The Warringers lived in Richmond, considerably more than a hundred
miles away. When, in the summer, they could leave town, they usually
went to General Warringer's parents, in Gloucester County. I early
gathered, from some source or other, that my aunt Harriet and my
uncle Gilchrist were like each other and somewhat unlike my father,
Uncle Robert, Aunt Sarah, and Aunt Kate. Restwell and Flowerfield
did not seem to have hold on them. Daddy Guinea told me a little
about this.
"Mr. Gilchrist an' Miss Harriet, dey restless. Lak de Flowerfield
colts--all wantin' ter be racers!"
"Isn't it good to be a racer?"
"Sho! Ef you's er bawn racer. But some of de colts jus' restless,
'n' thinkin' dey see er race-track where ain't any! Of co'se," said
Daddy Guinea, "dey're jus' pawin' 'n' zigzaggin' dere way ter hit!
Ez I see hit, we're all on de big race-track."
"Is Aunt Harriet pretty?"
"She sho is! 'N' sweet ez honey de way she talks!"
I found this out for myself when I was something more than eight
years old and my grandfather took me with him to Richmond. That was
an event!
The Surrender lay five years in the background. The South showed
faint signs of recuperation. But many individuals, speaking in terms
of material prosperity, were still upon the descending arc. Others
apparently rested precisely at the nadir. This last I gather to have
been my grandfather's case. He had done his best. Now he must have
help, or, despite all struggle, Restwell would go under the hammer.
He went to Richmond to see General Warringer. Just why he took me
with him I do not remember, but he took me.
Mandy's Jim and the ancient carriage conveyed us through Whitechurch
and so on by the old highway, by long hills and level stretches, to
the small town that bragged of a railroad. The colonel and I
together had a small leather trunk and a worn valise. He wore the
broadcloth he had had before the war. My suit had been fashioned by
my mother and Aunt Sarah out of clothes that had been my father's.
The colonel's hat was the Southern, wide-brimmed, soft, black felt.
I had a cap that my mother had made.
Every one on the train appeared to know my grandfather. Every one
seemed to speak to me. It was so novel! The rows of seats covered
with dark-red velvet, and the windows like parallel lines of dirty
glass beads, and the stove at one end and the water-cooler at the
other, and the lamps up in the painted roof, and the roar and the
swaying and the jolting, and the smell and grime of soft smoke, and
the telegraph-poles going by, and the rushing country--I sat with my
eyes wide and my teeth coming down hard upon my lip. I have reason
to believe that we made something under twenty-five miles an hour.
But all things are relative. Mandy's Jim, the plow-horses, and the
carriage made four and a half miles an hour. And when the whistle
screamed--what half-fearful, half-delightful agitation!
The conductor said: "You don't often travel with us, Colonel. Glad
to see you!" He had a patch over one eye and a great scar running
across forehead and cheek. When he had punched my grandfather's
ticket and gone by, and my grandfather had explained why he had
punched the ticket, we entered upon this.
"Did he get hurt in the war?"
"Yes. At Malvern Hill."
"Is he poor?"
"Yes, he's poor."
"Is everybody in the cars poor?"
"Mostly."
"If it lets us travel, I don't care!"
My grandfather smiled. "Do you like to travel?"
I produced two of Mammy's big words. "I extremely and fastidiously
like it."
Mr. Millwood was on the train. I do not remember where he was
going--not to Richmond, for the latter part of the day we went on
without him. But here he was, and an obliging farmer changed seats
with him so that he might be next to us. At first I was afraid of
hurting the red velvet (though already it was hurt enough), but at
last, as the train was overhanging the river and there was a boat
upon it and men fishing, I got upon my knees and glued my forehead to
the window. It was a very dirty window, but I managed to find an
unsmeared lane. Now the train ran under limestone cliffs, and how it
roared! Now it careered into open country, and I saw the willows of
the river and fields and houses.
Behind me Colonel Forth and Mr. Millwood were talking.
"So I thought I would go see Carter Warringer--"
"I hope he can help. I wish I could help, Dugald!"
"I know you do, Tom. If I can struggle on, I'd like to keep the
place for the boy."
"You'll pull through! The Lord isn't going to desert you--even if
you do read stuff and nonsense!"
"The boy's got a good mind and strong affections. He ought to do
well. Dugald had it in him.... If I can give Michael his schooling
and start him fair--"
Mr. Millwood nodded his big head. "In ten years' time Major Dallas
might take him in his office. Then, as a lawyer, he'd be made! If
Virginia ever gets up from the ground John Dallas can do what he
wants to--"
"Yes. John's a strong man. Sometimes I think that Michael won't
take to the law."
"Why not? Now I don't see him," said Mr. Millwood, "in the
pulpit.... I've heard ever so many war doctors say that henceforth
doctors would have a great showing--"
"Doctor Gilbert doesn't believe he'll be a doctor. Just as I," said
Colonel Forth, "don't see him as a farmer."
"It's a right hard thing to find--a way of living that your whole
heart's in! _I_ found it," said Mr. Millwood. "The law's the road
to political life--if ever we have any political life again!"
"I don't know. I feel sometimes," said my grandfather, "strange new
things in the earth, pushing up. A curtain's down, Millwood!"
We were on the river again. It flashed and bent. There was a broken
dam. Then a mill with a great wheel.... Now we were away from the
water, rushing through forest. The whistle screamed. My knees sank
into the worn and blackened velvet; my hands held the cinder-strewn
window-sill, my forehead pressed the glass where the last shower had
left dirty tear marks. Inside me was wild, bright, tense, rushing
adventure.
After a while I tumbled back and slept.
When I waked, Mr. Millwood was gone. My grandfather, in the seat
behind me, read a newspaper. We had dinner out of the willow basket
packed by my mother, and we shared it with an old lady and her
grandson, a boy of sixteen, also on their way to Richmond. The boy
was to be entered with a cousin in the tobacco business. "Make what
men want and sell it to them!" said the old lady. "Just farming and
lawing and ruling have got to sit back for a spell, Colonel!"
In the physical landscape the mountains had sunk from sight. The
hills had all lowered in height. The wooded country showed another
aspect. Broom sedge became plentifully in evidence. All that ride,
out of my window, might be seen agricultural poverty, poverty of town
and village. With something of frequency rose out of green or brown
earth, like ruined tombs, chimneys and hearths and nothing more.
Everywhere fencing was makeshift, and once-painted houses had
forgotten the event. The roads that the train crossed or paralleled
showed stony ledge, rut, and mud-hole. But the sun was shining and
the spring woods were greening.
A stout, well-dressed man came and sat beside my grandfather. "Glad
to see you, Colonel Forth! Well, what's the news in your part of the
state?"
They talked. After a while said the stout man, looking out of
window: "I have been North. Their country looks prosperous!"
My grandfather rested his thin brown hands, palm in palm, upon his
newspaper. His voice when he spoke had an unusual deep vibrancy. "I
am glad that part of our country is prosperous."
"'Our country'! So you have come to that?"
"Yes," said my grandfather. "Our South, our North, our East, our
West. Our America, our Europe, our Asia, our Africa. Our earth."
"Well, I'll be--! You didn't talk that way, Colonel, during the
Seven Days, nor in the Petersburg trenches!"
"No," said my grandfather. "Live and learn, Otway! Live and learn."
"Well, I can tell you," said Otway, "that where I've been it's 'Our
North--and you in the South, damn you!'"
"Yes," said my grandfather. "They, too, have got to live and learn.
We haven't been doing much living, any of us!"
"All that's a new lingo!" said the stout man, and presently went back
to his companion at the end of the car. I think that he said: "The
old Colonel must have been a Union man before the war. I never heard
of it, but he must have been!"
The worn engine and the worn cars and the worn road-bed, the engineer
with a wooden leg, the brakeman too young to have fought, the
conductor with the patched eye and the scar, the passengers
discussing Readmittance, and bad times, and better times perhaps in
the misty future, crops and Ku-Klux and the war in Europe, creaked
and jolted and roared, twenty-odd miles an hour. Twice occurred
prolonged halts. We were an hour and a half late and came upon
Richmond red in a great sunset flare. The stout man, passing the
colonel and me, said, "It looks like the burning five years ago!"
Colonel Forth and I got out of the train. He carried the old valise
and I the willow basket. There seemed a kind of long shed, and so
many persons speaking and hurrying in the shadows, that I felt vague
fear and pressed close to my grandfather. Then we heard General
Warringer's authoritative voice. "Here they are! Well, Colonel, and
how are you? Is this giant Michael? How do you like traveling,
youngster?"
A negro with the general took basket and valise. We went through the
station. Outside we encountered a throng of negro drivers,
vociferous, extolling the merits of various hotels--The Ford--The
Washington--The Exchange, and Ballard--gesticulating, long whip in
hand, toward painted omnibuses or ancient hacks. Coming to a
carriage, we entered it, waited for the leather trunk to be deposited
beside the coachman, then moving off, began presently to climb a
hill. The sunset reddened all the sky. My grandfather sat as in a
dream. "I have not been here since the Evacuation." He bent forward.
"There's the Capitol! ... The Stars and Bars--The Stars and Stripes."
The Warringers' house, old, large, square, gray stucco, with tall
magnolias about it, furnished within with pier-glasses and crystal
chandeliers, long damask curtains and much mahogany, inspired me with
some awe. The Warringers said they were poor, but I couldn't
immediately see it. And Richmond was a broken city. But to me it
showed Aladdin marvels of shop windows, spires of churches,
street-car, and market, General Washington on his bronze horse far up
against the blue sky, and squirrels in Capitol Square that took
peanuts from one's hand as one sat on benches. I had never been able
to get a squirrel in a real wood to do this. And the bronze horse
and rider that never moved, that stayed there! Wouldn't you go
galloping through the sky?
Twice I was taken to the theater. I saw a play of the West,
California, and the gold-diggers. And I saw a noted actress in
"Maria Stuart." ... Wonder world!
I did not love the Richmond Warringers as I loved the Flowerfield
Dallases. Yet I loved them. It is my way to taste persons, to
perceive them volatilized, as it were, so that the mind passes in and
out among spoken and unspoken words, gestures, obvious and
unobvious--goes, too, off the absurd, medicine-dropper business of
present moments....
My aunt Harriet had a beautiful skin, beautiful hair, a beautiful
mouth. She dressed beautifully, for all of poverty. She loved
people around her, and she talked wittily. The table was always
laughing. She had a gift of mimicry. She was ambitious for herself,
her husband, and her children. She wished General Warringer to
become a public man. She was sure that it was going to be possible,
now that Virginia was readmitted, and Southern men were beginning to
lay hands again on their own affairs. She meant, in the first place,
Southern white men, and in the second place the old propertied class.
"Their own affairs!" meant traditional things, political, social, and
economic. For herself she wished beautiful clothes, leisure to
attend to her beautiful body, leisure also to read clever books, to
observe, go about, "experience," feed her wit. Leisure and
money--money being with positiveness the only way to get leisure and
the rest of it! As women could not make money, General Warringer
must make it. Such was her triple-walled castle. Yet there was a
corner where the walls were really only honeycombs. She had a gay
sweet garden here.
They had lost two children. There remained Carter, Royal, and
Dorothea. These made friends with me. We fed the squirrels
together. They boasted of the sea to which they went in the summer,
and I of the mountains.
My grandfather and I spent ten days in Richmond. He got, I know, the
loan from his son-in-law, though I know, too, that there were
difficulties. General Warringer considered him a dreamer. Good
money would go after bad at Restwell, and God knew there was little
enough money, good or bad! The colonel would not be able to keep the
place.... But he was fond of the colonel, and they were his wife's
people. General Warringer, whose interests were tobacco and mining,
managed to scrape together the three or four thousands needed to
stave off the sale of Restwell.
There came up, too, the question of my future.
"If he's intelligent and energetic, I might, when he's finished his
schooling, find some opening for him. If I were you I'd give him a
scientific education."
"Scientific?"
"Colonel, our old world is changing! You and I got along very well
with the classics and what not. But I'm going to make Carter an
engineer, and I want Royal to train for finance,
railroading--something live and moving--"
"Scientific." It was a new thought to my grandfather. It had not
occurred to him in the train, talking to Millwood.... Swedenborg had
begun with Science.
At General Warringer's he heard much speculative talk. Men came
there who were looking ahead. The South was to be developed, that
was evident. Canals, railroads, furnaces, factories--the day for
such things was at hand. "Five years, and you'll see it
beginning--beginning--beginning! A quarter of a century and the
South 'll be richer than ever it was! Northern capital?
Certainly--at first! We'll mix--forget---get our arms round one
another there first. In business!"
Colonel Forth made a diffident remark. "We'll seek more, too, don't
you think, in ourselves? Get things together there?"
"I don't know about all that," said his son-in-law, drinking his
coffee. "Material enterprises are big enough for me just now! You
mustn't underrate them, Colonel! That's the danger for your kind."
The colonel admitted it. "But you mustn't think either that mining
and engineering and railroading and canalling aren't carried on upon
other floors. They go all through, I think."
Spring burst out softly, fully, while we were in Richmond. The ten
days passed. We said good-by to all the Warringers. Here once more
was the train.... As we went through country that had been ground of
battle, and again battle, and again battle, the dogwood made a milky
way of each piece of woodland. Once more, with knees sunk into
grimed velvet, I looked out of window. The day was so warm that the
glass was up. The world was the clearer for that.
My grandfather left me alone for a while. At last he came back,
"Michael!" I turned from the window.
"General Lee is in the next car. Come! I want to show you to him."
He straightened my tie for me, brushed back my hair, and saw that my
hands were pretty clean. We went into the next car, and to a
white-bearded, gentle, very fine-looking man. He put out his hand to
me, asked me a question or two which I answered, and I stood held
against his knee for five minutes while he and the colonel talked.
Then we went, my grandfather and I, back to our own car and the
dogwood stars outside the window and the rushing country and the blue
sky and the flight of birds.