you think. She's a dish for the gods, isn't she?" Dexter had to shrink back before what actually threatened to be a nudge in the ribs! "Does she still cry 'Bully Boy' when she 'comes'?"

  The only thing that kept Dexter's hands from flying to Bleeker's throat was the sudden vision of his father-in-law, across the room, over his adversary's shoulder, watching the two of them intently. But he trembled all over in a surge of conflicting impulses. The hands that wanted to strangle his adversary were now clenched so tightly that the nails bit painfully into his skin; his temples throbbed. And then, as the idea of all he owed to Mr. Handy flickered and jumped before him, he knew, with a sigh of utter exhaustion, that he must do nothing.