House Divided

by Ben Ames Williams

  “Wouldn’t come? Why not, for Heaven’s sake?”

  “Some of our company felt the same way. They said they didn’t volunteer to fight for Virginia.”

  “For Virginia!” She flamed with indignation. “I like that! Why, Virginia’s fighting for them, Tommy! We didn’t have to come into their old war. They had to get so uppity and start it, and then when they got in trouble we took their part; but if they’re going to talk like that—–”

  He grinned appeasingly. “That was just some of them, Vesta; just making an excuse to stay home. Mama says the farmers she knows at home are beginning to say this is a rich man’s war, and that the poor men will have to fight it. She told me to come and show them that that wasn’t so!” He added: “Colonel Gregg promised the ones who did come that they could go home when their enlistments expire on the first of July, or I guess hardly anyone would have come at all. But I’m not going home till the fighting’s over.”

  She squeezed his arm, said proudly: “Julian’s in the Charlotte Grays.”

  “Julian? Golly, Vesta, he’s awful young.”

  “He’s only sixteen. But nobody in the Grays is over twenty-one, and all the cadets enlisted, practically! But I guess everybody has; everybody who is anybody.”

  “Jeff Major, down home, said he wasn’t going to,” Tommy told her. “But some of the young ladies sent him a package of petticoats, so he did.” He grinned. “I guess a young man isn’t going to be very popular if he doesn’t.”

  “It’s the same in Richmond. Everybody I know has enlisted—except Darrell.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Darrell Streean, Dolly’s brother. You remember Dolly. She visited me down at the Plains, last year.”

  He nodded. “When Rollin—” he began, then said only: “Yes, I remember her. Awfully pretty.”

  “He’s a clerk in the Quartermaster’s office,” she said. “But he’s just no good anyway. But all the other boys are in the army, and all the ladies are sewing like mad, making things for soldiers.”

  “It’s the same in Camden,” he agreed. “They gave us a battle flag before we left home. The young ladies made it, and they had a banquet, and Miss Betsy Beaufort made a presentation speech that sounded mighty fine, but Romer Pettigrew had written it all out for her. He’s the color sergeant, so he was the one to receive the flag, and he had to make a speech back at her; and then they got married the next day, and the wedding coming right on top of the banquet that way, nobody had much chance to sleep any, those two days.”

  “Oh, what fun!” Her heart quickened. This talk of weddings might lead to what she wished to hear him say. “I’ll bet he’ll fight all the harder, remembering her at home, and knowing she’s loving him and praying for him.”

  “I don’t know,” he said in a doubtful tone. “He might worry more about getting—hurt or something.” He added hurriedly: “Then it was a big day when we marched to the station, everyone giving us presents and things, cakes and goodies and money too. You’d see gentlemen emptying their pockets and making the boys take the money, and all the girls were kissing everybody.”

  “Did they kiss you?” she asked teasingly.

  “Yes, ma’am!” He grinned and wiped his mouth with his knuckles. “I guess I got kissed about a hundred times. It was real nice. But the train ride was pretty hot and noisy. We had to eat up all the things they’d given us quick, because we were so crowded you couldn’t put anything anywhere; and then there’d be a new crowd at every station and the same celebration all over again. We got a chance to clean up, once; stopped by a branch out in the country clear away from everywhere. But nights you couldn’t sleep. I’m so sleepy I might as well be dead.”

  “Poor Tommy!” She shook his arm. “But don’t you dare go to sleep now!”

  “No, ma’am, I’m too worked up to sleep, I guess.” He grinned. “It was funny to see the men throwing things away between stations. People kept giving us so much, so we’d throw most of it out of the windows, and then the next station we’d have to take on a new load. The folks along the railroad can pick up enough things to eat right along the tracks to feed them all summer. The whole trip was like a picnic.” He added soberly: “I guess they won’t think drilling is so much of a picnic. None of us know very much about being soldiers, Vesta. It will take a while to learn.”

  Vesta was to hear him say something like this more than once during the two weeks and a little more before his regiment departed. She went almost every day to camp to watch the endless drills, and she too wondered why they were necessary. “I don’t see why you can’t just go start whipping Yankees,” she protested. Tommy tried to answer her, but she was not satisfied until one day at camp she saw General Lee watching a dress parade. She had never seen him before, but she knew how highly he was respected and how deeply loved by all Virginia men. He was tall, strongly built, erect and finely posed, with black hair barely touched with gray, and a black mustache. Vesta thought him the handsomest man she had ever seen. If such a man as he approved all this absurd marching to and fro, why, then it must be wise and necessary.

  So she argued the point with Tommy no more; but—especially after Cinda and Brett came home—they returned to one argument again and again. Tommy said learning to be a soldier took time, and that a man engaged in this arduous study ought not to think about getting married. Vesta retorted that Burr did not feel that way; that he and Barbara Pierce were to be married pretty soon.

  “Well, Burr’s in the cavalry,” Tommy reminded her. “That’s different. He already knows about riding and shooting and things. He doesn’t have to learn drill and marching and all that; but I do, and I’m not very smart. It’s bound to take me a long time.”

  “But, Tommy,” Vesta urged, “just suppose—just for instance—that it was you and me, and you were just starting out to war, the way you are, and we were in love with each other.” A dark wave of color swept his cheeks and she repeated reassuringly: “Oh, just for instance, I mean. But wouldn’t you want us to be married right away?”

  He swallowed hard. “Well, I guess it isn’t so much a question what a man wants, as what he thinks he ought to do.”

  Thus for the time he silenced her, but she told her mother next morning, in one of those long breakfast-time talks which meant so much to both of them: “Honestly, he makes me so mad sometimes I could just slap him.”

  Cinda smiled. “I don’t believe it! You’re really proud of him for feeling that way. Tommy’s such a sweet, shy youngster that it’s easy to think of him as just a boy; but he’s really a fine man.” She laughed fondly. “Make up your mind to it, darling, you’ll never be able to lead him around by the nose! He’ll be the head of the family!”

  “He’ll never be the head of our family if he doesn’t hurry!”

  “I’ve always loved Tommy,” Cinda confessed. “Now I’m learning to respect him too—and so are you.”

  “Oh, I suppose so! But I think he’s an awful old slow poke, just the same!”

  Clayton brought Jenny and the children to Richmond. He could stay a day or two, must then report to General Beauregard at Manassas to serve on the General’s staff. He left on the Saturday morning train; and Vesta saw Jenny’s good-by to him, Jenny’s fine smile hiding those secret terrors which she must be feeling. Vesta found stinging tears in her own eyes. Suppose she herself were Jenny. Suppose she and Tommy were married, and she too was soon to have a baby. Could she give Tommy a smiling good-by kiss and let him go? She thought not; yet perhaps being married, becoming part of another as that other became part of you, somehow multiplied your strength and his.

  Tommy came for supper that night. His regiment was ordered to move across the city to Camp Charleston; he had heard that they would within a day or two go in the cars to Manassas Gap. Vesta had held Tommy in her thoughts all day; she told him of that farewell she had seen. “I think she’s marvelous, don’t you?”

  “I’ve always thought she was pretty wonderful,” he assured her. “I didn’t hav
e to find it out now. She’s been that way right along.”

  “If I were married,” Vesta confessed, “if you and I were married, for instance, I don’t see how I could bear to have you go.” And when he only blushed in silence, she protested: “Tommy, whenever I say that —about you and me being married—you never say anything!”

  “Well—you just said ‘for instance.’”

  She touched his hand, herself now as shy as he. “I keep talking about it, Tommy, to—sort of get you used to the idea.”

  “Oh, I know that. I mean, I know you don’t mean—well, anything.”

  She started to speak, then hesitated; but presently his regiment would depart, and he must go with them to face what dangers she dared not even guess; and he was so slow, so slow! She could not wait. Time was too short. She said abruptly: “But I do, Tommy. I do—mean something!”

  “Eh?” He gulped and swallowed hard.

  “I mean everything!” He was so long silent that at last she had to speak. “Tommy, you’ve been in love with me for—just years and years. You know you have.” He wiped his helpless brow. “Haven’t you?” she demanded, and in tender impatience: “Oh, for Heaven’s sake, say something!”

  “Why—why, yes, ma’am, I wouldn’t wonder if that’s so,” he admitted.

  “I’ve been in love with you, Tommy, just as long as you’ve been in love with me!” She saw that he could not speak. “Do I have to—say it all, Tommy? I want you, please sir, to marry me.”

  “Oh, I want to marry you all right.” He blurted out the words in startled haste. “I guess you know that.”

  “Well, then! Oh, Tommy—” She rocked with helpless, relieved laughter. “You idiot, why didn’t you say so long ago?”

  “Well, I guess I would have, probably, if it wasn’t for the war coming this way.”

  “But, Tommy darling, that’s all the more reason!”

  He shook his head, spoke more surely. “No, Vesta. No, it’s all the more reason for not—doing anything. You see, I’ve got to learn how to be a soldier. I couldn’t be a good one if every time I went to shoot a Yankee I started thinking about you.”

  “Couldn’t you fight all the harder if you were fighting for me?”

  He found fumbling words. “I’m not very good at saying what I mean, Vesta; but—well, it looks to me as if I was different, somehow. The other men talk about killing Yankees as if it wasn’t going to bother them at all, and I guess a soldier has to be that way. They talk as if Yankees were like sheep-killing dogs, that just ought to be shot. But the chances are a lot of Yankees are pretty fine young men.” She wished to interrupt, hotly to contradict, but now at last he was completely vocal, and she was caught and moved by something behind his words. “I mean, some are a bad lot, probably, but that’s so everywhere. I keep thinking that in the North there must be a lot of boys like me, boys that just want to be—well, friends with folks. But they’re getting ready to be soldiers, getting ready to be shot at, and to shoot at us. I’ve got to learn how to be that way too. But if I were married—to you, for instance—any time I set out to shoot a Yankee I’d be thinking: why, maybe he’s got a wife at home that seems to him as nice and sweet as Vesta seems to me, and if I shoot him she’ll cry awful.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t shoot straight, feeling that way. I have to learn to forget all about people loving people, their wives and their babies and their mothers and all that. I have to learn to just go ahead and try to kill people as if they were so many hogs I was slaughtering, and forget about their being young men like me. That’s what it is being a soldier. That’s what I have to learn. I guess wars are bad things, just on account of that. I mean because they make boys and young men learn how to kill other boys and young men without ever feeling bad about it. It’s wrong, Vesta, to teach anything like that.

  “But I have to learn it. And it’s going to take me a long time as it is. I couldn’t ever do it if—if I was married to you, if you’d ever showed me how sweet it is to have someone love you. I couldn’t do it, Vesta.” He was silent for a moment, said then helplessly: “Well, I guess I can’t really tell you just what I do mean.”

  She had been when he began impatient, almost angry: while he spoke, retorts had come into her mind—and remained unspoken. Now they were forgotten. Her throat was full of proud tears and she dared not try to speak. Instead she rose and came to him, and he looked at her humbly, and she took his face between her hands and kissed his lips, once lightly, then with a fierce long pressure.

  Then she could speak. “I know what you mean, Tommy. I think you’re the sweetest, finest man in the world.” She laughed, like a sob. “I’ll promise, cross my heart, never to ask you again to marry me.” And in a proud tenderness: “But if you ever ask me, Tommy, I’ll marry you as quick as scat!”

  He was quiet now and strong: “I will ask you, one day, Vesta. I will ask you soon.”

  She faced him, straight and proud. “I’ll be ready, Tommy. Oh, I will be so ready, my dearest, darling man!”

  When he left her she stood in the open door to watch him stride away; and she lay awake for hours in a brimming happiness, till all the sounds of the city hushed and she could hear the murmur of the river singing along the rapids not far distant. Next morning she went early to Cinda’s room, eager to share her secret. “Mama, I asked Tommy to marry me,” she said, all in a breath, her face transfigured; but then she hesitated, suddenly knowing that she could not tell even her mother this beautiful and sacred thing. Was this a part of marriage, then; to share with one other, and with no one else at all, that which your two hearts knew? “We talked it over,” she finished calmly, “and decided to wait a while.”

  Cinda smiled, beckoned her near, kissed her. “They don’t come any finer than Tommy, do they, dear?”

  “They certainly don’t!”

  “It wasn’t hard to talk to him, was it, when the time came?”

  “Why, it just seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. I mean—well, after we got started, we weren’t embarrassed or anything. He’s wonderful, Mama.”

  Cinda nodded. “Sit down and have your coffee.” Someone knocked and she called: “Come in.” So Jenny joined them; and during the hour that followed they laughed together over little happy things. Vesta thought they all laughed so easily because these two somehow shared the happiness in her. I thought I loved Tommy before, she told herself; but that was nothing! I never really did till now!

  She and Cinda went to Dr. Minnigerode’s church that morning; and when they sang, Vesta heard her own voice as though it were a stranger’s, rising strong and rich and true. Perhaps this too was one of love’s miracles, this inner enrichment; or was it just her own imagination that told her she sang so well? No, for as they walked homeward Cinda spoke of it.

  “You must be very happy, Vesta. I never heard you sing as beautifully as you did today.”

  When Tommy departed, Vesta was proud to see him go, understanding now how Jenny could be strong in the certainty of Clayton’s love. Cinda went for a few days at Great Oak, and Brett was learning his duties as a member of the Howitzers; so Vesta was alone, yet without being lonely, for Tommy was always in her thoughts and Burr, training at Ashland, often came home.

  “Yet I might as well stay in camp,” he told Vesta, laughing at his own words. “Barbara’s too busy getting ready for our wedding to bother with me, says I’m just in the way.” Vesta suspected some hurt bewilderment in him. “Of course, she has to handle her mother.”

  “There, Honey, you leave Mrs. Pierce to Barbara!”

  “Oh, of course.” He added: “Barbara has a mind of her own, all right. She knows how to get her own way.”

  Vesta smiled. Most men failed to realize that their sweethearts would not always be sweetly submissive. Burr was clever even to suspect the truth about Barbara while he was still so desperately in love with her. Barbara was nice as she could be, of course; but in the long run she would make Burr toe the mark. There was no doubt of that.

  �
�Never mind,” she said, to comfort him. “After all, it’s just that she’s getting ready to marry you.”

  One day after Cinda’s return she spoke of this conversation to her mother. “Burr really sounded so bewildered, Mama. I was awfully sorry for him.”

  Cinda smiled faintly. “Barbara’s a quiet little mouse, but she knows exactly what she wants.”

  Vesta said in sudden understanding: “You have to be pretty careful to like the people your children are going to marry, don’t you, Mama?”

  “Of course. But thank heaven I do like Barbara.”

  “You know, Mama, there are some people you just love from the beginning,” Vesta suggested. “Jenny, for instance. And there are others you like, but you never quite dare love them, for fear they don’t love you.” She added: “I like Barbara too; but sometimes I’m a little scared of her.”

  She and Cinda had through this month of June many hours together. Sometimes Jenny was with them, but not always. Without ever seeming to withdraw into herself, yet although they shared the same roof she lived a life of her own. “It’s as though she knew we liked to be together,” Vesta told Cinda once. “And wouldn’t intrude.”

  In the city about them each day brought changes, and some of them were disturbing. Richmond was the gateway through which troops from the South moved to Yorktown, or to Manassas; and it seemed to Vesta that there were so many they must prove irresistible. But her father, when she said this, did not easily agree.

  “They make a fine show,” he admitted. “All the bright new uni- forms, and officers on high-tailed horses galloping everywhere; but we need more men, and we need weapons. A lot of the guns we have are so old-fashioned and worn out they’re not safe to shoot. The trouble is, each state wants an army of its own. Governor Brown of Georgia shipped the best muskets from the Augusta arsenal to Savannah before he turned the arsenal over to the Confederacy, and he won’t let Georgia regiments take those muskets outside the state. If we had all the regiments and all the weapons in the South today up here where the fighting is going to be, we could march right to Washington before the North gets ready for war. But Alabama’s keeping most of her regiments at home, and so is Louisiana and so’s Mississippi, and North Carolina thinks she has to defend her coast, and South Carolina and Georgia are just as bad.”