The Bookman's Promise (22 page)

We spent an hour with Colonel Gardner, who was an old man in every sense. The talk quickly became political, and Gardner’s sympathies overrode his Northern upbringing, coming down much too solidly with the Southerners for my liking. “You’ve got to understand their anger,” he said. “They are being treated very badly on the question of the territories. If Lincoln somehow gets elected and slavery is outlawed in the new territories, their way of life will soon be suffocated through the legislative process.”

Burton was polite as always, expressing an understanding of the Southern viewpoint without stating his own. But as we took our leave and trudged back to the fort, he said, “It’s not his age that makes him unfit for this command, it’s his attitude. Look at the position this puts his men in. It’s not bad enough to be surrounded by enemies and have the walls of their fort covered with dunes that any five-year-old could climb over; now for a leader they’ve got an old man who lives among the enemy and spouts the enemy’s dogma.” He stopped in the middle of the road and beheld the sorry fort. Loudly, with no attempt to hide his anger, he said, “So, Charlie, how’d you like to be stationed here with your life in the balance?” Then, under his breath, he said, “God
damn
such authority! God
damn
such arrogance! God
damn
politics and politicians!”

Captain Doubleday seemed happy to see us again, as if we represented some fading semblance of sanity in a world going quickly mad. The three of us walked up the beach, chatting pleasantly in the warm May sunshine. He needs our outside voices, I thought, even though he can’t admit that or commit himself to strangers. He’s a soldier; he can’t criticize the politicians who have put him here, or the seditious old man to whom they’ve entrusted his life. All he can honorably do is hope to die well when the time comes.

We stood for a while and watched the sea, looking at incoming ships gliding past Fort Sumter and around the point to the city. Then Doubleday said, “Come, I’ll buy you something to drink.”

The tavern was just a short trek across the dunes: a cool, dark haven with a pair of cool, dark wenches as barmaids. The ladies were so closely matched that they had to be sisters, and Doubleday introduced them to us as Florence and Frances. I thought of Marion, the girl in the little upstate town that now seemed so far behind us: the town of Florence, I remembered with a shudder. I looked across the table and wondered if Burton was having the same supernatural thoughts.

Doubleday ordered ale for us and tea for himself.

I offered a toast. “To the Union.”

Instinctively Doubleday raised his cup. Richard was tardy by just a couple of heartbeats.

We talked into the afternoon. Doubleday and Burton spoke of general military strategies, captain to captain. It all came down to the one thought, without ever getting more specific than they had already been: how to defend the defenseless.

It was after three o’clock when Doubleday said, “I should get back to my post and you have a boat to catch.”

At the very last, he said to Burton, “I’ve been thinking about that question we left unanswered this morning. You said it would depend on your authority and how you interpreted it. I’m not sure what you meant.”

“I meant that in your colonel’s position, lacking specific orders to the contrary, I would move my men under cover of night to that new brick fort out yonder in the harbor.”

If Doubleday had expected some theoretical, wishy-washy answer, this was a surprise. He stiffened, clearly shocked by what he’d heard. “You can’t be serious.”

“I wouldn’t make jokes about something this grave, Captain.”

“That would surely be taken as an act of war by the people who live here.”

“Such a viewpoint has no logic. The fort is Union property, not the state’s.”

“Captain, you are speaking of logic in a land that does not know its meaning.”

“Then the problem must inevitably become critical, no matter what you do to prevent it. You can’t talk logic to madmen and you can’t prevent a war if only one side is interested in doing that.”

Nothing was said until Burton spoke again. “So in that situation my most immediate loyalty would be to my men. Assuming, as I said, no orders to the contrary.”

“And you would move them,” Doubleday said, still in disbelief.

“I would move them now—tonight if it were mine to do.”

“Interesting thought,” Doubleday said. “Depressing but interesting.”

We walked down the beach and took our leave in a hazy afternoon sunlight. At the fort we wished Captain Doubleday and his garrison good luck. As we put it some distance behind us, Burton said, “Those men are going to need a hell of a lot more than luck,” and this reality followed us over the marsh to the steamer and back across the harbor to the city.

That to me was the climax of our journey. All these years later I can still see Burton’s dark face in the candlelight; I can feel Double-day’s surprise, as palpable as a slap in that dark, flickering corner, and I would bet my life that he had never given such a bold move a serious thought before that moment. The act that started our civil war may seem obvious now in its dusty historical context. But what seems obvious to historians might not have been quite so clear to the men who were living it. Yes, those Southerners were mad, hot-blooded and irrational, determined to have their war. If there had been no Fort Sumter they would have found another time and place to begin it. But the fact that it did start at Sumter makes the provocative act, first posed by Richard Burton on a quiet afternoon a year before the shooting started, of considerable historical significance.

The time was now coming for us to part. Nothing had been said, but I had already gone well past the days I had begged from my wife. Richard planned to go on to New Orleans and then catch the river-boat north to his jumping-off point into the Western territories. Over dinner he launched a spirited campaign for me to join him. “Come at least as far as New Orleans.”

“Richard, I can’t. I’m a family man who has indulged himself long enough.”

We had carefully avoided the subject of his disappearance, but he alluded to it now. “I hope things are right between us.”

“Of course they are. I wouldn’t have missed this trip for anything.” “Good. I’m glad to hear that.”

He lit a smoke. Impulsively he reached through the smoke to grip my hand. “I’m not a sentimental man, Charlie. But in all likelihood we shall never see each other again, and I must say this. I’ve had damned few friendships that I value as much as yours.”

“That’s very mutual, Richard,” I said over the lump in my throat. “Then come with me to St. Joe. I wouldn’t insist on anything beyond that, my word of honor. I don’t want your scalp on my conscience if I run into Indians on west.”

I resisted, he insisted, and at last we compromised on New Orleans. The next morning I sent a telegram to Baltimore, stealing another two weeks from my wife and young daughter, and we left Charleston that afternoon. Down the coast we went to Savannah, then west on a rugged overland trip that took us through the growing towns of Columbus, Montgomery, and Mobile. We spent five days drinking and laughing in New Orleans. My two weeks ran into a third, and as the time drew to its inevitable close, I felt a cutting sadness like nothing I’ve known before or since. When my wife died in ‘eighty-three, my grief was crushing; this was different, but in its own way almost as overwhelming. I felt the loss of Richard as sharply as the slice of a knife.

We got roaring, hilariously drunk that final night. Richard drank more than I had ever seen one man consume, and we stag-gered into our rooms in a stupor that I can barely remember. In the morning we both paid the price: Richard was actually ill from the aftereffects, and it took him all morning, until just before his steamer departed, to begin to recover. I walked with him to the dock and we promised to write. I gave him a standing order for any books he might produce, “two copies of each, please, one inscribed to me, for as long as you write them and as long as I’m here to receive them.”

I watched him, a lonely figure on the riverboat’s deck, until he went out of sight. In that moment I’d have done anything to have him back. The city that night was full of tourists, but to me it was excruciatingly empty, and I knew the long voyage home would be solemn and bleak.

As I checked out the next morning, the clerk asked if my stay had been satisfactory. “And will you be seeing your friend again, sir?”

“I hope so. But he lives in London…”

“I only ask, sir, because the maid found something he left in his room.”

He brought it out from behind the desk.

It was Richard’s notebook.

Of course I wrote him, telling him I had the notebook and it was safe with me until such time as he could claim it. Did he want me to entrust it to the mails? That transatlantic passage could be perilous, but I would be happy to send it on if that’s what he wanted. Otherwise I would hold it until we met again.

His reply when it came months later was enigmatic and brief. He would appreciate it if I would put the journal in a safe place, unseen by
anyone
, until he could retrieve it. “I must have knocked myself out that night,” he said by way of apology. “I thought I packed it, but I drank like a fish.”

Other than that I didn’t expect much from his promise to write: Burton was a busy world traveler and in the gradual letdown after my homecoming, I had to be realistic. I was a minor character in his crowded life, an admirer he had met by chance. But one day a letter came.

It was everything I could have hoped for: detailed, packed with news of his journey to see Brigham Young, his trek to California and across Central America, and the steamer voyage home. Soon he would have a book, to be called
The City of the Saints
, describing what he had seen of the Mormons and his stagecoach trip across the American desert to California, and his book
The Lake Regions of Central Africa
was imminent from the publisher. “I have taken you at your word regarding two copies of each book, but don’t hesitate to holler uncle if it becomes too burdensome.” He said nothing about his journal, and though it sat on my shelf like some wicked temptress, I never opened it, I never peeped; I rose to the highest expectation of his trust and let it be.

I wrote him back at once, saying that not only did I want his new books as they came off the press but any new editions of his older works as well, especially if they contained new or amended material. I sent him news from the States. The little garrison at Fort Moultrie was living under a national microscope in the wake of Lincoln’s election, anything could tip us into war, and if there was a chance that his books might fail to arrive through some difficulty with the mails, he should please hold them for me until the trouble was settled.

I followed the events at Moultrie and kept a diary of my reactions, with the silly idea of sending it to Burton at some point and perhaps egging him to do a book on our part of his journey. “Old Gardner has been replaced by a much younger commander, Major Robert Anderson,” I wrote in December. “Captain Doubleday is his right-hand man.” Later that month I wrote again, when the Moultrie garrison slipped into Fort Sumter under cover of night, exactly as Burton had suggested almost a year before. “You must have made far more sense to that captain than either of us thought at the time,” I said. “Of course, having no alternative will change a man’s mind.”

“God help us all now,” I wrote in January. “War cannot possibly be averted more than another two weeks.” But the talks dragged on until April, when a blaze of fire sent us into four years of hell.

All that year the war news was bleak. Any hope for a quick end dwindled in a series of bloody battles that pushed us to new levels of hatred. November brought my severest test with Richard when a Union warship stopped the British mail steamer
Trent
and two Confederate officials on board were arrested. In London, Lord Palmerston thundered and roared. This was the excuse he had been waiting for. I trembled with rage as thousands of British troops, the vanguard of a certain invasion, were massed on the Canadian border. During those weeks I felt so wracked with suspicion that I decided to torch Richard’s books and be done with him. If I sent him a box filled with their ashes, topped by a petulant note telling him what I thought of his honor and the worthlessness of his word, perhaps that would ease my conscience somewhat. But I couldn’t light the fire: I couldn’t even bring myself to read the truth in his journal, and at last I took it out of my room, out of sight, and, I hoped, out of mind. I waited into January, thank God, when Seward finally announced that the Rebels were being set free, and the crisis with England was defused.

One day a cryptic note came to me. It was months old, written at Christmas in the worst days of the
Trent
affair. It was only two lines and unsigned, but there was no mistaking that cribbed hand:
I made my best case
, it said.
Now we’ll see what happens. You may he sure, that I join you in hoping for cool heads to prevail
. Again I felt riddled with shame. The bad friend had not been Richard but myself, and my lack of faith had nearly brought us to ruin. I made up my mind that I would keep his friendship for the rest of my days. No matter what happened, there would be no further suspicion. And to seal my decision I brought out his journal and put it up on my open shelf, where it has sat unread ever since.

I got nothing more from him until our war was over, but the cornucopia that followed was one of my great thrills of 1866. A vast collection arrived in two enormous boxes:
The Lake Regions of Central Africa
, in two volumes, signed to me with an inscription that never fails to warm my heart.
To Charles Warren
—
my dear friend Charlie
—
I think of you often and hold very dear those days we traveled together through your troubled American South
. I read
The City of Saints
with great interest, wondering why he had written not a word on his time in the South. I knew he hated slavery; why would he not take that opportunity to comment on its evils. A trace of the old suspicion wafted up:
Because he was a spy, England will invade us the first chance she gets, and I in my silence am her accomplice
. But those dark thoughts I pushed aside: my trust in Richard always returned.