House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  “Gracious, Mama, I hope you don’t feel about all your in-laws the way you do about Mr. Streean!”

  Mrs. Currain patted her shoulder affectionately. “Nonsense! I like you very much, my dear.”

  Enid looked forward to Tilda’s coming, but she quickly found the other tiresome. Tilda was so absurdly ready with flattering praise. “Oh, Cousin Enid, isn’t little Peter the cleverest thing?” “Mama, just look at Lucy! Isn’t she sweet?” Henrietta, she insisted, was such a baby as the world had never seen before; Enid herself was the loveliest young mother in Virginia. Tilda’s admiration fell without discrimination on everything and everyone, and Enid began at last to feel a choked, clogged sensation, as though she had stuffed too long on sticky sweets.

  But if Tilda were wearying, her daughter was completely charming. Dolly Streean at sixteen was already a beauty, and within twenty-four hours of her arrival at Great Oak, beaux flocked around her. She introduced Enid to these youngsters as “Aunt Enid” so persistently that Enid told Trav in amused resentment:

  “The little witch makes me feel a hundred years old, and she knows it, too! I believe she does it on purpose!”

  Trav chuckled. “She’s a lovely child!”

  Enid tossed her head. “She ought to be! She practices all her pretty airs and graces in front of a mirror by the hour.” Yet she liked Dolly and sought her company, at once envious and admiring.

  Toward the end of August, Redford Streean and Darrell came for a few days. Enid disliked Mr. Streean at once. She thought him fat and pompous. But Darrell was a handsome youngster with a disturbing twinkle in his eye, and during his stay Enid enjoyed his teasing compliments and the audacious impropriety so often hidden in his words. The things he said were the sort you pretended not to understand, at once exciting and—since he was, after all, only a boy!—perfectly harmless; yet Trav one night remarked:

  “You and Darrell have a lot of jokes between you, don’t you?”

  “He’s loads of fun.” Then in mischievous amusement: “Do you object, Honey?”

  “I? Why, no.” He added soberly, “Darrell’s been in a good many scrapes, Enid. He’s a wild youngster.”

  “I think he’s nice.” She laughed teasingly. “I declare, I believe you’re jealous!”

  “Oh, no. But I can see Mama is a little puzzled sometimes at the way you two go on.”

  She might have ignored Trav’s opinion, but Enid would not risk awakening any critical thoughts in Mrs. Currain. Thereafter in the older woman’s presence, her manner toward Darrell gave no slightest cause for reproach.

  The Streeans were no sooner gone back to Richmond than Faunt arrived. He had ridden down from Belle Vue, stayed two or three days. Enid had not met him before, and she told Trav the night he came: “Oh, I like Faunt! I like him so much.”

  “He’s a fine man.”

  “He makes me feel—I don’t know; not just beautiful, but—well, good. Noble and brave and everything. He’s just charming. Why isn’t he married?”

  “He was, twelve or fifteen years ago. He married Betty Farrington, but she died when their baby was born, and the baby died too.”

  “Oh, poor man! But I should think some nice girl—does he live all alone?”

  “Yes, up on the Northern Neck, at Belle Vue. That was my grandfather’s first place, and when Faunt and Betty were married Mama settled them there. After Betty died he built a little chapel, and she and the baby are buried in it, and he lives there alone to be near them.”

  “I wish we could find a nice wife for him.”

  “Oh, don’t go bothering Faunt, Enid. He’s made his life the way he wants it to be.”

  Trav’s warning curbed her tongue, but not her eyes. She watched Faunt day by day. Once she saw him walking toward the river with the children, Peter clinging to his hand, Lucy looking up to him with serious eyes. Enid wondered what in the world he found interesting in these children of hers; and at dinner she said to him: “I hope Lucy and Peter didn’t bother you.”

  “No, indeed. I enjoyed them.”

  “What ever did you find to talk about?”

  “Well, we inspected Lucy’s play house in the old tree, and I told her—remember, Mama?—about the time before I was born when Tony dared Trav into climbing as far as he could up into the hollow, and Trav got stuck and had to be dug out.”

  Trav grinned sheepishly. “I hollered like a good one. Never been so scared since.”

  “And I told them about the underground passage that used to run from the house to the river, and about the pit under the hearth where gold and silver could be hidden if the Indians came.” He smiled at Enid reassuringly. “But I didn’t frighten them. They’re fine children.”

  “Well, naturally I think so,” she assured him. As a matter of fact they often seemed to her a great nuisance; yet that Faunt should enjoy them somehow made him nicer in her eyes. When he said he must go on to Richmond and then back to Belle Vue, she made charming protests. “We’re just beginning to get acquainted, Cousin Faunt! Living away off at Chimneys, I’ve never had a chance to know Trav’s family; but I’m sure you’re the nicest of them all.”

  He smiled and said he would come again in October for Mrs. Currain’s birthday. She would be seventy-one. “Cinda and Brett have promised to be home for that,” he explained, “and their children and grandchildren are coming from the Plains to meet them here, so you’ll see us all together then.”

  For the rest of September there were no guests at Great Oak, but early in October three of Cinda’s children arrived by the stage from Richmond. Enid thought Burr was like Faunt. Even at twenty he had some of his uncle’s fine gentleness and strength. Vesta, two years younger, was a freckled, laughing girl whom Mrs. Currain greeted with smiling fondness.

  “Well, Vesta, you’re as homely as ever! And twice as many freckles!”

  Vesta tossed her head, laughing; and Enid saw the affectionate bond between these two. “It’s your fault for letting Mama be so ugly! If she were as beautiful as you are, maybe I’d look like you, and then I’d have broken every heart in Camden by now.”

  Mrs. Currain smiled. “All the looks went to your brothers!” she admitted. “But there, dear, you’re nice enough to make up for it!”

  Burr and young Julian—Julian was fourteen, sturdy and straight—stood smiling by; and Julian said mischievously: “Grandma, make Vesta tell you about Tommy Cloyd!”

  Vesta turned as red as her freckles. “Julian Dewain, you just hush up! Don’t listen to him, Grandma!”

  “Of course I won’t, Honey,” Mrs. Currain promised. “What do men know about such things anyway? When will your mama get here, do you know?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but she told us she’d be here for your birthday. Clayton and Jenny and the babies will come up next week. He had to stay to tend to things till the last minute. Grandma, Kyle just declares and declares that he remembers you! He’s so cute! And Janet’s the fattest little thing you ever saw!”

  “I do hope Cinda gets here.”

  Vesta hugged the little old woman, kissed her again. “Oh, darling, don’t be such a fuss-budget!”

  “Well, I worry, all the same,” Mrs. Currain confessed. “You may say what you like, ships do get wrecked. Why, two years ago, over five hundred people were drowned when that Havana steamer sank off the Capes.”

  “But, darling,” Vesta reminded her, “Mama and Papa aren’t coming from Havana!” The charming lack of logic in this made them all laugh, and silenced Mrs. Currain’s fears.

  On the Thursday before the birthday, Clayton and Jenny and their children—Clayton was Cinda’s oldest son—arrived. Of the grandchildren, Kyle was three, Janet a year old. Clayton and Trav from the first spent their every hour together, for Clayton too was a lover of the land. Enid thought Jenny was an astonishingly quiet young woman. Unless someone addressed her directly she seldom spoke, and Enid remarked this to Trav.

  “And yet she always seems to be having a wonderful time! You can feel her bein
g happy inside.”

  “She’s a darling girl,” Trav agreed. Enid had never heard him speak so warmly of anyone, and she looked at him in surprise. “Everybody loves Jenny. I suppose it’s because you know right away that she likes you, so naturally you like her.”

  Enid, in an unaccustomed self-appraisal, thought that she herself seldom felt real fondness for anyone. Trav was her husband, so of course she loved him; but he bored and often irritated her. Mrs. Currain could be frightfully tiresome, and Tilda too, and Mr. Streean was common! The young people were nice enough, though Dolly, calling her “Aunt Enid” as if she were a thousand years old, sometimes made her furious. Darrell was fun, in an exciting, wicked sort of way, but of course she did not really like him. She could not think of anyone—except of course Faunt—whom she really liked; Faunt, and now Jenny. Since she and Jenny were in-laws, Currains only by marriage, outsiders in the close-knit family, it was natural that they should draw together. To be sure, Mr. Streean was an in-law too; but no one could like Mr. Streean.

  On Friday, an hour before dinner, Faunt arrived. When Vesta gave him a laughing hug and a kiss, so—with a sense of daring——did Enid, and felt her cheeks suddenly hot. Lying awake that night with Trav heavily asleep beside her she remembered that kiss, and she thought that when Faunt departed she could kiss him again! Why not? After all, they were kissing cousins!

  Next day Tilda and Mr. Streean and Dolly came down from Richmond, but this time Darrell was not with them. Mrs. Currain hoped they might have heard from Cinda, but they had not. Monday would be Mrs. Currain’s birthday. Sunday, with everyone wondering about Cinda and bravely trying to hide any hint of concern, dragged itself away and dusk descended. Mrs. Currain delayed going to her room till long past her usual time.

  “They might get here tonight,” she urged, till Vesta at last hustled her away upstairs.

  “They’ll be here bright and early tomorrow, darling,” she assured the old woman. “You wait and see. But you must go to bed and be all rested up. Come along now.”

  Jenny and Tilda went upstairs with them, but Enid stayed a while to watch Faunt, liking the sound of his voice, waiting to catch his eye. The men talked politics, and she heard Redford Streean declaim against the abolitionists.

  “They’ll do their best to elect a President next year,” he predicted. “If they succeed, if a Black Republican is elected and put in command of the army and navy of the United States, the South will rise! As sure as that day strikes, so surely will we see disunion.”

  Clayton nodded in agreement, but Faunt doubted that anything so extreme would happen. “All this talk is just politics,” he urged, and said courteously: “No offense meant, Mister Streean.” Enid remembered that Mr. Streean was a politician. “But reasonable men take political talk with a grain of salt.”

  “Republicans aren’t reasonable men!” Streean retorted. “They’re all crazy abolitionists, believing their own lies! Don’t you ever read their pamphlets? To hear them talk, we whip our slaves to death, brand them, cut off their ears, keep the cowhides going all day long, take their—” He looked at Enid and paused and she guessed, in a secret excitement, what he had been about to say.

  Faunt smiled faintly. “Yes, they lie about us,” he agreed. “But we sometimes exaggerate a little about them. Not all Yankees spend their lives selling wooden nutmegs and cheating their grandmothers.” He added in sober concern: “The North has been told so many things that aren’t true, and so has the South, that we’re beginning to believe them. When lies are repeated often enough even wise men begin to accept them. Most of the evil we believe about the North is probably as false as most of the evil they believe about us.”

  “They’ve been slandering our peculiar institution for thirty years,” Streean said harshly. “One day we will call them to account.”

  “Slavery isn’t important,” Faunt suggested. “Washington and Jefferson and Madison freed their slaves, and many lesser men. If we were let alone, we’d rid ourselves of slavery in time.”

  “It’s important to the South.”

  “It’s what men think and say about it that’s important,” Faunt corrected. “Not slavery itself.”

  Trav said his old neighbors in North Carolina wanted no trouble over slavery. “But they believe in it,” he admitted. “They don’t own slaves themselves, but I suppose most of them hope to buy a few, some day, to do some of their work for them.”

  “Not many men in the South do own slaves,” Faunt assented. “Of course all our friends do, but there aren’t many of us. A few thousands, out of millions. We can’t very well expect the whole South to fight the North just so a few of us can keep our slaves. Virginia certainly never will leave the Union over slavery. I expect a good share of all the slave owners in Virginia would free their people if they could afford to.”

  Streean laughed harshly. “If you said that in the Cotton States you’d be tarred and feathered.”

  Faunt’s cold eyes touched the other. “I think not,” he said in icy tones; and Enid saw sudden sweat on Redford Streean’s brow, and wanted to clap her hands. Clayton spoke quickly to ease the momentary tension.

  “Mr. Streean didn’t mean that literally, of course, Uncle Faunt; but in a way he’s right. People in South Carolina feel pretty strongly about abolitionists. There’ve been horsewhippings, yes and shootings too. We don’t want anyone preaching that doctrine down our way, or printing it.”

  Trav said North Carolina was much the same. “An abolitionist gets hard treatment. Professor Hedrick, at the University, said three years ago that he meant to vote for Fremont; and the Raleigh Standard demanded his dismissal, and the students burned him in effigy, and he was discharged.”

  “They let him off too easy,” Streean declared. “We don’t want any Republicans in the South.”

  Clayton said soberly: “Well, if the abolitionists elect a President next year, South Carolina—at least the men I know—will think it’s the last straw.” He added in strong resentment: “The negroes don’t mind being slaves!”

  “That’s true, of course,” Faunt assented. “One of my men was a good carpenter. I told him he could go hire himself out wherever he chose. He came home last summer. He’d been gone three years, worked in Chicago, Washington, New York, saved over three hundred dollars. He brought half of it to me and said he was happier at Belle Vue and wanted to stay there.”

  “I went North four years ago,” Clayton told them. “I saw the way white people are worked in the mills in Massachusetts, and the way mine workers have to live; and Papa’s written about the white miners in England. They’re worse off than our slaves. But slavery’s not the point. The point is, are we going to let the abolitionists tell us what we must do? We don’t like taking orders!”

  Trav asked: “Are you saying what you think, Clayton, or what your neighbors think?”

  Clayton colored faintly, but his head rose. “I reckon if trouble comes I’ll do what my neighbors do.”

  Trav nodded, and Faunt said: “Yes. Yes, in the long run, whatever our personal opinions, most of us will stand with our class.”

  When at last Enid left them to their endless talk and went upstairs, she met Vesta and Dolly, in wrappers, laden with good things pilfered from the kitchen, tiptoeing through the hall. Dolly’s eyes were shining with mischief. “We were starving, Aunt Enid, so we went down the back way, and Vesta’s got an apple pie and I’ve a sago pudding. Come help us eat them.”

  Enid, because she envied them their youth and their high spirits, said severely: “Mama will be distressed. She plans all the meals ahead so carefully.”

  But Dolly made a teasing face at her, and Vesta gaily protested: “Oh, she won’t mind, really! Come on! Do!”

  Enid refused, and went into her own room. Before she slept—Trav had not come upstairs—she heard delighted screams along the hall, and her door was flung open and the two girls came racing in and slammed the door and set their shoulders against it, laughing excitedly. She sat up in bed.
<
br />   “What ever are you up to now?”

  “It’s Uncle Faunt!” Vesta cried, and Dolly—richly beautiful, her dark hair flying—amplified the tale.

  “He’s pretending to be a highwayman or something! He’s got on a great black cloak and a big hat and boots and he came bursting into our room with a regular roar! We were eating the pie, and he caught one of us under each arm and kept kissing us and tumbling us and saying he’d take us off to jail.”

  Vesta broke in, and for a moment they both talked at once. “And I wiggled away—” “—and he dropped me and chased her—” “—and I tripped him up—” “—and we got away and—” Dolly came to perch on Enid’s bed, still excited, cheeks bright; and Vesta peeped out of the door and exclaimed in consternation:

  “Dolly, he’s out here eating our pie!”

  Dolly cried: “Oh the big thief! Come on!”

  They raced away to rescue their booty, leaving the door wide, and Enid slipped out of bed to close it, and stayed for a moment listening to their laughing voices yonder. How astonishing that Faunt, always so dignified, should play this prank upon them! Suppose she had accepted their invitation, had joined them—in her wrapper, her hair loosed as theirs was. Heavens! How embarrassed she would have been! And Faunt too, of course! He certainly would not have dared maul her as he had these children!

  She blushed at her own thoughts, and went back to bed; but she was still awake when, hours later, she heard hoof beats and the sound of wheels on the crushed oyster shells of the drive, and the summons of the bell that woke them all.

  6

  October, 1859

  FOR three days the ship had been becalmed and Cinda was in a fret and fever of impatience. September gales had driven them far off their course, the uncertain engines failed, they worked their laborious way under sails alone, and then with the Virginia shore in sight the wind died altogether. They tipped and teetered on long lazy swells, the rigging slatted idly.