House Divided (157 page)

She swept him away upstairs. “Let me get him clean, Vesta! He's not fit to be seen! I won't have such a tramp of a man in my drawing room.” But when they were alone she held fast to him again, whispering his loved name. “Brett Dewain! Oh Brett Dewain!”

While he bathed, she gave his garments to June, who sniffed and said of rights they should go into the fire; but Brett called a warning: nothing must be destroyed. “There's no way to replace anything,” he told Cinda. “Except off a dead Yankee.”

They had had time before Cinda came to tell him of Burr's hurt, and now he spoke of it. “Vesta says he thinks he can fight again.”

“I don't know. I suppose he can if he's bound to. Even Julian has tried to help in the home defense. Rollin will be as well as ever, in time. Did he and Vesta tell you about themselves?”

“Yes. I'm mighty glad, aren't you?”

“Of course. I love Rollin. And Vesta deserves so much. Oh, did she tell you Dolly's married?”

“Yes.” He said: “Honey, Vesta and Rollin want to be married at once; and he wants to take her to Fallow Fields to see his mother. You might go with them, go to the Plains, have a visit with Jenny.”

“No, I'll stay in Richmond. Unless Grant is going to drive us out?”

Brett shook his head. “We've beaten Grant to a standstill. He's lost seventy-five thousand men since he crossed the Rapidan, more men than General Lee has ever had to fight against him.” His tone was not exultant; rather it was sober with a sort of wonder. “The Northern
papers printed Grant's dispatch where he said he'd fight it out on that line if it took all summer; but he's had to eat his words. He didn't fight it out on that line. Every time we beat him, he tried a new line.” He was dressed now, in old familiar garments. “It's been one long slaughter, Cinda. At Pole Green Church they came up within twenty yards of our gun in a solid column before we let loose at them with double charges of canister. The flames from the muzzle burned the men at the head of that column, they were so close. We fired seventeen rounds of canister into them, eleven rounds in one minute, at point-blank range. The ground where they'd been looked as though a giant had swung a scythe through the column.”

“I'd rather not hear about it,” she confessed. “I see enough men in the hospital, see what happens to them.”

But when they went downstairs, Julian and Anne were there, and Julian and Rollin asked many questions which Brett must answer. He said the fighting in the tangle of the Wilderness gave little chance for artillery, but at Spottsylvania they had a hard and bitter day. “We opened fire about nine in the morning, and they worked on us with muskets and then with artillery till along in the afternoon.” Cinda's eyes closed as though to banish a vision of the perils he had survived. “Then they charged us. A lot of our infantry ran over to their lines and surrendered, so there was nothing left in front of us to stop them; and they broke in on our right and rear and took three of our guns and scattered the whole company. We ran like good ones, I can tell you!” He laughed. “I tripped, getting over our breastworks, and came down so hard it knocked the breath out of me. I thought I'd been hit, but I tried to run and found I could—so I did!”

He was smiling, and so were they. “I found a soldier hiding behind a tree. It was a question whether I'd take his tree or his gun, but he was hugging that tree as though it were his sweetheart, so I took his gun. Then General Ewell came along. That one-legged man has just one idea in a fight, and that is to charge; so five companies of us charged five thousand Yankees. We got as far as the caissons they'd taken; but by that time there weren't many of us left, so we scuttled back; but we met our brigades coming up, and Ewell sent us in again.” He chuckled. “There was a boy with him, not over twelve years old, riding a pony, and the pony was rearing and pawing, and
the boy was shooting a little pistol at the Yankees. It was a sight, I tell you!”

Their breathless laughter, half mirth and half tears, made him pause a moment. “Well, we got the guns, finally,” he said. “We'd taken all the implements from each gun, so the Yankees hadn't been able to use them; and we worked them till we hadn't enough men left to keep them going. But that was long enough. By dark, things quieted down, and next morning we pulled back.”

He paused, and Julian said quickly: “Go on, Papa.”

“Well,” Brett continued, “Thursday was the bloody day. God knows how many men Grant threw at us, and how many we killed. I saw one tree almost two feet thick that had been cut down by musket balls. I walked down afterward to where the Yankees had been, and there must have been hundreds of dead men. It was artillery that stopped them. I don't suppose there was a man left all in one piece. That discouraged Grant. He moved off, and we didn't have much to do till the fight at Pole Green Church.” He looked at Cinda. “I told you about that.”

“Don't tell it again, please.”

He nodded. “Well, that's about all. We were in reserve for a while; and now Grant's stopped in front of Petersburg, fought to a standstill, bled white; so we'll have some rest.” He said in sober satisfaction: “If he'd come around by water, Grant could have put his army where it is now without losing a man. It's cost him close to a hundred thousand men to come the way he did.”

Cinda spoke quietly. “Figures don't mean anything. At the hospital we see men die one at a time. I wonder if generals would go on fighting if they saw men die one at a time, instead of by the thousands.”

“The generals are as helpless as any of us, Cinda. We're all just—grains of wheat in the hopper. The stones keep on grinding till there's no more wheat for them to grind.”

She shook her head as though to shake away her own thoughts. “For Heaven's sake let's talk about something else for a while.” Then suddenly she smiled. “Vesta, can't you and Rollin think of something we might be discussing?”

That made them all laugh together, and they turned to wedding plans. Brett could only stay till Monday. “And I won't be married
unless Papa's here,” Vesta declared. “So we must hurry.” Cinda protested that this left only tomorrow to get ready, but Vesta said it need not take long. “I shall wear the dress I wore to
The Rivals,”
she decided. “Nothing we could possibly manage would be any prettier!”

But the dress was not all; for Rollin and Vesta would leave at once to spend his wound-leave at home. The Yankee cavalry, now at Petersburg, threatened every day to cut the Weldon Railroad, so travel to Wilmington might be interrupted; but the Piedmont from Danville to Greensboro had at last been completed, giving Richmond another direct communication with the lower South; so they could go that way. This meant taking the half-past-seven train for Danville, and couples planning to depart by that early train sometimes elected to be married at six in the morning.

But Vesta brushed aside this suggestion. “That's no time of day to be married! Goodness knows I'm homely enough anyway, but at the crack of dawn—br-r-r!”

She chose to have an evening wedding and an all-night party afterward; so they would be married Sunday evening. “It must be after supper,” Cinda decided. “With everything that's fit to eat so scarce, we couldn't feed a crowd, so we'll have to make it a ‘starvation party,' Vesta; but perhaps we can have a waffle-worry for early breakfast.”

Vesta protested that they could surely manage supper for Julian and Anne and Judge Tudor, for Aunt Enid and the children, for Aunt Tilda and Mr. Streean. “And we can invite the others for afterward.” So they settled on this compromise. In spite of the fact that there was little to do by way of preparation, Saturday and Sunday were so crowded with activity that when supper-time came, Cinda was glad to sit a passive listener for a while. They made that supper hour briefly gay, and then Vesta and Anne and Lucy fled away upstairs, and Rollin and Julian too. The others waited in the drawing room, and Enid complained because Trav stayed in Lynchburg, where General Longstreet had been taken after he was wounded, when he might quite as well be here with her. Streean remarked that some wives found they had more freedom when their husbands were not at home; and to Cinda's surprise that silenced Enid. Then Streean turned to Brett, saying that many believed Lee had failed at the Wilderness; that when Longstreet had Grant whipped, Lee let the enemy escape.

“Oh, I know Lee does the best he can,” he admitted. “But he's a sick man.”

Brett smiled. “If he's sick, I expect Grant wishes he'd get well—or that we'd put some of our healthy generals in his place.”

“If Beauregard were in command you'd see the difference.”

“We haven't heard much of Beauregard since First Manassas.”

“He's the only one of our generals who has never lost a battle,” Streean asserted. Cinda pressed her fingertips to her eyes. Could they not forget war for this last hour before Vesta's wedding? “And of course it was Beauregard, not Lee, who saved Richmond. If it hadn't been for Beauregard, Petersburg would have been lost a week after Cold Harbor; and Petersburg means Richmond. Beauregard had only two thousand troops to hold a four-mile line against the first attack, and next day he had about eight thousand against forty thousand; and the day after that, he had to hold off sixty-five thousand men. But he did it. Lee was at Drewry's Bluff, wouldn't believe that Grant had crossed the river. Beauregard had been telling him so for three days; but Lee's an old man, and his mind's no longer resilient.”

Cinda watched Brett, uneasily fearing an explosion; but Brett said mildly: “Lee's army's not very resilient, either. Grant couldn't move us out of his way, no matter how many men he threw against us.”

“Grant has men to spare,” Streean reminded him. “He can afford to waste them. An officer told me yesterday that at Cold Harbor there was a line of dead Yankees two miles long, lying so close together you might have walked the whole distance and never set foot on the ground; and at Spottsylvania there were breastworks so full of bodies that wounded were smothered under them. You could see hands sticking up where wounded men had tried to push the dead men away so they could breathe.”

Cinda thought if Streean went on much longer she would scream. Brett was about to speak, but she caught his eyes with a glance so angry that he held his tongue. But Enid said with a fluttering laugh: “I declare, I just get all mixed up about things. Ever since the war started the Yankees have been yelling ‘On to Richmond!' and we've been saying we had to hold on to Richmond, and no one ever mentioned Petersburg, but now it's all we hear about.”

Streean nodded pompously. “Captain Pew was the first man of my
acquaintance to say that Petersburg was the key to Richmond. Lee didn't realize it, and I don't believe the Yankees did, or they'd have taken it when they could.”

Cinda seized any pretext to turn the talk away from battles. “How is Captain Pew?” She wished the wedding guests would begin to come.

“Busy, and profitably so,” Streean assured her; and he spoke to Brett again. “You know, Brett, speaking of profits, you're missing many opportunities.”

Brett met Cinda's eyes. “I haven't given much thought to business recently.”

Streean smiled. “I suppose you mean you've been too busy fighting the war. Well, so has the Government; but even the Government finds time to turn a penny now and then. They're selling meal to the public at twelve dollars a peck, meal that they've impressed at the set price. That gives them a profit of forty-five dollars a bushel. And they're making money in cotton, too. Thousands of bales go out through Wilmington, bought with Confederate bonds and sold for sterling or for gold.” He said in what sounded like friendly urgency: “In times like these, Brett, to insure against loss is just common sense. I understand that Mr. Anderson, and Mr. Arnshaw, and Mr. Haxall and many other gentlemen have already arranged with Grant that when Richmond falls, their mills and factories won't be harmed. That's just ordinary business precaution.”

Brett said abruptly: “Richmond will not fall.”

“Not yet, to be sure.” Streean shrugged. “Not as long as we hold Petersburg. And certainly Grant has had his fill for a while.”

 

The door bell rang, the first of their friends began to arrive. There had been a question whether to invite many or few; but though Cinda and Vesta agreed that a few would be better than many, the number somehow grew; and when Vesta and Rollin faced Dr. Minnigerode together, the drawing room and the wide hall and the library were crowded. Vesta was radiant, Rollin's scarred face transfigured. Cinda, while she listened to Doctor Minnigerode's familiar voice with the heavy German accent which in church she seldom noticed, thought even Dolly would think Rollin handsome if she could see him now.

Afterward there was for a while a pleasant turbulence of many voices before the guests began to say good night. President and Mrs. Davis were the first to go, and to Cinda's satisfaction Redford Streean and Tilda did not long remain. Enid, who had few intimates in this company, took Peter home early; but at Vesta's affectionate insistence, Lucy was allowed to stay. General and Mrs. Ould and General and Mrs. Randolph had come together and departed together; but Mattie Ould, who although she was a year or two the younger was Lucy's closest friend, stayed to share with Lucy in the nightlong merrymaking.

When the older people were gone there were still Rollin's friends and Vesta's, Anne's and Julian's. Vesta slipped away to change into travelling garb, and someone begged Hetty Cary to sing, and she agreed on condition that they all sing with her. When Vesta reappeared they began to organize charades, and there was a great deal of moving of furniture to arrange settings, and every wardrobe in the house was searched to provide costumes. Cinda had dreaded that long night, sure that sooner or later even the young people would begin to be sleepy, and the hours would drag, and a certain grim determination would creep into the protracted gaiety; and she had promised Brett that, if he chose, he and she would quietly slip away and go to bed till time for Vesta and Rollin to depart. But actually the hours sped, and she forgot to notice whether she was sleepy or not; and when Caesar and June at the appointed hour brought in great platters of waffles, and jugs of molasses, and a hot beverage that would pass for coffee, she was astonished to find the night so quickly gone.