Kincaid's Battery Part 21

But suddenly there was a change. Whether it began in the music, which turned into a tune every Tom, d.i.c.k, and Harry now had by heart, or whether a moment before among the blue-caps or gray-shakos, neither Anna nor the crowd could tell. Some father in those side ranks lawlessly cried out to his red-capped boy as the pa.s.sing lad brushed close against him, "Good-by, my son!" and as the son gave him only a sidelong glance he seized and shook the sabre arm, and all that long, bristling lane of bayonets went out of plumb, out of shape and order, and a thousand bra.s.s-b.u.t.toned throats shouted good-by and hurrah. Shakos waved, shoulders were s.n.a.t.c.hed and hugged, blue kepis and red were knocked awry, beards were kissed and mad tears let flow. And still, with a rigor the superbest yet because the new tune was so perfect to march by, fell the unshaken tread of the cannoneers, and every onlooker laughed and wept and cheered as the bra.s.s rent out to the deafening drums, and the drums roared back to the piercing bra.s.s,--

De black-snake love' de blackbird' nes', De baby love' his mamy's bres', An' raggy-tag, aw spick-an'-span, De ladies loves de ladies' man.

I loves to roll my eyes to de ladies!

I loves to sympathize wid de ladies!

As long as eveh I knows sugah f'om san'

I's bound to be a ladies' man.

So the black-hatted giant with the silver staff strode into the wide shed, the puffy-cheeked band reading their music and feeling for foothold as they followed, and just yonder behind them, in the middle of the white way, untouched by all those fathers, unhailed by any brother of his own, came Hilary Kincaid with all the battery at his neat heels, its files tightly serried but its platoons in open order, each flas.h.i.+ng its sabres to a "present" on nearing the General and back to a "carry" when he was pa.s.sed, and then lengthening into column of files to enter the blessed shade of the station.

In beside them surged a privileged throng of near kin, every one calling over every one's head, "Good-by!" "Good-by!" "Here's your mother, Johnnie!" and, "Here's your wife, Achille!" Midmost went the Callenders, the Valcours, and Victorine, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, topsy-turvy, swept away, smothering, twisting, laughing, stumbling, staggering, yet saved alive by that man of the moment Mandeville, until half-way down the shed and the long box-car train they brought up on a pile of ordnance stores and clung like drift in a flood. And at every twist and stagger Anna said in her heart a speech she had been saying over and over ever since the start from Callender House; a poor commonplace speech that must be spoken though she perished for shame of it; that must be darted out just at the right last instant if such an instant Heaven would only send: "I take back what I said last night and I'm glad you spoke as you did!"

Here now the moment seemed at hand. For here was the officers' box-car and here with sword in sheath Kincaid also had stopped, in conference with the conductor, while his lieutenants marched the column on, now halted it along the train's full length, now faced it against the open cars and now gave final command to break ranks. In comic confusion the fellows clambered aboard stormed by their friends' fond laughter at the awkwardness of loaded knapsacks, and their retorting mirth drowned in a new flood of good-bys and adieus, fresh waving of hats and handkerchiefs, and made-over smiles from eyes that had wept themselves dry. The tear-dimmed Victorine called gay injunctions to her father, the undimmed Flora to her brother, and Anna laughed and laughed and waved hi all directions save one. There Mandeville had joined Kincaid and the conductor and amid the wide downpour and swirl of words and cries was debating with them whether it were safer to leave the shed slowly or swiftly; and there every now and then Anna's glance flitted near enough for Hilary to have caught it as easily as did Bartleson, Tracy, every lieutenant and sergeant of the command, busy as they were warning the throng back from the cars; yet by him it was never caught.

The debate had ended. He gave the conductor a dismissing nod that sent him, with a signalling hand thrown high, smartly away toward the locomotive. The universal clatter and flutter redoubled. The bell was sounding and Mandeville was hotly shaking hands with Flora, Miranda, all. The train stirred, groaned, crept, faltered, crept on--on--one's brain tingled to the cheers, and women were crying again.

Kincaid's eyes ran far and near in final summing up. The reluctant train gave a dogged joggle and jerk, hung back, dragged on, moved a trifle quicker; and still the only proof that he knew she was here--here within three steps of him--was the careful failure of those eyes ever to light on her. Oh, heart, heart, heart! would it be so to the very end and vanishment of all?

"I take back--I take--" was there going to be no chance to begin it? Was he grief blind? or was he scorn blind? No matter! what she had sown she would reap if she had to do it under the very thundercloud of his frown. All or any, the blame of estrangement should be his, not hers! Oh, Connie, Connie! Mandeville had clutched Constance and was kissing her on lips and head and cheeks. He wheeled, caught a hand from the nearest car, and sprang in. Kincaid stood alone. The conductor made him an eager sign. The wheels of the train clicked briskly. He glanced up and down it, then sprang to Miranda, seized her hand, cried "Good-by!" s.n.a.t.c.hed Madame's, Flora's, Victorine's, Connie's,--"Good-by--Good-by!"--and came to Anna.

And did she instantly begin, "I take--?" Not at all! She gave her hand, both hands, but her lips stood helplessly apart. Flora, Madame, Victorine, Constance, Miranda, Charlie from a car's top, the three lieutenants, the battery's whole hundred, saw Hilary's gaze pour into hers, hers into his. Only the eyes of the tumultuous crowd still followed the train and its living freight. A woman darted to a car's open door and gleaned one last wild kiss. Two, ten, twenty others, while the conductor ran waving, ordering, thrusting them away, repeated the splendid theft, and who last of all and with a double booty but Constance! Anna beheld the action, though with eyes still captive. With captive eyes, and with lips now shut and now apart again as she vainly strove for speech, she saw still plainer his speech fail also. His hands tightened on hers, hers in his.

"Good-by!" they cried together and were dumb again; but in their mutual gaze--more vehement than their voices joined--louder than all the din about them--confession so answered wors.h.i.+p that he s.n.a.t.c.hed her to his breast; yet when he dared bend to lay a kiss upon her brow he failed once more, for she leaped and caught it on her lips.

Dishevelled, liberated, and burning with blushes, she watched the end of the train shrink away. On its last iron ladder the conductor swung aside to make room for Kincaid's stalwart spring. So! It gained one handhold, one foothold. But the foot slipped, the soldier's cap tumbled to the ground, and every onlooker drew a gasp. No, the conductor held him, and erect and secure, with bare locks ruffling in the wind of the train, he looked back, waved, and so pa.s.sed from sight.

Archly, in fond Spanish, "How do you feel now?" asked Madame of her scintillant granddaughter as with their friends and the dissolving throng they moved to the carriage; and in the same tongue Flora, with a caressing smile, rejoined, "I feel like swinging you round by the hair."

Anna, inwardly frantic, chattered and laughed. "I don't know what possessed me!" she cried.

But Constance was all earnestness: "Nan, you did it for the Cause--the flag--the battery--anything but him personally. He knows it. Everybody saw that. Its very publicity--"

"Yes?" soothingly interposed Madame, "'t was a so verrie pewblic that--"

"Why, Flora," continued the well-meaning sister, "Steve says when he came back into Charleston from Fort Sumter the ladies--"

"Of course!" said Flora, sparkling afresh. "Even Steve understands that, grandma." Her foot was on a step of the carriage. A child plucked her flowing sleeve:

"Misses! Mom-a say'"--he pressed into her grasp something made of broadcloth, very red and golden--"here yo' husband's cap."

x.x.xI

VIRGINIA GIRLS AND LOUISIANA BOYS

Thanks are due to Mr. Richard Thornd.y.k.e Smith for the loan of his copy of a slender and now extremely rare work which at this moment lies before me. "A History of Kincaid's Battery," it is called, "From Its Origin to the Present Day," although it runs only to February, '62, and was printed (so well printed, on such flimsy, coa.r.s.e paper) just before the dreadful days of s.h.i.+loh and the fall of New Orleans.

Let us never paint war too fair; but this small volume tells of little beyond the gold-laced year of 'Sixty-one, nor of much beyond Virginia, even over whose later war-years the color effects of reminiscence show blue and green and sun-lit despite all the scarlet of carnage, the black and crimson of burning, and the grim hues of sickness, squalor, and semi-starvation; show green and blue in the sunlight of victory, contrasted with those of the states west and south of her.

It tells--this book compiled largely from correspondence of persons well known to you and me--of the first "eight-days' crawl" that conveyed the chaffing, chafing command up through Mississippi, across East Tennessee into southeast Virginia and so on through Lynchburg to lovely Richmond; tells how never a house was pa.s.sed in town or country but handkerchiefs, neckerchiefs, s.n.a.t.c.hed-off sunbonnets, and Confederate flags wafted them on. It tells of the uncounted railway stations where swarmed the girls in white muslin ap.r.o.ns and red-white-and-red bows, who waved them, in as they came, and unconsciously squinted and made faces at them in the intense sunlight. It tells how the maidens gave them dainties and sweet glances, and boutonnieres of tuberoses and violets, and bloodthirsty adjurations, and blarney for blarney; gave them seven wild well-believed rumors for as many impromptu canards, and in their soft plantation drawl asked which was the one paramount "ladies' man," and were a.s.sured by every lad of the hundred that it was himself. It tells how, having heard in advance that the more authentic one was black-haired, handsome, and overtowering, they singled out the drum-major, were set right only by the roaring laughter, and huddled backward like caged quails from Kincaid's brazen smile, yet waved again as the train finally jogged on with the band playing from the roof of the rear car,--

"I'd offer thee this hand of mine If I could love thee less!"

To Anna that part seemed not so killingly funny or so very interesting, but she was not one of the book's editors.

Two or three pages told of a week in camp just outside the Virginian capital, where by day, by night, on its rocky bed sang James river; of the business quarter, noisy with army wagons--"rattling o'er the stony street," says the page; of colonels, generals, and statesmen by name--Hampton, Wigfall, the fiery Toombs, the knightly Lee, the wise Lamar; of such and such headquarters, of sentinelled warehouses, glowing ironworks, galloping aides-de-camp and couriers and arriving and departing columns, some as trig (almost) as Kincaid's Battery, with their black servants following in grotesque herds along the sidewalks; and some rudely accoutred, s.h.a.ggy, staring, dust-begrimed, in baggy b.u.t.ternut jeans, bearing flint-lock muskets and trudging round-shouldered after fifes and drums that squealed and boomed out the strains of their forgotten ancestors: "The Campbells are coming," "Johnnie was a piper's son," or--

"My heart is ever turning back To the girl I left behind me."

"You should have seen the girls," laughs the book.

But there were girls not of the mountains or sand-hills, whom also you should have seen, at battery manoeuvres or in the tulip-tree and maple shade of proud Franklin street, or in its rose-embowered homes by night; girls whom few could dance with, or even sit long beside in the honeysuckle vines of their porticos, without risk of acute heart trouble, testifies the callow volume. They treated every lad in the battery like a lieutenant, and the "ladies' man" like a king. You should have seen him waltz them or in quadrille or cotillon swing, balance, and change them, their eyes brightening and feet quickening whenever the tune became--

"Ole mahs' love' wine, ole mis' love' silk, De piggies, dey loves b.u.t.tehmilk."

Great week! tarheel camp-sentries and sand-hill street-patrols mistaking the boys for officers, saluting as they pa.s.sed and always getting an officer's salute in return! Hilary seen every day with men high and mighty, who were as quick as the girls to make merry with him, yet always in their merriment seeming, he and they alike, exceptionally upright, downright, heartright, and busy. It kept the boys straight and strong.

Close after came a month or so on the Yorktown peninsula with that master of strategic ruse, Magruder, but solely in the dreariest hards.h.i.+ps of war, minus all the grander sorts that yield glory; rains, bad food, ill-chosen camps, freshets, terrible roads, horses sick and raw-boned, chills, jaundice, emaciation, barely an occasional bang at the enemy on reconnoissances and picketings, and marches and countermarches through blistering noons and skyless nights, with men, teams, and guns trying to see which could stagger the worst, along with columns of infantry mutinously weary of forever fortifying and never fighting. Which things the book bravely makes light of, Hilary maintaining that the battery boys had a spirit to bear them better than most commands did, and the boys reporting--not to boast the special kindness everywhere of ladies for ladies' men--that Hilary himself, oftenest by sunny, but sometimes by cyclonic, treatment of commissaries, quartermasters, surgeons, and citizens, made their burdens trivial.

So we, too, lightly pa.s.s them. After all, the things most important here are matters not military of which the book does not tell. Of such Victorine, a.s.sistant editor to Miranda, learned richly from Anna--who merely lent letters--without Anna knowing it. Yet Flora drew little from Victorine, who was as Latin as Flora, truly loved Anna, and through Charlie was a better reader of Flora's Latin than he or Flora or any one suspected.

For a moment more, however, let us stay with the chronicle. At last, when all was suffered, the infuriated boys missed Ben Butler and Big Bethel! One day soon after that engagement, returning through Richmond in new uniforms--of a sort--with scoured faces, undusty locks, full ranks, fresh horses, new harness and s.h.i.+ning pieces, and with every gun-carriage, limber, and caisson freshly painted, they told their wrath to Franklin street girls while drinking their dippers of water. Also--"Good-by!--

"'I'd offer thee this hand of mine--'"

They were bound northward to join their own Creole Beauregard at a railway junction called--.

x.x.xII

MANa.s.sAS

Femininely enough, our little borrowed book, Miranda's and Victorine's compilation of letters from the front, gives no more than a few lines to the first great battle of the war.

Fred Greenleaf was one of its wounded prisoners. Hilary cared for him and sought his exchange; but owing to some invisible wire-pulling by Flora Valcour, done while with equal privacy she showed the captive much graciousness, he was still in the Parish Prison, New Orleans, in February, '62, when the book was about to be made, though recovered of wounds and prison ills and twice or thrice out on his parole, after dusk and in civilian's dress, at Callender House.

The Callenders had heard the combat's proud story often, of course, not only from battery lads bringing home dead comrades, or coming to get well of their own hurts, or never to get well of them, but also from gold-sleeved, gray-breasted new suitors of Anna (over-staying their furloughs), whom she kept from tenderer themes by sprightly queries that never tired and constantly brought forth what seemed totally unsought mentions of the battery. And she had gathered the tale from Greenleaf as well. Constance, to scandalized intimates, marvelled at her sister's tolerance of his outrageous version; but Miranda remembered how easy it is to bear with patience (on any matter but one) a rejected lover who has remained faithful, and Flora, to grandma, smiled contentedly.

Anna's own private version (sum of all), though never written even in her diary, was ill.u.s.trated, mind-pictured. Into her reveries had gradually come a tableau of the great field. Inaccurate it may have been, incomplete, even grotesquely unfair; but to her it was at least clear. Here--through the middle of her blue-skied, pensive contemplation, so to speak--flowed Bull Run. High above it, circling in eagle majesty under still, white clouds, the hungry buzzard, vainly as yet, scanned the green acres of meadow and wood merry with the lark, the thrush, the cardinal. Here she discerned the untried gray brigades--atom-small on nature's face, but with Ewell, Early, Longstreet, and other such to lead them--holding the frequent fords, from Union Mills up to Lewis's. Here near Mitch.e.l.l's, on a lonesome roadside, stood Kincaid's Battery, fated there to stay for hours yet, in hateful idleness and a fierce July sun, watching white smoke-lines of crackling infantry multiply in the landscape or bursting sh.e.l.ls make white smoke-rings in the bright air, and to listen helplessly to the boom, hurtle and boom of other artilleries and the far away cheering and counter-cheering of friend and foe. Yonder in the far east glimmered Centerville, its. .h.i.therward roads, already in the sabbath sunrise, full of brave bluecoats choking with Virginia dust and throwing away their hot blankets as they came. Here she made out Stone Bridge, guarded by a brigade called Jackson's; here, crossing it east and west, the Warrenton turnpike, and yonder north of them that rise of dust above the trees which meant a flanking Federal column and crept westward as Evans watched it, toward Sudley Springs, ford, mill, and church, where already much blue infantry had stolen round by night from Centerville. Here, leading south from these, she descried the sunken Sudley road, that with a dip and a rise crossed the turnpike and Young's Branch. There eastward of it the branch turned north-east and then southeast between those sloping fields beyond which Evans and Wheat were presently fighting Burnside; through which Bee, among bursting sh.e.l.ls, pressed to their aid against such as Keyes and Sherman, and back over which, after a long, hot struggle, she could see--could hear--the aiders and the aided swept in one torn, depleted tumult, shattered, confounded, and made the more impotent by their own clamor. Here was the many-ravined, tree-dotted, southward rise by which, in concave line, the Northern brigades and batteries, pressing across the bends of the branch, advanced to the famed Henry house plateau--that key of victory where by midday fell all the horrid weight of the battle; where the guns of Ricketts and Griffen for the North and of Walton and Imboden for the South crashed and mowed, and across and across which the opposing infantries volleyed and bled, screamed, groaned, swayed, and drove each other, staggered, panted, rallied, cheered, and fell or fought on among the fallen. Here cried Bee to the dazed crowd, "Look at Jackson's brigade standing like a stone wall." Here Beauregard and Johnson formed their new front of half a dozen states on Alabama's colours, and here a bit later the Creole general's horse was shot under him. Northward here, down the slope and over the branch, rolled the conflict, and there on the opposite rise, among his routed blues, was Greenleaf disabled and taken.

All these, I say, were in Anna's changing picture. Here from the left, out of the sunken road, came Howard, Heintzelman, and their like, and here in the oak wood that lay across it the blue and gray lines spent long terms of agony mangling each other. Here early in that part of the struggle--sent for at last by Beauregard himself, they say--came Kincaid's Battery, whirling, shouting, whip-cracking, sweating, with Hilary well ahead of them and Mandeville at his side, to the ground behind the Henry house when it had been lost and retaken and all but lost again. Here Hilary, spurring on away from his bounding guns to choose them a vantage ground, broke into a horrid melee alone and was for a moment made prisoner, but in the next had handed his captors over to fresh graycoats charging; and here, sweeping into action with all the grace and precision of the drill-ground at Camp Callender, came his battery, his and hers! Here rode Bartleson, here Villeneuve, Maxime with the colors, Tracy, Sam Gibbs; and here from the chests sprang Violett, Rares.h.i.+de, Charlie and their scores of fellows, unlimbered, sighted, blazed, sponged, reloaded, pealed again, sent havoc into the enemy and got havoc from them. Here one and another groaned, and another and another dumbly fell. Here McStea, and St. Ange, Converse, Fusilier, Avendano, Ned Ferry and others limbered up for closer work, galloped, raced, plunged, reared, and stumbled, gained the new ground and made it a worse slaughter-pen than the first, yet held on and blazed, pealed, and smoked on, begrimed and gory. Here was Tracy borne away to field hospital leaving Avendano and McStea groveling in anguish under the wheels, and brave Converse and young Willie Calder, hot-headed Fusilier and dear madcap Jules St. Ange lying near them out of pain forever. Yet here their fellows blazed on and on, black, shattered, decimated, short of horses, one caisson blown up, and finally dragged away to bivouac, proud holders of all their six Callender guns, their silken flag shot-torn but unsoiled and furled only when sh.e.l.ls could no longer reach the flying foe.

x.x.xIII

LETTERS

Hardly any part of this picture had come to Anna from Hilary himself.

Yes, they were in correspondence--after a fas.h.i.+on. That signified nothing, she would have had you understand; so were Charlie and Victorine, so were--oh!--every girl wrote to somebody at the front; one could not do less and be a patriot. Some girl patriots had a dozen on their list. Some lads had a dozen on theirs.

Ah, me! those swan-white, sky-blue, rose-pink maidens who in every town and on every plantation from Memphis to Charleston, from Richmond to New Orleans, despatched their billets by the forlornly precarious post only when they could not send them by the "urbanity" of such or such a one! Could you have contrasted with them the homeless, shelterless, pencil-borrowing, elbow-scratching, musty, fusty tatterdemalions who stretched out on the turfless ground beside their mess fires to extort or answer those cautious or incautious missives, or who for the fortieth time drew them from hiding to reread into their guarded or unguarded lines meanings never dreamed by their writers, you could not have laughed without a feeling of tears, or felt the tears without smiling. Many a chap's epistle was scrawled, many a one even rhymed, in a rifle-pit with the enemy's sh.e.l.ls bursting over. Many a one was feebly dictated to some blessed, unskilled volunteer nurse in a barn or smoke-house or in some cannon-shattered church. From the like of that who with a woman's heart could withhold reply? Yes, Anna and Hilary were in correspondence.

So were Flora and Irby. So were Hilary and Flora. Was not Flora Anna's particular friend and Hilary's "pilot"? She had accepted the office on condition that, in his own heart's interest, their dear Anna should not know of it.