House Divided (34 page)

Brett was right in this prediction. When the train of wagons reached the earthworks, shouting men crowded around them; in a moment fires were going, and the fragrance of fat pork broiling in the flames began to fill the air. Trav saw in all these men and boys an equal exhilaration. Even Colonel Hill, when he came toward them with Major Randolph, showed the same unnatural stimulation. Was this what battle did to men? Did it make each individual a little more than his usual self, multiply and magnify him? It was as though all these warriors had drunk deep of some heady wine.

“You're responsible for this bounty?” Colonel Hill demanded.
“Why, Mr. Currain, this is better than another victory! You understand soldiering, sir.”

Trav grinned. “I'm afraid not, Colonel. I haven't the stomach for it. Sight of blood—even a mule's blood—sickened me.”

“Pah! That can happen to anyone! It takes boys with no imagination to do the fighting—did you see how gallantly my cadets handled themselves today, sir?—but older men like you and me are needed to lead and to feed them. The South needs men like you. Colonel Magruder will make a place for you as commissary—Mr. Vaughan is acting for him temporarily—if you're at liberty to serve.”

“I'll have to make some arrangements first, sir,” Trav confessed. “But—I doubt my own fitness. I lost my senses so completely I don't know what happened, even now.”

The Colonel's eyes lighted. “Ah, it was a day of glory, sir! Yes, two days of glory, Saturday and again today. Twice Saturday we chased the Yankees across New Market Bridge, and now Captain Douthatt and his dragoons are chivvying them along the same course! Every man on the field today bore himself like a hero of legend, Mr. Currain! Major Randolph and his guns—” He pointed, and Trav saw the Major and Brett talking quietly together a little way off, thought Major Randolph alone among all these men here seemed calm and normal. “I tell you, Mr. Currain, as an artillerist, Major Randolph has no superior in any army in the world!” Trav thought with faint amusement that the Colonel in this hour of triumph was taking in a good deal of territory! “My field officers, my captains—By the way, Mr. Currain, Captain Currain and his Martinston men especially distinguished themselves. When Captain Bridges was ordered to retake our advanced position he was so excited that he forgot to tell his men to follow him, ran forward alone! Captain Currain saw the situation and led his own men forward, and Captain Bridges's company went shoulder to shoulder with them! Ah, sir, it was glorious! The Yankees were five times our numbers, and we've chased them for miles!”

Trav nodded. “That's fine, sir.” He asked: “Were there many—hurt?”

“One of our fine boys, Henry Wyatt, yes. I fear for him. A few others were lightly wounded.” His voice rang. “But the fields yonder are littered with Yankee dead! They must have lost three or four hundred
men!” He laughed dryly. “I can't place their losses lower without accusing them of a degree of cowardice disgraceful even in a Yankee! For they were five to our one, Mr. Currain! Five to our one! Yes, in fact the odds were nearer ten to one, since not five hundred of our men even fired their pieces.”

He was willing to talk endlessly. Trav had never seen him so vocal. The little man seemed taller than usual, as though inches had been added to his stature in this hour. Then Colonel Magruder appeared from the church and gave a dispatch to a rider who galloped away; and Magruder too, when he heard what Trav had done, was grateful. Trav was amused by the splendor of the other's uniform and by the Colonel's childish lisp, incongruous in such a gorgeous figure; nevertheless these profuse acknowledgments impressed him. Clearly, within this business of war, to supply the men was a task worth doing. Before he went to Richmond for Burr's wedding he had put affairs at Great Oak in such order that he could if he were needed be absent for a while.

June, 1861

 

 

F
OR the four years after Sumter, the whole business of the South was war; but to each individual war wore a different aspect. To Vesta Dewain, its onset was a spur, an urgent warning: “Hurry, hurry, hurry! Hurry before it is too late!” She was twenty years old, and she had known Tommy Cloyd through most of her childhood at the Plains; but not till a year or two ago had she begun to see in him something more than a nice, awkward, stammering boy. Since then she had come to be sure that she loved him and that he loved her, and to assume that time would in some beautiful fashion presently bring them close to each other and that they would cleave together forever.

But now with the sudden roll of drums there was no more time. When Sumter fell, Vesta and Burr were alone in the house on Fifth Street, Cinda and Brett in South Carolina. Vesta wished her mother and father were here; and Burr's happiness with Barbara made her long for Tommy. She wrote him, not to say any of the things she wished to say but only because to write him somehow eased her loneliness; but before her letter had time to reach him, one from him came to her. He said his company would soon reach Richmond as a part of Colonel Gregg's regiment, and a week before Cinda and Brett returned from the Plains he arrived.

Vesta was one among hundreds of pretty girls at the station eager to welcome these valiant boys. Had not some of them been among the heroes in the bloodless victory at Sumter! Oh, war was glorious and beautiful and fine! Vesta caught the infection, she cheered and sang with the rest; but while she lent herself to the smiling confusion of that happy welcoming, her eyes sought Tommy everywhere.

When ranks were formed she discovered him, stiff and straight, visibly gulping with excitement while he awaited the command to march; and through brimming, laughing eyes, she saw his Adam's apple pump nervously up and down, and knew how he must be trembling, and loved him because he was so young and so anxious to look every inch a soldier. She tried to come near him, and when a moving file blocked her way she called: “Tommy! Tommy! Oh, Tommy Cloyd!” He did not turn his head; but she saw his ears red with pleasure, so she knew he had heard. Then the column began to move, small boys tramping proudly beside the soldiers in the dusty street, pretty girls with a skip and a run to keep the pace scurrying along the sidewalks. Vesta saw Dolly, on the arm of a tall young officer, watching the regiment pass, and Dolly introduced her escort, Lieutenant something or other.

“He's in the army at Yorktown,” Dolly explained, with a flashing upward smile at the bedazzled youngster beside her. “They're going to keep the Yankees shut up in Fortress Monroe till they all die of yellow fever or something.” Then, as Vesta tried to hurry on: “Don't go, darling!”

“I have to. I want to keep up. Tommy Cloyd's with them.”

“You know perfectly well he'll come to call this evenin',” Dolly argued; but Vesta laughed and scurried on.

She kept up with Tommy's company all the long way to Camp Pickens, and saw the men dismiss, and when Tommy was free she captured him and kissed him and felt his shy embarrassment and said in laughing reassurance:

“Oh, Tommy! Everybody's kissing everybody! Don't be so bothered! Tommy, can you come right away home to supper?”

He could, and they set out together, Vesta's hand through his arm, her heart full of happiness. She poured out many questions.

“Was the trip hard?”

“Why, I guess so. But everybody was too excited to mind. You know the way you feel when your foot goes to sleep! I felt like that all over. I was some excited, and some scared, too.”

“Pooh! I bet you're not scared!”

“Yes'm! I guess most of us are. I guess that's why everybody keeps saying how the Yankees won't fight, and how quick we'll be in Washington,
and what we'll do to old Abe Lincoln when we catch him.”

“I bet you will, too. The Yankee papers say they'll hang President Davis in Washington on the Fourth of July, but I'll bet you'll go and hang Lincoln instead.” She asked: “Is Rollin Lyle in your regiment?”

“Yes, ma'am, in the Richland Rifles. His old company, most of them wouldn't come, so he joined the Columbia company.”

“Wouldn't come? Why not, for Heaven's sake?”

“Some of our company felt the same way. They said they didn't volunteer to fight for Virginia.”

“For Virginia!” She flamed with indignation. “I like that! Why, Virginia's fighting for them, Tommy! We didn't have to come into their old war. They had to get so uppity and start it, and then when they got in trouble we took their part; but if they're going to talk like that—–”

He grinned appeasingly. “That was just some of them, Vesta; just making an excuse to stay home. Mama says the farmers she knows at home are beginning to say this is a rich man's war, and that the poor men will have to fight it. She told me to come and show them that that wasn't so!” He added: “Colonel Gregg promised the ones who did come that they could go home when their enlistments expire on the first of July, or I guess hardly anyone would have come at all. But I'm not going home till the fighting's over.”

She squeezed his arm, said proudly: “Julian's in the Charlotte Grays.”

“Julian? Golly, Vesta, he's awful young.”

“He's only sixteen. But nobody in the Grays is over twenty-one, and all the cadets enlisted, practically! But I guess everybody has; everybody who is anybody.”

“Jeff Major, down home, said he wasn't going to,” Tommy told her. “But some of the young ladies sent him a package of petticoats, so he did.” He grinned. “I guess a young man isn't going to be very popular if he doesn't.”

“It's the same in Richmond. Everybody I know has enlisted—except Darrell.”

“Who is he?”

“Darrell Streean, Dolly's brother. You remember Dolly. She visited me down at the Plains, last year.”

He nodded. “When Rollin—” he began, then said only: “Yes, I remember her. Awfully pretty.”

“He's a clerk in the Quartermaster's office,” she said. “But he's just no good anyway. But all the other boys are in the army, and all the ladies are sewing like mad, making things for soldiers.”

“It's the same in Camden,” he agreed. “They gave us a battle flag before we left home. The young ladies made it, and they had a banquet, and Miss Betsy Beaufort made a presentation speech that sounded mighty fine, but Romer Pettigrew had written it all out for her. He's the color sergeant, so he was the one to receive the flag, and he had to make a speech back at her; and then they got married the next day, and the wedding coming right on top of the banquet that way, nobody had much chance to sleep any, those two days.”

“Oh, what fun!” Her heart quickened. This talk of weddings might lead to what she wished to hear him say. “I'll bet he'll fight all the harder, remembering her at home, and knowing she's loving him and praying for him.”

“I don't know,” he said in a doubtful tone. “He might worry more about getting—hurt or something.” He added hurriedly: “Then it was a big day when we marched to the station, everyone giving us presents and things, cakes and goodies and money too. You'd see gentlemen emptying their pockets and making the boys take the money, and all the girls were kissing everybody.”

“Did they kiss you?” she asked teasingly.

“Yes, ma'am!” He grinned and wiped his mouth with his knuckles. “I guess I got kissed about a hundred times. It was real nice. But the train ride was pretty hot and noisy. We had to eat up all the things they'd given us quick, because we were so crowded you couldn't put anything anywhere; and then there'd be a new crowd at every station and the same celebration all over again. We got a chance to clean up, once; stopped by a branch out in the country clear away from everywhere. But nights you couldn't sleep. I'm so sleepy I might as well be dead.”

“Poor Tommy!” She shook his arm. “But don't you dare go to sleep now!”

“No, ma'am, I'm too worked up to sleep, I guess.” He grinned. “It was funny to see the men throwing things away between stations. People
kept giving us so much, so we'd throw most of it out of the windows, and then the next station we'd have to take on a new load. The folks along the railroad can pick up enough things to eat right along the tracks to feed them all summer. The whole trip was like a picnic.” He added soberly: “I guess they won't think drilling is so much of a picnic. None of us know very much about being soldiers, Vesta. It will take a while to learn.”

Vesta was to hear him say something like this more than once during the two weeks and a little more before his regiment departed. She went almost every day to camp to watch the endless drills, and she too wondered why they were necessary. “I don't see why you can't just go start whipping Yankees,” she protested. Tommy tried to answer her, but she was not satisfied until one day at camp she saw General Lee watching a dress parade. She had never seen him before, but she knew how highly he was respected and how deeply loved by all Virginia men. He was tall, strongly built, erect and finely posed, with black hair barely touched with gray, and a black mustache. Vesta thought him the handsomest man she had ever seen. If such a man as he approved all this absurd marching to and fro, why, then it must be wise and necessary.

So she argued the point with Tommy no more; but—especially after Cinda and Brett came home—they returned to one argument again and again. Tommy said learning to be a soldier took time, and that a man engaged in this arduous study ought not to think about getting married. Vesta retorted that Burr did not feel that way; that he and Barbara Pierce were to be married pretty soon.

“Well, Burr's in the cavalry,” Tommy reminded her. “That's different. He already knows about riding and shooting and things. He doesn't have to learn drill and marching and all that; but I do, and I'm not very smart. It's bound to take me a long time.”

“But, Tommy,” Vesta urged, “just suppose—just for instance—that it was you and me, and you were just starting out to war, the way you are, and we were in love with each other.” A dark wave of color swept his cheeks and she repeated reassuringly: “Oh, just for instance, I mean. But wouldn't you want us to be married right away?”

He swallowed hard. “Well, I guess it isn't so much a question what a man wants, as what he thinks he ought to do.”

Thus for the time he silenced her, but she told her mother next morning, in one of those long breakfast-time talks which meant so much to both of them: “Honestly, he makes me so mad sometimes I could just slap him.”

Cinda smiled. “I don't believe it! You're really proud of him for feeling that way. Tommy's such a sweet, shy youngster that it's easy to think of him as just a boy; but he's really a fine man.” She laughed fondly. “Make up your mind to it, darling, you'll never be able to lead him around by the nose! He'll be the head of the family!”

“He'll never be the head of our family if he doesn't hurry!”

“I've always loved Tommy,” Cinda confessed. “Now I'm learning to respect him too—and so are you.”

“Oh, I suppose so! But I think he's an awful old slow poke, just the same!”

Clayton brought Jenny and the children to Richmond. He could stay a day or two, must then report to General Beauregard at Manassas to serve on the General's staff. He left on the Saturday morning train; and Vesta saw Jenny's good-by to him, Jenny's fine smile hiding those secret terrors which she must be feeling. Vesta found stinging tears in her own eyes. Suppose she herself were Jenny. Suppose she and Tommy were married, and she too was soon to have a baby. Could she give Tommy a smiling good-by kiss and let him go? She thought not; yet perhaps being married, becoming part of another as that other became part of you, somehow multiplied your strength and his.

Tommy came for supper that night. His regiment was ordered to move across the city to Camp Charleston; he had heard that they would within a day or two go in the cars to Manassas Gap. Vesta had held Tommy in her thoughts all day; she told him of that farewell she had seen. “I think she's marvelous, don't you?”

“I've always thought she was pretty wonderful,” he assured her. “I didn't have to find it out now. She's been that way right along.”

“If I were married,” Vesta confessed, “if you and I were married, for instance, I don't see how I could bear to have you go.” And when he only blushed in silence, she protested: “Tommy, whenever I say that —about you and me being married—you never say anything!”

“Well—you just said ‘for instance.'”

She touched his hand, herself now as shy as he. “I keep talking about it, Tommy, to—sort of get you used to the idea.”

“Oh, I know that. I mean, I know you don't mean—well, anything.”

She started to speak, then hesitated; but presently his regiment would depart, and he must go with them to face what dangers she dared not even guess; and he was so slow, so slow! She could not wait. Time was too short. She said abruptly: “But I do, Tommy. I do—mean something!”

“Eh?” He gulped and swallowed hard.

“I mean everything!” He was so long silent that at last she had to speak. “Tommy, you've been in love with me for—just years and years. You know you have.” He wiped his helpless brow. “Haven't you?” she demanded, and in tender impatience: “Oh, for Heaven's sake, say something!”

“Why—why, yes, ma'am, I wouldn't wonder if that's so,” he admitted.

“I've been in love with you, Tommy, just as long as you've been in love with me!” She saw that he could not speak. “Do I have to—say it all, Tommy? I want you, please sir, to marry me.”

“Oh, I want to marry you all right.” He blurted out the words in startled haste. “I guess you know that.”