House Divided (42 page)

Trav nodded sympathetically. “I'm not built for running, but if I ever get into a hot place I'll probably outrun a horse.” He asked, smiling: “Did you run?”

“Well, I rallied to the rear,” Burr admitted with a grin. “But I wasn't actually scared. Fighting doesn't bother me as much as the things I see when we're not fighting. We passed one place where the surgeons were cutting off arms and legs, and the surgeons were as bloody as butchers, and men were screeching and screaming, and there were swarms of flies so full of blood they couldn't fly.” He added: “But I didn't mind seeing men shot to pieces in the battle; and right after it was over I drank out of a creek where the water was red with blood and really tasted of blood, and didn't even think about it.”

Trav swallowed painfully. “I suppose you get used to it, but I don't think I ever will. Were you in the pursuit?”

“Yes, sir. It wasn't like what I'd expected, though. It wasn't cutting down men right and left with our sabres and all that sort of thing.
The Yankees kept on running till you caught up with them and then they held up their hands and you marched them off to the rear.” He laughed at his memories. “Uncle Trav, you should have seen the roadsides and the fields toward Centerville. I guess a lot of Yankee civilians had come out from Washington expecting the battle would be a sort of picnic; because I saw great baskets of food and wine and all sorts of things, scattered along the road for miles. I saw parasols and lace shawls, and I passed one broken-down carriage with two girls in it, pretty girls, too. They didn't know whether to be scared of us or mad at the escorts who had deserted them. Someone had taken their horses. The whole thing was so funny you couldn't help laughing.”

 

Through that summer, Trav's close daily association with Longstreet brought him a contenting satisfaction. The General was tireless, and the men of his staff were hard driven, but Trav could match him. “There's not much fuss and fury about you, Captain Currain,” Longstreet said once, approvingly. “But you seem to be there or thereabouts when you're needed.”

Trav one day asked: “General, do you expect we'll hold our position here?”

“No. When the Yankees show signs of being ready to attack, we'll fall back. It's too easy for them to flank us from Acquia Creek if we stay here.” Longstreet's eyes twinkled. “Why? Are you taking lessons in grand strategy, Captain?”

“No, sir—I was thinking of rations.”

“Ah! You're a man of one idea.”

“Well, that's my job, sir. Of course there's plenty of everything now; but if we don't intend to hold this part of Virginia, we'd better clean out the corn cribs and collect the cattle and hogs. No use leaving supplies for the Yankees.”

Longstreet agreed, so Trav's foraging parties were steadily at work, ranging as far as Falls Church on the hills above the Potomac. From the high ground a quarter of a mile beyond where the old red brick church stood beside the road, Trav more than once saw the lights of the enemy capital three or four miles away across the river.

He was glad his duties kept him much away from headquarters. Since there was little military activity beyond the routine drill, the
dinners at headquarters were elaborate and jolly. An abundance of wine and liquor usually set someone to singing; and after dinner and through the long evenings a poker game was a reasonable certainty. On the rare occasions when Trav was at headquarters he watched these games without participating; and once at a jovial dinner Longstreet rallied him for his sobriety.

“Take your pleasure when you can, Currain! My only complaint of you is that long face of yours!” And he said, looking up and down the listening table: “You can always recognize greatness in a man by his readiness to taste the joys of life when they're offered him.”

General Van Dorn said a loud “Amen to that!” A laugh ran down the board, and Longstreet cried:

“There you are, Currain; praise from Sir Herbert! Or was it Sir Herbert, gentlemen? My literary education has its deficiencies. But I tell you, Currain, even the exhausting pleasures are good for a man. The ascetic is too busy with self-discipline to get things done. Excesses don't produce greatness, to be sure; but I never knew a great man who wasn't given to excess of one sort or another. He liked the ladies too well—–”

Van Dorn shouted: “No! No!”

But Longstreet repeated: “The ladies, yes; or he liked wine too well, or good fare, or gambling. Which reminds me, gentlemen ...” So they turned to the waiting cards.

 

Usually some of the higher officers of the army were of the number around the table; and Trav saw that in these jovial hours Longstreet established an ascendancy over the other generals. There was something daunting in his size, his calm certainty, his firm tones. When in August business took Trav to Richmond he spoke of this to Cinda.

“Even General Johnston and General Beauregard defer to him,” he told her. “I suppose it's because he's so sure of himself.”

She smiled faintly. “Cousin Jeems was always a masterful man.”

“We're not really related, are we?”

“Oh, no, but at his wedding he called every pretty girl ‘Cousin Something-or-other', so we all began calling him ‘Cousin Jeems'. Louisa says wherever they go he always manages to find lots of ‘kissing cousins'!”

“That reminds me: one of Mrs. Longstreet's cousins, Colonel Garland, commands the Eleventh Virginia in Longstreet's brigade. Longstreet likes to torment Colonel Garland, calls him ‘Cousin Sammy'; and the Colonel gets red around the ears.” Trav smiled. “The General is always playing jokes on his regimental commanders. We had a review for Prince Jerome Napoleon one day. The First Virginia Infantry is in our brigade, and their uniforms are going to pieces. Longstreet borrowed a couple of smart regiments from other commands and put the First Virginia in with them, and then he joked Colonel Skinner because their trousers were out at the seat; but the Colonel turned the laugh on him—said his men might be a little out at the seat but that the Yankees would never see that part of them.”

“Is the Prince attractive?”

“No. Pasty skin, dissipated, fat, soft, rude, ill-mannered. Major Fairfax had prepared refreshments, but the Prince declined to stay. We sent him back through the lines under a flag—and good riddance.”

Trav, hoping to help her for a while to forget Clayton's death, talked so much more than was usual for him that she said smilingly: “I declare, Travis, soldiering's loosened your tongue. I never knew you to have so much to say. Did you learn that from Cousin Jeems?”

“He's quite a talker when we're alone,” Trav agreed, and added with a chuckle: “Or when we've had wine or whiskey for dinner. Then he likes to talk—and to sing.”

“Tony's changed, too,” she reflected. “He was here last week. I wonder if Brett and Faunt will be changed. I hope Brett won't. He couldn't be improved.”

“I had a letter from Tony,” Trav told her. “He'd seen Mama and Enid and the children. I'm going down to Great Oak tomorrow.” Tony had written suggesting that he come home for a visit when he could, that Enid missed him; but Trav did not tell Cinda this. Some undercurrent in Tony's letter had puzzled him, made him faintly uneasy.

“I'm so glad,” Cinda agreed. “Be nice to Enid, Trav. It's lonely for her there.”

This was so nearly what Tony had said that Trav looked at her half resentfully. “I suppose so.”

Cinda hesitated as though about to say more. “Are you here on duty?” she asked.

“I came to see Colonel Northrop. He's—well, I want to try to straighten out some things.”

“That sounds familiar! Everybody complains about Colonel Northrop. He's the most be-damned man in Richmond—and President Davis is damned for supporting him.”

“Well, Colonel Northrop makes a lot of mistakes,” Trav admitted. “I've been impressing corn and meat in front of our lines, because if we don't the Yankees will; but the Colonel has sent orders not to do that. I want to discuss it with him. We could draw all we need from the country west of us, as long as we stay where we are; and when we retreat, as we're bound to, everything there will be left for the Yankees. But Colonel Northrop insists on shipping everything up from Richmond. That not only puts too heavy a load on the railroad, but it uses up our stores here before there's any need.”

“I should think he'd see that.”

“I think that he will,” Trav agreed. “When I tell him the situation.” He added, half-embarrassed, laughing at himself: “Of course I don't know much about it; but I've been trying to figure out a system of supply and transportation, so things will come through regularly. As it is, one day there'll be plenty and to spare; and then when that's gone there'll be no rations at all for a day or so. The army eats up a million pounds a week—when we get it. That means a lot of wagons, besides the railroads.” She nodded, and he said earnestly: “I think we ought to have at least four wagons, with four or maybe six horses to a wagon, to each company, and two to each battery, and about twenty-five more for making depots. That would take care of food and ammunition and headquarters and hospitals and everything.” On this subject so important to him he became eloquent. “Then I think we ought to accumulate a big reserve of supplies in places where they'll be safe from capture but where they can be easily transported to the army. As it is, we just live from hand to mouth. That's all right in summer; but in winter when the roads are bad it means the men will be short of food a lot of the time. This war is just beginning, but we ought to plan ahead. I've talked about it with General
Longstreet and he sent me down to see Colonel Northrop and explain my ideas to him.”

She said affectionately: “It's so like you to do your fighting with figures.” And she suggested: “Mr. Streean might help you.”

“He's in the Quartermaster's office, but I don't think he's in the purchasing department.”

“He buys all sorts of things, Tilda says.”

“He may be doing it as a speculation. Prices are rising already.”

Cinda agreed. “Brett Dewain says they'll go sky-high,” she commented. “He says paper money is no good. He worries as much about such things as you do about figures.”

“Have you seen him lately?”

“Not since—” Her voice caught, and she did not finish. He guessed that she had not seen Brett since the days he spent here after Clayton's death.

“I expect you miss him,” he suggested.

“Oh, I keep busy. At first I worked with Miss Sally Tompkins in her hospital.” She hesitated. “I don't suppose I accomplished much, but it was—well, I got a lot of satisfaction out of it. But now no more wounded are coming in, so I have time to enjoy little Clayton.”

“It isn't just wounds,” he remarked. “Disease, too. We've thousands of men sick in the hospitals at Centerville.”

She touched her brow with her hand in a gesture he had never seen before. “Battle isn't the only danger, is it? Mr. French and Dr. Laidley were killed right here in Richmond. They were making powder or something, and it exploded.”

“We're hard put to it for such things.” He remembered Longstreet's word. “Even for lead. We searched the battlefield for bullets, picked them up out of the grass, dug them out of trees and out of the walls of houses. The men got hundreds of pounds of lead that way, and we needed it all. Collecting rations is hard enough, but there's plenty of food if we manage properly.”

 

Trav's interview with the Commissary General next day was completely fruitless. Colonel Northrop himself had a dyspeptic look, and Trav thought a man with no appetite could not be expected to realize how much soldiers needed to eat. When he went on to Great Oak, he
was depressed by Colonel Northrop's stubborn stupidity, and his thoughts were all absorbed in his own problems; but remembering Tony's advice and Cinda's, he made a conscientious effort to content Enid. She had always seemed to him a person of mysterious moods: sometimes astonishingly gay and charming, sometimes wearyingly querulous, sometimes easily pleased, sometimes impossible to content. There were times when her eager responses enchanted him; there were others when at his least touch she shivered with distaste and drew away. She was an enigma he had long ago ceased to try to solve. If she accepted his clumsily affectionate advances, he was pleased; if she repelled them, he neither wooed her nor demanded what she did not readily bestow.

So, though he had mildly hoped for a warmer welcome, he was not surprised when this time she rebuffed him. “Don't start tumbling me! If you want to be a married man, you'd better stay home and take care of your family, instead of just coming when you feel like it, as though I were your mistress!”

She had many complaints. She said Mrs. Currain was becoming more exasperating every day. “She treats me like a child, doesn't think I can do anything right, doesn't trust me out of her sight. She won't even let me help her.”

“Well, Mama's always run things here.”

“Oh, of course you'd take her side!”

“Why, you know I'm on your side, Enid, if it ever comes to the point of taking sides; but Mama doesn't intend to make you unhappy.”

“Well, I don't know what she intends, but I know what she does! She even interferes with the way I manage the children. She spoils them so that they're beginning to just hate me!” Her tone became maddeningly patient. “But I'll get used to it, I suppose. Your family never did like me.”

“Cinda sent her love to you.”

“That didn't mean anything! I know what they all think of me. I suppose that's why I'm so lonely.”

“You see Brett and Tony and Julian pretty often, don't you?”

“Oh, yes, they ride over at the most heathenish hours, and Mama wears herself out taking care of them and then goes to bed with a headache and I have to play nursemaid to her! If you think seeing
them is any pleasure, you're mightily mistaken. They never pay any attention to me anyway, except to ask for things. I might as well be one of the servants and go live in the quarter!”