“TELL me, Buddie,” Lucinda said, as they sat in the hammock at the end of the south gallery one morning in the languid ten o’clock hour, “do you think talking brings you closer to people or just keeps them farther off?”
“I only wish now at the seminary we’d been able to talk—from the way it looks nobody there will be meeting again.”
“But why do you say you won’t see the cadets again?”
“You know as well as I do. War.”
“Do you remember the time at the Easter party General Quitman scented himself all out? He roared about the Mexican War and annexing Cuba, which he said everybody in the country was crying for.”
“I remember he had taken you up in his arms and you had long curls, and climbed down to the carpet,” Edward said, giving the hammock a swing with his foot against the floor.
“That was because I knew that what he was talking about was his big self.”
“Then Mamma whispered to you to go take the general’s hand, he was the most popular hero in the United States; but you wouldn’t. So you came and sat by me on the corner sofa. You said he smelled like cake.”
“He kept vanilla beans in his armoire to scent his linen, but we didn’t know that. I sat by you and felt very sad because I thought a hero could eat up all the cake if he wanted to.”
“If we’d always done the way Mamma wanted us to we’d have been angels by now.”
“Buddie, do you think Father’s dull, well, say simple?” Lucy asked suddenly.
He stopped the hammock with his root.
“Plague take it, what do you mean, simple?”
“Plague take it yourself, Mr. Edward McGehee, I am always wondering why he won’t just pack off these old psalm singers out of the house.”
What she referred to was the way they had at Montrose of giving shelter every winter to two or three invalids from the North, recommended to Hugh McGehee by some minister or other in the church. Two rooms in the south wing were reserved for this charitable practice. The two now were Mr. Munger from Wisconsin and Mr. Tripler from Providence. Lucy went on: “Father’d let Mr. Munger bring his medicine bottles to the table if Mamma hadn’t put her foot down and yet look at the sense Papa’s got, what he says about people like Mr. Munger’s ancestors!”
“What does he say?”
“Says it’s not so much that these people are not well-born, they don’t want to be well-born.”
“Born better but don’t like it,” Edward said, laughing.
“It’s not that you’re trying to descend from Alfred the Great, Papa says, what you want is to be connected with something larger than yourself. But it’s no use telling Mr. Munger. If you’re Mr. Munger, you want to be self-made.”
“Certainly. Then you’re the first to get there.”
“ ’Twould be rude with a bang,” said Lucy, “to tell Mr. Munger just where he’s got. You know, Buddie, Papa’s certainly got sense sometimes.”
“I thought you said he was dull.”
“I said sometimes. I think he’d be smart, though, if he’d wring Miss Whipple’s neck. That’s what your sister’d do.”
“You sound like Aunt Sallie,” he said, smiling.
“Well, let me sound like Aunt Sallie. I remember one day over there she said to me, ‘Honey, what does your father mean letting those Yankee divines sit around Montrose with their sharp noses?’ ”
“Yes, and what does Aunt Sallie do? She’d sit up all night with a crippled goslin.”
“That’s different. You should have heard them yestiddy, I mean our two theologues and Miss Whipple.” Lucinda told of the conversation of the three Northerners about slavery and secession. God would punish every man, woman, and child in the South, they said. Except that Miss Whipple did not think darkies should be slaves; she thought they ought to be all taken out and shot. You ask for a glass of water, Miss Whipple said, you may get it in a quarter of an hour and you may never get it at all.
“What I wish is,” Lucy continued, “I could bray the way I used to. You remember the time Miss Whipple told Papa on me because I asked her why she didn’t say Mc Gee Hee Haw? Haw hee haw hee haw hee! I said. All the same, though I like our old donkey Pike better, I like her more than I do the theologues.” Lucy’s voice suddenly changed, as he put her hand through his arm. “Edward, are you really going to enlist?”
He turned and looked into her eyes quietly, then kissed her brow.
“I know you are right. I know you are right, because you are good,” she said, as if to her own thoughts.
Presently, as they talked, Lucy began to complain of how everybody talked of secession and the war to suit themselves, but her mother interrupted by coming to say there were guests who wanted her to sing. Judge and Mrs. Winchester and Colonel Harrod were in the parlor.
“Mamma, I’d rather not,” Lucy said, frowning. “You know I ought to stop trying to sing until Monsieur la Tour has taught me a little at least.”
“Colonel Harrod’s just been praising your voice to the skies.”
“Pour les sots acteurs—” Lucy said, turning to Edward. “Monsieur la Tour says for stupid actors God made stupid spectators.”
“I know it’s considered a most elegant tendency to run into the French, but my child had better give up French if it’s going to make her so tart,” her mother said, stroking the brown head.
“Mamma, you know it’s not French, it’s that old Colonel Harrod. If he’d just hush up!”
“Sh! Your voice carries. I’m sorry, but I didn’t propose it, honey.”
“I know, I’m sorry,” Lucinda said, rising, but not touching her mother as they moved toward the long window that would take them through the library to the parlor. “I’ll try gladly. I don’t know what’s come over me lately, Mamma. Sometimes I think I’m the sort will live on and on till they have to put out poison for me.”
“Precious, don’t always jump to the bottom of the well. Judge Winchester has an ear for music.”
When Edward heard Lucy singing a few moments later he understood that he could see deeper into her nature than his mother could. As he heard now the low, rich voice moving through the song, he leaned his head on his hands and sat motionless, listening, solitary and eager. Both his father and mother loved Lucy and admired her; but they would sometimes look at her as if nothing they could do or say would make their love reach her.
Lucy was too handsome a young lady not to draw Colonel Harrod’s loud applause, and Edward heard it with his young lips curled in contempt. Colonel Harrod was a tall man of fifty with two plantations and a house then building, called Stamboul, and designed with the idea of rivalling Longwood, Doctor Haller Nutt’s house at the other end of town, thirty-two octagonal rooms with an octagonal rotunda for the five stories. For some months the colonel had talked their heads off about tyranny and tasting the steel of Southern manhood. At the same time he had been able to explain that he must accept the proposed terms of exemption from military service for planters with more than twenty slaves. He could, he declared, best serve the South by the raising of supplies. He was the kind that if such a law of exemption for planters were abolished, would likely turn preacher.
Colonel Harrod, Edward could forget. But there were men like his father, like Judge Winchester, and thousands of others who had talked from so many sides about the war. There was so much to be considered, so many rights, leaders, policies and laws, sections, interests. As if these things were the point—As if there were not within you——
The singing went on. His heart was restless, tragic and rebellious; he wanted the cause he fought for to be simple and single; he knew that it was not. He wanted his country to be perfect just as one thinks of a beloved girl as perfect. He knew that he was going to the war; he had not any girl that he was in love with, and the Southern cause passed through his mind like a face that was still vague but would be beautiful yet, and a voice whose sweetness he felt but had not heard.