House Divided (52 page)

 

Trav left them laughing together. He had enjoyed this hour without envy, despite his wistful realization that in the deep affection between these two lay something he had missed. He and Enid had hours of anger and they had hours of passion, but never of shared and tender mirthfulness.

He had thought to return at once to Centerville, but General Longstreet wished a few days more with his children; so Trav was still at Cinda's when two or three days after Christmas she came from Great Oak, and brought Enid with her. “Faunt's there with Mama,” Cinda explained. “So this is Enid's chance for a little vacation. We'll have a party for her, charades and things.”

Trav thought there was some pretense in Cinda's vivacity; and Enid seemed almost sulky. When they were alone he asked her: “Didn't you want to come?”

“Of course not! I despise travelling in cold, rainy weather.” The fine autumn days had in December given way to snow and rain. “And
even Great Oak's fun with Faunt there. But Cinda just dragged me away.”

Yet she enjoyed as much as anyone the party Cinda arranged. Tommy and Rollin had gone home to spend Christmas leaves; but they appeared at dusk, an hour or two before the first guests were to arrive, so Vesta's happiness was complete. Rollin had time to answer Cinda's questions about the great Charleston fire which had struck the city early in December. “They say it burned over about six hundred acres,” he explained. “From Hazel Street on Cooper River to Tradd Street on Ashley River, and uptown, both sides of Broad Street. It looked for a while as if it would burn out, but then the wind shifted and blew a gale and brought it back so fast people didn't have time to save much before their houses caught. Even when they got furniture out into the streets, there weren't carts enough to carry it away.” He spoke of people they knew. This one's house had been burned, that one's escaped with slight damage, a third's was out of the track of the flames: Cinda trembled as she listened.

“There's nothing that frightens me any worse than a fire,” she confessed. “There's so little you can do.”

Vesta, with Rollin, asked: “Was it fun being at home?”

“Grand,” he said, smiling. “Like old times. We had the whole neighborhood for an oyster roast on the beach, hot whiskey punch and oysters by the barrel and terrapin and palmetto cabbage and wine.” He laughed. “We ate till we couldn't breathe and then danced ourselves hungry again when the moon rose.”

Cinda remembered another picnic at Muster Springs; and Vesta's thoughts must have run with hers, for the girl said quickly: “You and Tommy got here just in time, Rollin. We're having a party.”

He hesitated. “I wanted to make a call or two,” he said doubtfully; but Vesta laughed at him.

“Dolly'll be here, you know. You'd better stay.”

So Rollin grinned and grew red and stayed; and presently the General and Mrs. Longstreet arrived, and then Tilda and Redford Streean, and—after an interval during which Cinda saw Rollin watch the door—Dolly, with two young officers in her train. For Julian's sake, Cinda had asked Anne Tudor. Moxley Sorrel of Longstreet's staff,
and Theodore Hamilton of the First Virginia joined the company. Mr. Hamilton had brought from Centerville funds donated by the officers of Longstreet's division with which to buy some scenery and costumes for the theatrical entertainment which Trav was to arrange. There were half a dozen others, so that the big house was brimming with gay voices and bright laughter.

Charades were the order of the evening. To present the first, Cinda chose the General, Captain Sorrel, Dolly and Enid for the principals; and Trav was drafted for a silent part.

“The word's ‘industrial',” Cinda explained when she gave them their roles. “So this is an Inn, for the the first syllable. You'll be the Inn Keeper, Travis. You don't have to do anything; just be a surly old bear behind the table there. Dolly's the Barmaid, and the General's the Traveller, and he comes in all dusty and thirsty and demands a drink——”

“That won't be play-acting, ma'am!”

“Hush! And it's all pantomime, you know, so don't bellow! And Dolly serves him, and then he says he has no money to pay; so then Trav and you and Dolly just throw him out, and that will be the scene. Now let's start——”

Trav hoped he would be able to do his part. Dolly in cap and apron was a bewitching maid servant; the General a satisfactorily travel-stained wayfarer in hat and greatcoat, stamping in to take his seat at the small table and thumping for service and then visibly softening under Dolly's sprightly smiles. He ogled her and twirled his mustache till the spectators were hilarious and even Trav could no longer keep from grinning. When the General had drained the beaker that Dolly brought him, he rose and fumbled in his pockets and then with an eloquent gesture declared them empty; but before Trav could recognize his cue and do his part, Dolly caught the General's arms and rose on tiptoe, plainly assuring him that another form of payment would be welcome. He accepted the challenge, swept his beard aside and bussed her soundly, to loud applause.

Then Cinda hustled them off through the wide doors; and Trav protested: “But I thought I was supposed to——”

“Oh, you were,” Cinda laughingly agreed. “But this little minx had her own ideas!”

“I thought it was nicer that way,” Dolly said demurely. “Did you mind, General?”

“My dear young lady, I'm only sorry we couldn't repeat the performance! An encore, Cinda?”

“You men!” Cinda protested. “Every last one of you turns flighty at a pretty smile. Go sit with Cousin Louisa, Jeems! She'll give you a wigging!”

For the second syllable, Dolly and Vesta and Anne Tudor and Enid—Trav thought Enid seemed as young and as beautiful as they—elaborately flicked clouds of imaginary dust off every chair and table and mantel; for the third and fourth syllables combined, the scene was a court room, Longstreet the sober judge, young Hamilton the prisoner on trial. Streean and Trav were opposing counsel, and Dolly was the accusing witness. Pantomime can be more eloquent than words; Dolly with a pretty impudence made the crime of which the defendant was accused so manifest that Trav felt an uneasy embarrassment; but Longstreet, never at a loss, played his part as well as she. He bullied counsel, he sympathized with the witness, and he damned the scoundrelly prisoner—and all in pantomime—till the audience rocked with laughter. Trav, who had seen him in many moods, thought he was a dozen men in one; stout commander, devoted husband, adoring father, gamester, lover of fun—and now even an actor! He saw Mrs. Longstreet's amused affection in her eyes.

The long evening never lagged, and when her roles offered the opportunity Enid was as audacious and as charming as Dolly. Trav, watching her happiness, was happy too; and alone with him at last she was still rapturous. “Oh, Trav, I don't think I ever did have such a good time in all my life!” She kissed him, laughing richly. “You were so cute, acting all over the place! You're really sweet, you know.” That night even in her sleep she clung to him, uttering in her dreams little happy sounds.

 

The President's New Year's reception in the White House on Clay Street seemed to Trav a dreary occasion, but Enid enjoyed it; and when next day Mr. Hamilton took her and Trav behind the scenes at the Richmond Theatre—which most people still called the Marshall—she was delighted. Trav too found this glimpse of a new world curious
and interesting. In one of the plays,
The Log Fort,
muskets were fired on the stage; and a wad struck Trav's knee as he stood with Enid in the wings, and smouldered till he set his foot on it. He would remember this, for in the small hours that night he was awakened by a tumult in the town, and saw a glare against the sky, and dressed and followed the beacon of the flames to the corner of Seventh and Broad to find the theatre all afire and already beyond saving. But a saddler's shop next door had caught; and the little establishment of Mrs. Jackson, who made mantuas, was burning; and so was Davidson's Hotel; and embers flying in the updraft from the flames set roofs ablaze in the nearer neighborhood. Thus though the main battle was already lost there were many small skirmishes to be fought. Trav lent a hand in this, till all that could be done had been done. In the gray dawn he heard Mr. Dalton, the stage manager, furiously assert that the fire had been set; that Mr. Crone, the night watchman, had seen a Negro climb out of an alley window a while before the first flames appeared, had tried unsuccessfully to halt him. Trav suggested that a musket wad might have been responsible; and Mr. Dalton dissented so violently that Trav suspected him of guilty fears that this might be true.

Not only the building but the scenery, costumes, properties, musical instruments, all were gone. This made it impossible for Trav and Mr. Hamilton to buy the theatrical supplies they had hoped to secure; so next day they returned to headquarters in Centerville. Trav left Enid in Richmond. She would go down to Great Oak when next Brett, or some other to escort her, went that way.

 

Through the first weeks of the new year, Trav's duties were light. Supplies, in spite of Colonel Northrop's many inadequacies as Commissary General, accumulated faster than they were consumed; for so many soldiers were in hospitals, either in camp or in Richmond, that the army was no more than half an army. Sickness was not the only toll. Most of the men had enlisted for twelve months, and in April and May those enlistments would expire. Congress offered a bounty and a sixty-day furlough to every man who would promise to reenlist, and as early as January there were many furloughs granted; but from their furloughs an alarming number of soldiers failed to return. General Longstreet told Trav that to put an adequate force in the field for the spring campaign, conscription would be necessary.

“The army's melting away like snow under a spring sun,” he de clared. “The men take the furlough, but they don't come back.”

“They all want to go home,” Trav agreed. “They hate winter quarters, and eating their own cooking, and having nothing to do but huddle around their fires and scratch themselves. But no one's going to like conscription, General.”

“No one likes war!” Longstreet retorted. “But once you're in one, it's lick or get licked. Next spring McClellan will throw a hundred thousand men at us; and if things keep on the way we're going, we won't have ten thousand soldiers to meet him. Why, Currain, by the middle of May the enlistments of a hundred and fifty of our regiments will have expired. That means that just about the time fighting starts, we'll be trying to recruit new regiments and reorganize the army.” And, remembering Trav's word, he exploded. “Want to go home? Of course they do! We all want that! But the way to win a war is to want to win it, to want victory more than you want anything else!”

“Do you want conscription, General?”

“You're damned right I do! I want to win this war, and I want anything that will help win it!”

But to supply men was not Trav's province, nor Longstreet's; so at division headquarters January was a lighthearted time. General Johnston's headquarters were at the hotel near-by, and Colonel Lamar came in late November and spent much of the winter there as an unofficial liaison between General Johnston and President Davis. Colonel Lamar had been a student at Emory College when Judge Longstreet, the General's uncle, was its president; and he married Judge Longstreet's daughter, so he and General Longstreet were not only long friends, but in this fashion kin. The Colonel, after a distinguished career which included more than one term in Congress, had with the outbreak of the war received a regimental command. Persistent illness disqualified him for active duty; but his eagerness to be of use led him to undertake to work for a better understanding between President Davis and the commanding generals.

Trav quickly learned to feel for the amiable and valiant invalid a strong affection, and Colonel Lamar sometimes confided to Trav his perplexities. “General Johnston and Cousin James are a stiff-necked and rebellious generation,” he admitted, smiling at his own words. “Cousin James will never forgive President Davis for asking him,
when he offered his services, whether he had settled his accounts as a Union paymaster before resigning. Mr. Davis is sometimes lacking in tact, but he meant no offense; and for the sake of victory, personal grievances should be forgotten.” And he added: “I hope to be able to persuade Cousin James and General Johnston to like President Davis a little better.”

But he did not succeed. No one could fail to respond to his charm, and General Johnston proposed to recommend him for promotion to brigadier, and General Longstreet never concealed his own pleasure in Mr. Lamar's company. “But he will never lead me to any fondness for Jeff Davis,” he told Trav, with an amiable vehemence.

“I remember you said one day you'd do anything that would help win the war. Doesn't that include——”

Longstreet laughed cheerfully. “I can obey a man without liking him.” And he asked in an amused tone: “By the way, how well do you agree with Colonel Northrop nowadays, Currain?” Colonel Northrop's unfitness for the responsibilities that President Davis had put in his hands was so manifest that Trav never thought of him without reddening anger.

 

There was in these weeks of idleness time for pleasure and Longstreet organized a club to jump horses, with a forfeit for each fall to be paid into a fund for jolly dinners. The General himself, though he weighed well over two hundred, was a fine horseman; and his big bay, a thoroughbred, was the best jumper in the army. So he paid no forfeits; but only Peyton Manning, who was so small that two Mannings would hardly have made one Longstreet, had an equally clean slate. Beverly Johnston, an older brother of General Johnston, a choleric and excessively bibulous individual six inches under six feet but as fat as he was short, one day tried a jump and took a bad fall, bloodying his own nose and breaking his mount's knees; and the jumping club came thereafter under General Johnston's displeasure.