Her own fancy keenly alive. The notion, firmly fixed in the minds of so many who like herself had come out of a poorer class, that there was peace and happiness to be found... happiness in a way inevitable, assured in the houses of the rich and the well-to-do.
A kind of envy, hunger for something of the sort in her own life. She listened to the talk of young Weathersmythe, a little shocked, but with rapt absorbing attention.
He began telling her the story of his grandfather, who was a Civil War veteran.
He was one of Mosby’s men and young Weathersmythe thought of him always as a heroic figure.
He, the grandfather, had gone into the Mosby organization during the Civil War... that strange band, largely young Southern bloods, raiding all during the war back of the Northern armies. They were half guerillas, half warriors. They were horse stealers. When Lee’s army was in rags and on half rations they were dressed in the best of gray broadcloth, had money in their pockets.... Once a band of them robbed a Northern army paymaster of some hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
It was split up among them and they bought more and more gaudy clothes, better and better horses. They sent North, by way of some army sutler, for the best of clothes, boots, hats. They fought desperately, killed and were killed with cruel abandon. Once they went, a little band of them, on a dark night, into the very heart of a large camp of Northern troops, their own horses tied to trees, somewhere back in a dark wood, and brought out as captive the commander of the camp.
It was a strange, very exciting and exhilarating kind of warfare, often degenerating into plain robbery, the bands forming, raiding, then dispersing, and young Weathersmythe spoke of it all with fervor. There was a life... fun, danger, fine clothes, good horses, women, admirers. He had been a boy when his grandfather was an old man and other very old men, also Virginians, who had also been Mosby men, sometimes came to his grandfather’s house. The boy lived there with his father and his aunt, his own mother being dead. The old men came and sat on the porch before the house. It was at the edge of a town in the Shenandoah Valley and there were rich and fertile fields, belonging to his grandfather, stretching away behind the house. The old men came and sat with the grandfather and they talked of their young lives and young adventures.
They were in the streets of some town, Kit and young Weathersmythe, Kit going along in silence listening while her new companion talked and it grew late. “It is better not to stay out too late,” she said. “We will attract attention when we go in.” She was thinking of the hotel lobby, some lounger, perhaps also in with Tom’s crowd, who might be about. Since she had become a character, a half-celebrity, her name in newspapers, she had grown more and more cautious. She made the young man wait until she had gone alone into the hotel and to her room but she could not escape him.
He came again to the door of her room, wanted to be admitted and with a smile she let him in and sat with him for hours, a chair drawn up to a window that looked into a sleeping small town main street, the boy on the floor at her feet.
He talked. He was dissatisfied with his own life, angry about something. His story came out.
It was an old story, the son of a well-to-do, respected and respectable man... boredom with respectability. There is something such young men want. As the boy talked to Kit at night, in some hotel room... often he stayed with her thus until two or three in the morning... he was telling her the story of his father, of his own birth... always she half expected when he was with her thus that there would be a knock at the door, some man or group of Tom’s men standing there.
“Now we have you where we want you.”
Tom laying down the law to her. “Now we will clean this up.” The fear in him that she, being still his son’s wife, would, if anything happened to him, be dangerous. A man in Tom’s position was always in danger of being bumped off, taken for a ride...
He was a gang leader but clung to the notion that through his son there would come into being a new generation of Halseys... respectable Halseys...
.. Even in time perhaps a claim set up... no one particularly interested in disputing it... the Halseys also numbered among the F. F. V’s.
An absurd enough notion. Kit had got it all from Tom’s former talk with her. She had a curious determination... not being particularly interested in the money Tom Halsey had accumulated, not wanting him to defeat her.
She thought it was that feeling kept her in the game so long, after she knew that it might cost even her life.
In a hotel room with her was a boy dispelling the F. F. V. myth. He told her the story of his father, as a young man, of the age perhaps that the boy was when he was with Kit.
So he, the father, had also gone forth on his adventures. There was a story... the boy had not known it when his grandfather was alive... he told Kit that it was thrown into his teeth when he was a lad and went to the Virginia town school. There was the suggestion thrown out that he was an illegitimate child.
He wasn’t. “My father and mother were married all right,” he told Kit. They were sitting in one of the hotel rooms at night. In all the relationship between the two there was, on the boy’s part, no move, no suggestion or attempt to draw close to her as young man to young woman. She thought afterwards that young Weathersmythe might have been quite sexless...
.. Or that he was so constantly excited by his own notion of the adventure of the life they were leading together, so anxious to draw close to her, have her as a friend on another plane, that the man and woman impulse was quite crowded out.
He sat on the floor, in the hotel room... it often a shabby enough room... talking. He talked first of the grandfather, the Mosby man... the man he had loved, for whom he had the boyish passionate admiration... making a hero of him. The grandfather had been, Kit gathered from the boy’s talk, one of the most daring of the Mosby men. He had come to Mosby as a private in the ranks but had been made, for his daring, first a lieutenant and then a captain. Such men were sent out, often alone, to get information, to locate the smaller bands of enemy cavalry, to burn bridges, steal horses.
There had been one such undertaking, notable enough in the life of Alfred’s grandfather. There were the Northern troops, in pursuit of Mosby and his men, camped, of all places, at the Weathersmythe house, in the very house before which Captain Weathersmythe, now an old man, sat talking of the adventure, the boy listening, wide-eyed.
Captain Weathersmythe setting out... “They are at your house, the bastards. You’re the man to get the lay of things”... Weathersmythe not now decked out in gray broadcloth, high boots of fine leather with spurs jingling... “Not another troop in the whole Confederate army rigged out as we are. No wonder all the young bloods want to join us,”... no pistol at side now, no swagger gray hat, turned up so saucily with a feather in it. He had let his beard grow, had got into a suit of ragged and dirty blue clothes, taken off a Union prisoner.
He went to the camp of the Union men, the men camped on his own good Shenandoah Valley farm, the officers living in his house, his eyes open, his brain busy enough. “In such and such a way we will come down upon them at night. We can hide our horses in this hollow, beside this little stream where the Balm of Gilead trees grow. They have got a picket here, where the path comes down out of the wood, but we’ll get him. I’ll go ahead and get him with my own naked hands. I’ll choke him into silence.”
There was a troop of Northern cavalry and among them, of all people who do you think?
“An Adams... ha!... one of the New England Adamses. He is an officer among them.”
Dream of taking, as captive, or of killing, an Adams. Memory of old John Quincy Adams, after being President, coming back to Washington as simple congressman and sitting in the Congress, that waspish stern old man, goading the slave owners of the South also sitting in the Congress... an Adams, Lincoln’s Ambassador to England.
The young Charles Francis, Jr., commanding a detachment of cavalry bivouacking at the Weathersmythe house in the Valley.
Mosby a dramatist, wanting the publicity that would come with the capture or death of the young Adams... the North given another shock.
“Ha! This will be something to curl their hair. Don’t fail me now, Weathersmythe.” Young Alfred’s grandfather had gone there, to his own house, to find out how many men young Adams had, passing himself off as a Union soldier from Ohio escaped from a Confederate prison.
Taking the risk of being recognized by some of his own former slaves, still about the place.
The Adams there, in that house, sitting in one of the rooms.... It was the dining-room of the house... writing letters. He might be writing to his father. Ambassador to England. “Damn the English. They’ve done us dirt enough... not giving us the recognition that would have made our success sure... a dirty commercial-minded lot, the damn English... they are really also Yanks.”
An Adams writing letters. That lot always writing, writing, writing. Weathersmythe shown in to him, to be questioned. “Ha! I’ll throw you off the track.”
“Did you hear anything of Mosby’s men as you came through to us?”
“Yes, sir.” There is an old Negro man, former house servant in the house, standing by the door. He is being servant to an Adams now but he knows his Captain Weathersmythe. The Negro frightened by the presence of a Weathersmythe. “If I make a sign he’ll kill me before they can kill him.”
The gorgeous risk of it... death if there is a flutter of suspicion. He had trusted the fear of the ex-slave. A story told, that he, the Union prisoner, had picked up as he crept toward the Union lines... of Mosby and his men gone off on a raid. “They left two nights ago. I was lying beside the road and saw them go. I heard their talk.”
“No, sir. I don’t know. I heard them say....” He named a town, a hundred miles inside the Union lines.... It was a place where stores for the Union army were kept.
That and the young Weathersmythe, with Kit... such a gentle seeming boy with his rather slight body and sensitive face... this in the night, the little hotel in which they were staying very quiet...
She had to caution him. “Don’t talk so loud, will you, boy, please, boy,” she pled. He made her feel very gentle, very motherly. He told the story of the night raid of the Mosby men, his grandfather among them, he knowing every little country road, every cowpath in that section of the valley.
The sudden descent out of darkness, the alarm, the killing of many. It was odd, a bit uncanny, the enthusiasm of the young Weathersmythe... talking, talking, in the half darkness of the room, a young boy’s romanticization of war, of killing. Kit had a woman’s half revulsion. Sometimes after such a talk she had the notion that the boy also wanted to kill...
There was a hunger for revenge in him. Kit got his story in fragments. His mother had been a mountain girl, from a county south of the valley county in Virginia that was the home of the Weathersmythes. The grandfather had come back to the farm after the war and had gone to work.
The Weathersmythe slaves were gone. The place was in ruins but the Weathersmythe who had been a Mosby man put his own hand to the plow. He sold off some of the Weathersmythe land, worked day and night. The former wealth of the Weathersmythes was gone but the young Civil War Weathersmythe had re-established the family.
He had got down, from the hill country to the South, a mountain man, also a Civil War man, one of Lee’s men who had surrendered with Lee at Appomatox, and it was this man’s daughter who became young Alfred’s mother.
It had happened. There was the son of the Mosby man... he was at the age young Alfred was when he came to Kit. Young Alfred himself going in secretly for a kind of adventure, Kit thought he had romanticized as perhaps long before his grandfather had romanticized the work of Mosby. After all, the Mosby might have been a kind of Tom Halsey, the same kind of force in him... ability in him to make men do what he wanted them to do.
It developed that young Alfred, before coming to Kit, had seen and talked to Tom, and Kit thought that Tom had perhaps been pleased and flattered to have such a one in his band. He might later be useful to Tom. The Weathersmythes were more or less prominent in the state and the boy’s father was in state politics.
The boy had been born to the mountain girl, daughter of a poor white farmhand on the Weathersmythe place, and Kit understood that the marriage had not taken place until a few weeks before young Alfred was born and that there had been a struggle, the mountain girl’s father coming at night to the Weathersmythe house, a scene between him and the Mosby Weathersmythe, young Alfred’s father called out of his bed... confronted by the girl’s father... “is this story true?”
Alfred’s father denying, protesting, accusing. A hint thrown out that the child, so soon to be born, might well be the son of some other man at work on the place, the father of the girl angry... he having come to the house with a shotgun over his arm....
How much of the story had been born later in Kit’s imagination and how much in the imagination of the boy, she didn’t afterwards know. She was herself the daughter of a Poor White. She said... “He told me such a lot of things. He was a born story teller. He made everything seem so vivid. It was like reading an exciting story in a book.”
Young Alfred did tell her of how once, in the vacation time after his first year in college... it was after his second college year that he came to her... he went off secretly, trying to find some of his mother’s people.
He had found them although his mother was dead, but Kit gathered that he had not made himself known. They were very poor and ignorant people in the hills and young Alfred, although on his mother’s side he was a Poor White, was also a Weathersmythe.
Such a queer mixture of pride, arrogance, gentleness. The young man was torn by many conflicting emotions. Kit, in speaking of him... he remained for some reason a very vital figure in her own adventure in living... admitted that she did not understand the boy who for a time was her companion. She said... “He never asked me about my own people.” She thought that a part at least of the story that remained in her mind might have been formed out of other stories she had heard.
There was, in any event, the scene in the Weathersmythe house. There would have been another Weathersmythe, Alfred’s father, confronted by Alfred’s mother’s father, the shotgun hung over his arm, this in the night, the Mosby Weathersmythe standing there, Alfred’s father accusing, the Weathersmythe denying... he would have known he was lying.
A mountain man angry. After all the Weathersmythes, gay young dogs, Mosby men, feathers in their hats, gay broadcloth clothes, shining boots that went up to the knees... they a little like movie cowboys of another age in America... the real cowboy after all being in actuality little more than a hired man who all day long, month after month, must follow tame enough cows and steers through barren dry country...
.. it is to be borne in mind that although Alfred Weathersmythe’s grandfather had been a Mosby man... gay dog, F. F. V. with feather in hat, doing daringly enough, the grandfather, on Alfred’s mother’s side, had been one of Lee’s men.
He would have been with Jackson at Chancellors ville... in the long secret march with Stonewall Jackson that time... odd that there had been so little talk of Stonewall being an F. F. V.... that strange religious, murderous genius... praying and killing, then again praying... man of such fine abandon.
Young Alfred Weathersmythe’s grandfather, on the mother’s side, marching with him...
Then again at Gettysburg, standing to it there.
And again when Grant came down with his ever-increasing hordes to pen Lee in at Richmond and Petersburg... the crater... the persistent grim thrusts of that other genius of grim war, Grant... curiously gentle man, called “Butcher Grant.”
Alfred Weathersmythe’s commoner grandfather standing before Alfred Weathersmythe’s grandfather, once F. F. V. young blood, gun in hand, Alfred’s father going a little cheap... Kit Brandon had the impression that the father of her friend, young Alfred, always had been a cheap man and that the son knew it.
&
nbsp; .. Gun of mountain man brought down to firing position.
“You are the father of the child my daughter is going to have. What are you going to do about it?”
F. F. V. young blood meeting the commoner. It may well be that a commoner who has been four years with a Lee is no longer a commoner.
Alfred Weathersmythe’s other grandfather, the Mosby one, speaking up.
“Put the gun down, Jim.”
Kit understood, got it from fragmentary things young Alfred said that there had been an offer of money. He had got the story from some of his mother’s people, that time he went to them... an offer of money made and refused.
Then a mountain man getting proud. He spoke to Alfred’s father, ignoring the grandfather. “All right. You marry her. Let her have the child. You can keep it and I’ll take her away.”
As it happened the mother died soon after Alfred was born and he grew up in his grandfather’s home knowing nothing of all this.
And then the story came to him, not from his father, his grandfather or his aunt, but from other boys, in a Virginia town where he went to grade school and then to high school.
So he wasn’t then a pure Weathersmythe, an F. F. V. There was the bad blood, so called, his father just a common soldier with Lee’s army... certainly not a dashing cavalry man. Mosby man with feather in hat, every man in the little band trying to out-jeb the Jeb Stuart. A kind of shame and self-consciousness in the boy. This in secret. His father, grandfather, and that so executive aunt, always marching him off to church and Sunday School when he was a small boy... he had always been slender and not strong... the aunt, he told Kit, was a determined religionist.
There had come a kind of hatred of his father... this mingled with a curious reverence for the grandfather, the Mosby man. When Kit urged him to get out of Tom’s gang, have nothing to do with it... she pointed out what Tom was probably up to, taking the boy on to learn her own trade. The boy’s father was in state politics — later in the state legislature. At that time, as every one must know, who knows later Virginia history, the legislature of Virginia was dominated, almost absolutely, by the Anti-Saloon League, in the person of Bishop Cannon, Methodist churchman... he even sitting day after day in the doorway to the hall where the legislature met, United States senators, governors, members of Congress as well as state legislators, fearing him, kow-towing to him. This in proud Virginia.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 200