station agent. It is closely similar to the question he asked, only, by
reason of his lack of cultivation, he interrupted the even and orderly
flow of his English with many objurgative and even violent terms, such
as we do not employ in ordinary converse, but such as stablemen and
innkeepers seem to like to use.
"Despairing of my efforts to secure reasonable public service at the
hands of the railroad, I looked about me, and presently encountered
Captain Skinner. You know him, of course--lives at the Kennels, or some
such place--keeps a lot of dogs, and drinks a good deal more whiskey
than would be good for most men. But he is a West Pointer, you know, and
served for a considerable time in the Indian wars. He was at
Chapultepec, too, I think. At any rate, he mentioned the fact in
connection with his missing arm. He told me he was going to raise a
battery in the purlieus of Richmond. He said he didn't want a company of
young bloods, but one of soldiers. He proposes to enlist wharf-rats down
at Rockett's, and ruffians, and especially jailbirds. 'There are more
than a hundred as good men as ever smelt gunpowder or stopped a bullet
in its career,' he said, 'now languishing in the Richmond jails and the
Virginia State Penitentiary. Governor Letcher promises me that he will
pardon all of them who choose to enlist with me, and I'm going to look
them over. Those that are fit to make soldiers of, I'll enlist, and
after a week or two of drilling I'll have a battery ready for the
field.'
"His idea pleased me, so I told him to put me down as the first man on
his list. He objected at first. You see, I've had no experience as a
ruffian, and I never served a term in jail in my life, but I convinced
him that I would make a good cannonier, and he enrolled me. I am to
report to him at Rockett's by the day after to-morrow."
To Baillie's remonstrances and pleadings that his friend should choose a
company of gentlemen in which to serve, Marshall turned a deaf ear.
"When I become a soldier," he said, "and put myself under another man's
command, I want that other man to be one who knows something about the
business. Captain Skinner knows what to do with a gun and a gunner, and
I've a pretty well-defined notion that most of our coming captains have
all that yet to learn, and besides--well, I've given you reasons
enough."
"Besides what, Marshall? What were you going to say?"
"O, nothing that you would understand or sympathise with. It's only that
somehow I don't want to be in a company of gentlemen turned soldiers,
where I should be sure to meet our kind of people on terms of social
equality now and then. As a common soldier, I should find it rather
embarrassing at a military ball to have a lady put me on her
dancing-list while scornfully refusing a like favour perhaps to the
officer who must assign me to guard-duty next morning."
In thus answering, Marshall Pollard equivocated somewhat. He made no
mention of the little jessamine and honeysuckle incident, but perhaps
there was something behind that which helped to determine his course in
choosing Captain Skinner's company for his own, thus placing himself
among men wholly without the pale of that society in which sprigs of
jessamine are given and cherished, and now and then thrown out of the
window. At any rate, the young man seemed disposed to change the course
of the conversation.
"Now, Baillie," he said, "you've catechised me quite enough for one
morning. Tell me about yourself. Why are you going off to Richmond to
enlist in one of the batteries there, instead of joining your neighbours
and friends here in organising one or other of the companies they are
forming?"
"For the simple reason that I want to be in the middle of this mix as
soon as possible. Those Richmond batteries are already fit to take the
field, and they'll be hurling shells at the enemy and dodging shells on
their own account before these companies here learn which way a
sergeant's chevrons should point. I want to get to the front among the
first, that's all."
Sending for Sam, he bade that worthy pack a small saddle valise for him
with a few belongings, and when, an hour later, the two friends were
ready for their departure, Sam presented himself, clad in his best, and
carrying a multitudinous collection of skillets, kettles, and
frying-pans, with other and less soldierly belongings. When asked by his
master, "What does this mean?" Sam answered, in seeming astonishment at
the question:
"Why, Mas' Baillie, you'se a-gwine to de wah, an' of co'se Sam's a-gwine
along to take k'yar o' you."
"Of course Sam is going to do no such thing," answered the young man.
"Go and put away your pots and pans."
"But, Mas' Baillie," remonstrated the negro boy, in a nearly tearful
voice, "who's a-gwine to take k'yar o' you ef Sam ain't thar? Whose
a-gwine to clean yer boots, an' bresh yer clo'se, an' cook yer victuals,
an' all that?"
The master was touched by the boy's devotion, though he justly suspected
that a yearning for adventure had quite as much to do with Sam's wish to
"go to de wah," as his desire to be of service to a kindly master.
"But, Sam," he said, "a common soldier doesn't carry his personal
servant with him. If we did that, there wouldn't be enough--"
"A common soldier!" Sam broke in, exercising that privilege of
interrupting his master's speech which the personal servants of
Virginians always claimed for their own. "A common soldier! Who says
Mas' Baillie'll be a common soldier? De mastah of Warlock ain't a common
nuffin'. He's a Pegram, he is, an' de Pegrams ain't never been common
yit, an' dey ain't a-gwine to be."
"But, Sam," argued his master, "you see we're all going to war. We can't
carry our servants with us any more than we can carry our feather beds
or our foot-tubs. We must do things for ourselves, now."
"But who's a-gwine to cook your victuals, Mas' Baillie?"
"I reckon I'll have to do that for myself," answered the master.
"What? You? Mas' Baillie Pegram a-gittin' down on his knees in de mud
an' a-smuttin' up of his han's an' his face, an' a-wrastlin' with pots
an' kittles? Well, I'd jes' like to see you a-doin' of that!"
Baillie was disposed to amuse himself with the boy; so he said:
"But your mammy says you don't know how to cook, Sam, and that you don't
seem to know how to learn."
This staggered Sam for an instant, but he promptly rose to the
emergency.
"I kin 'splain all dat, Mas' Baillie. You see, I'se done been a-foolin'
o' mammy. Mammy, she's de head cook at Warlock; she's a-gittin' old, an'
de rheumatiz an' de laziness is a-gittin' into her bones. So she's done
tried to make Sam take things offen her shoulders. But I'se done see de
situation. I'se watched mammy so long dat I kin cook anything from a
Brunswick stew to an omelette sufferin', jes' as good as mammy kin. But
it 'ud never 'a' done to let her know that, else she'd 'a' shouldered
the whole thing onter Sam. So when she done set me to watch somethin'
she's a-cookin' while she's busy with somethin' else, I jes' had to let
it spile some way, in self-defence. Of co'se, I had to run out'n de
kitchen after that, a-dodgin' o' de pots an' kittles mammy throwed at my
head--an' sometimes I didn't dodge quick enough, either--but de result
was de same. Mammy was sure I couldn't cook, an' dat's what she done
tole you, Mas' Baillie. But I kin cook, sho'. An' please, Mas' Baillie,
you'll let me go 'long wid you?"
The time was growing short now, and Baillie sent the boy away, saying:
"If I ever get to be an officer, Sam, and am allowed a servant, I'll
send for you. But you'd better learn all you can about cooking while
we're waiting for that."
Sam was disconsolate. He went to the detached kitchen building--for no
Virginian ever suffered cooking to be carried on within fifty feet of
his dwelling--and sat down and buried his face in his hands and rocked
himself backward and forward, moaning dismally.
"I'd jes' like to know," he muttered to the pickaninnies, standing by in
their simple costume of long shirts and nothing else, "I'd jes' like to
know what's a-gwine to become o' dis here Warlock plantation an' dese
here niggas, now dat Mas' Baillie's done gone off to git hisself killed
in de wah. De chinch-bug is a-gwine to eat de wheat dis summer sho'. De
watermillions is a-gwine to run all to vines. De 'bacca worms an' de
grasshoppas is a-gwine to chew up all de terbacca befo' men gits a
chawnce at it. De crows is a-gwine to pull up all de cawn--an' dey might
as well, too, fer ef dey didn't, it 'ud wither in de rows. Don't yer
understan', you stupid little niggas, you'se a-gwine to stawve to death,
you is, an' you better believe it. Mas' Baillie's done gone to git
hisself killed, I tells you, an' you'se got a mighty short time till yer
stomicks gits empty an' shet up an' crampy like. You'se a-gwine to
stawve to death, sho', an' it'll hurt wus'n as ef you'd a-swallered a
quart o' black cherries 'thout swallerin' none o' de seeds fer safety."
By this time all the young negroes were wailing bitterly, and they would
not be comforted until Sam's mammy set out a kettle of pot-liquor, and
gave them pones of ash-cake to crumble into it. After that, Sam's
prophecies of evil departed from their inconstant minds. But Sam did not
recover so quickly. For days afterward he moped in melancholy,
occasionally stretching his big eyes to their utmost while he solemnly
delivered some dismal prophecy of evil to come.
VII
_A FAREWELL AT THE GATE_
When the two friends reached the outer gates of Warlock plantation on
their way to the Court-house, Marshall, to whose queer ways his friend
was thoroughly well used, called a halt.
"Let us dismount," he said, "and consider what we are doing."
When they had seated themselves upon the carpet of pine-needles, the
meditative youth resumed:
"Does it occur to you, Baillie," he asked, "that when you and I pass
through yonder gate, we shall leave behind us for ever the most
enjoyable life that it ever fell to the lot of human beings to lead? Do
you realise that we may never either of us come back through that gate
again, and that if we do, it will only be to find all things changed? We
are at the end of a chapter. The next chapter will be by no means like
unto it."
"I confess I don't quite understand," answered the less meditative one.
"Well, this easy-going, delightful Virginian life of ours has no
counterpart anywhere on this continent or elsewhere in the world, and we
have decided to put an end to it. For this war is going to be a very
serious thing to us Virginians. Virginia is destined to be the
battle-field. Greater armies than have ever before been dreamed of on
this continent are going to trample over her fields, and meet in
dreadful conflict on the margins of her watercourses. Her homes are
going to be desolated, her fields laid waste, her substance utterly
exhausted, and her people reduced to poverty in a cause that is not her
own, and in behalf of which she unselfishly risks all for the sake of an
abstraction, and in defence of a right on the part of other States which
Virginia herself had seen no occasion to assert in her own defence.
Whatever else happens in this war, all that is characteristic in
Virginian life, all that is peculiar to it, all that lends loveliness to
it, must be sacrificed on the altar of duty.
"I don't at all know how the change is to come about, or what new things
are destined to replace the old; but I see clearly that the old must
give way to something new. Perhaps, after all, that is best. Ours has
been a beautiful life, and a peculiarly picturesque one, but it is not
in tune with this modern industrial world. It has its roots in the past,
and the past cannot endure. We have thus far been able to go on living
in an ideal world, but the real world has been more and more asserting
itself, and even if no war were coming on to upset things, things must
be upset. Railroads and telegraphs have come to us rather in spite of
our will than by reason of it. We have realised their convenience in a
fashion, but they are still foreign and antagonistic to our ideas. The
older gentlemen among us still prefer to make long journeys on horseback
rather than go by rail, while very many of them insist resolutely upon
sending their womankind always in private carriages, even when they go
long distances to the mountains for the summer.
"We are living in the past and fighting off the present, but the present
will successfully assert itself in the end. You have yourself rejected
all the overtures of the speculators who have wanted to open coal mines
on Warlock plantation, but the time will come when you'll be glad to be
made richer than any Pegram ever dreamed of being by the sinking of mine
shafts among your lawn trees.
"If you are lucky enough to survive this war, you'll see a new labour
system established, and learn to regard the men who work for you, not as
your dependents, for whom you are responsible, and for whose welfare you
feel a sympathetic concern, but as so many 'employees,' to be dealt with
through a trades union, and kept down to the lowest scale of wages
consistent with their living and working.
"I am not advocating the new, or condemning the old. I am only pointing
out the fact that the new is surely destined to triumph over the old,
and replace it.
"The negroes in Virginia are beyond question the best paid, the best
fed, the best housed, and altogether the best cared for labouring
population on earth. They are secure in childhood and in old age and in
illness, as no other labouring people on earth are. They are happy, and
in important ways they are even freer than any other labouring class
ever was. But they are slaves, and modern thought insists that they
would be better off as free men, even though freedom should bring to
them a loss of happiness and a loss of that well-nigh limitless liberty
which they enjoy as bondsmen, under care of kindly masters.
"Mind you, Baillie, I am not arguing for or against the claims of modern
thought. I am only pointing out the fact that it is resistless, and will
have its way. All history teaches that. Even chivalry, armed as it was
from head to heel, and limitlessly courageous as it was, could not hold
its own against commercialism, when commercialism became dominant as the
thought that represented the aspirations of men. Not even prejudice or
sentiment can prevail against progress.
"John Ruskin is even now protesting in the name of æsthetics against the
scarring of England with railroad embankments, and the pollution of
England's air with the vomitings of unsightly factory chimneys; but
neither the extension of the British railway system nor the
multiplication of British factories halts because of his protests.
"Henry Clay was never so eloquent as when pleading against protective
tariffs as something that threatened this country with a system like
that of Manchester, in which men were divided into mill owners and mill
operatives, with antagonistic interests; yet Henry Clay was forced by
the conditions of his time to become the apostle of industrial
protection by tariff legislation.
"My thesis is that no man and no people can for long stand in the way of
what the Germans call the _zeitgeist_--the spirit of the age. Neither, I
think, can any people stand apart from that spirit and let it pass them
by. That is what we Virginians have been trying to do. The time has come
when we are going out to fight the _zeitgeist_, and the _zeitgeist_ is
going to conquer us."
"You expect the South to fail in the war, then?" asked Baillie.
"I don't know. We may fail or we may win. But in either case the old
régime in the Old Dominion will be at an end when the war is over.
Virginia will become a modern State, whatever else happens, and the old
life in which you and I were brought up will become a thing of the past,
a matter of history, the memory of which the novelists may love to
recall, but the conditions of which can never again be established.
"Fortunately, none of these things needs trouble us. They make no
difference whatever in our personal duty. Virginia has proclaimed her
withdrawal from the Union, under the declared purpose of the Union to
make war upon her for doing so. It is for us to fight in Virginia's
cause as manfully as we can, leaving God, or the Fates, or whatever else
it is that presides over human affairs, to take care of the result.
"Come! The time is passing; we must hurry in order to catch that train
which represents the modern progress that is destined to ride over us
and crush us. Good-bye, old Virginia life! God bless you for a good old
life! May we live as worthily in the new, if we survive to see the
new!"
VIII
_A RED FEATHER_
The sun shone with the fervent heat of noonday in mid-July, as the long
line of cannon and caissons came lumbering down the incline of the
roadway that leads from the mountainside into the little railway
village. The breath of the guns was still offensively sulphurous, for
there had been no time in which to cleanse them since their work of
yesterday. The officers and non-commissioned officers on their horses,
and the cannoniers who rode upon the ammunition-chests, were
powder-grimed and dusty--for there had been no opportunity on this
hurried march for those ablutions that all soldiers so eagerly delight
in.
There were no shouted commands given, for this battery had been three
times under fire, and one of the first things an officer learns in real
war is not to shout his orders except when the din of battle renders
shouting necessary. Three months ago on parade the captain of this
battery would have bellowed, "Forward into battery!" by way of
impressing his importance upon the lookers-on. Now that he had learned
to be in earnest, he merely turned to his bugler, and said, as if in a
parlour, "Forward into battery, then halt."
A little musical snatch on the bugle did the rest, and with the
precision of a piece of mechanism, the guns were moved into place, each
with its caissons at a fixed distance in the rear, and the command, "At
ease," was followed by a stable-call, in obedience to which the drivers
set to work to feed and groom their horses. For while men may be allowed
to go grimed and dirty on campaign, the horses at least must be curried
and rubbed and sponged into perfect health and comfort whenever there is
opportunity.
Here at the little railway station were assembled all the womankind from
a dozen miles round about. These had come to look upon the Army of the
Shenandoah, with which Johnston, after several days of skirmishing in
the valley with the Federals under Patterson, was hurrying onward to
Manassas to join Beauregard there, in the battle which was so obviously
at hand.
The women of every degree had come, not merely to see the spectacle of
war, but to cheer the soldiers with smiles and words of encouragement,
and still more to minister in what ways they could to their needs. The
maids and matrons thus assembled were gaily clad, for war had not yet
robbed them of the wherewithal to deck themselves as gaily as the lilies
do. They were full of high confidence and ardent hope, for war had not
yet brought to them, and for many moons to come was not destined to
bring to them, the realisation that defeat and disaster are sometimes a
part of the bravest soldiers' fortune. These women believed absolutely
and unquestioningly in the righteousness of the Southern cause, and they
had not yet read the history of Poland, and La Vendée, and the Huguenots
with discretion enough to doubt that victory always in the end crowns
the struggles of those who stand for the right.
How much of disappointment and suffering this curiously perverse reading
of history has wrought, to be sure! And how confidently, in every case,
the men and women on either side of a war commend their cause to Heaven,
in full confidence that God, in his justice, cannot fail to give victory
to the right, and cannot fail to understand that they are right and
their enemies hopelessly wrong. Probably every educated woman among
those who were assembled at the little village on that twentieth day of
July, 1861, had read Motley's histories; every one of them knew the
story of Poland and of Ireland and of La Vendée and the Camisards; but
they still believed that God and not the guns decides the outcome of
battles.
In one article of their faith at least they were absolutely right. They
believed in the courage, the devotion, the unflinching prowess of the
men who had enlisted to fight for their cause. They had come now, at the
approach of a first great battle, to bid these men Godspeed. Four years
later, when war had well-nigh worn out the gallant Army of Northern
Virginia, and when the very hope of ultimate victory, over enormously
superior numbers and against incalculably superior resources, was
scarcely more than an impulse of faith-inspired insanity, these women of
the South were still present and helpful wherever their presence could
cheer, and wherever their help was needed.
To-day, they looked to the morrow for a victory that should make an end
of the war. The victory came with a startling completeness wholly
unmatched in all the history of battles. But the end did not come, and
the war wore itself out, through four long years of brilliant
achievement, alternated with terrible disaster. At Petersburg these
women did not look to the morrow at all, but their courage was the same,
their cheer the same, their devotion the same. It was still their chosen
task to encourage the little remnant of an army which still held the
defensive works with a line stretched out to attenuation. To the very
end--and even after the end--these brave women faltered not nor failed.
When the war began, the women of the South made a gala-day of every day
when soldiers were in sight. As the war neared its calamitous end, all
days were to them days of mourning and of always willing self-sacrifice.
On that twentieth day of July, 1861, the women gathered together were
full of high hope and confidence. Some were perched upon goods boxes,
arranged to serve as seats. Some were tripping about on foot, gliding
hither and thither in gladness, as girls do in a dance, simply because
their nerves were tuned to a high pitch, and their sympathetic feet
refused to be still. But for the most part they sat in their carriages,
with the tops thrown back in defiance of the fervour of the sun.
Defiance was in the air, indeed, and the troops on their way to the
battle-field were not more resolute in their determination to do and to
dare, than were the dames and damsels there gathered together in their
purpose to disregard sunshine and circumstance, while bestowing their
smiles upon these men, their heroes.
After the fashion of the time among volunteers who were presently to
become war-worn into veterans, but who were never to be reduced to the
condition of hireling regulars, the men were free, as soon as a halt was
called, to move about among the feminine throng, greeting their
acquaintances when they had any, and being cheerily greeted by
strangers, in utter disregard of those conventions with which womanhood
elsewhere than in Virginia surrounds itself. There womanhood had always
felt itself free, because it had always felt itself under the protection
of all there was of manhood in the land. No woman in that time and
country was ever in danger of affront, for the reason that no man dared
affront her, lest he encounter vengeance, swift, sure, and relentless,
at the hands of the first other man who might hear of the circumstance.
No Virginian girl of that time had her mind directed to evil things by
the suggestion of chaperonage; and no Virginia gentleman was subjected
to insulting imputation by the refusal of a woman's guardians to entrust
her protection against himself, as against all others, to his chivalry.
So far was the point of honour pressed in such matters, that no man was
free even to make the most deferential proposal of marriage to any woman
while she was actually or technically under his charge and protection.
To do that, it was held, was to place the woman in an embarrassing
position, to subject her to the necessity of accepting the offer on the
one hand, or of declining it while yet under obligation to accept escort
and protection at the hands of the man making it.