Part 24 (1/2)
What dey been doin' ter you--dat's what I wants ter know? My po'
lamb!--Ma.r.s.e Edward, don' you laugh kaze mammy done fergit you ain' er baby still--”
Edward hugged her. ”One night in the trenches, not long ago, I swear I heard you singing, mammy! I couldn't sleep. And at last I said, 'I'll put my head in mammy's lap, and she'll sing me
The Buzzards and the b.u.t.terflies--
and I'll go to sleep.' I did it, and I went off like a baby--Well, Julius, and how are you?”
Within the parlour there were explanations, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns, questions, and answers. ”So short a furlough--when we have not seen you for almost a year! Never mind--of course, you must get back. We'll have a little party for you to-morrow night. Oh, how brown you are, and your uniform's so ragged! Never mind--we've got a bolt of Confederate cloth and Johnny Bates shall come out to-morrow.... All well. Knitting and watching, watching and knitting. The house has been full of refugees--Fairfaxes and Fauntleroys. They've gone on to Richmond, and we're alone just now.
We take turn about at the hospitals in Charlottesville--there are three hundred sick--and we look after the servants and the place and the poor families whose men are gone, and we read the papers over and over, every word--and we learn letters off by heart, and we make lint, and we twist and turn and manage, and we knit and knit and wait and wait--Here's Julius with the wine! And your room's ready--fire and hot water, and young Cato to take Jeames's place. Car'line is making sugar cakes, and we shall have coffee for supper.... Hurry down, Edward, Edward _darling_!”
Edward darling came down clean, faintly perfumed, shaven, thin, extremely handsome and debonair. Supper went off beautifully, with the last of the coffee poured from the urn that had not yet gone to the Gunboat Fair, with the Greenwood ladies dressed in the best of their last year's gowns, with flowers in Judith's hair and at Unity's throat, with a reckless use of candles, with Julius and Tom, the dining-room boy, duskily smiling in the background, with the spring rain beating against the panes, with the light-wood burning on the hearth, with Churchill and Cary and Dandridge portraits, now in shadow, now in gleam upon the walls--with all the cheer, the light, the gracious warmth of Home. None of the women spoke of how seldom they burned candles now, of how the coffee had been saved against an emergency, and of the luxury white bread was becoming. They ignored, too, the troubles of the plantation. They would not trouble their soldier with the growing difficulty of finding food for the servants and for the stock, of the plough horses gone, and no seed for the sowing, of the problem it was to clothe the men, women, and children, with osnaburgh at thirty-eight cents a yard, with the difficulties of healing the sick, medicine having been declared contraband of war and the home supply failing. They would not trouble him with the makes.h.i.+fts of women, their forebodings as to shoes, as to letter paper, their windings here and there through a maze of difficulties strange to them as a landscape of the moon. They would learn, and it was but little harder than being in the field. Not that they thought of it in that light; they thought the field as much harder as it was more glorious. Nothing was too good for their soldier; they would have starved a week to have given him the white bread, the loaf sugar, and the Mocha.
Supper over, he went down to the house quarter to speak to the men and women there; then, in the parlour, at the piano, he played with his masterly touch ”The Last Waltz,” and then he came to the fire, took his grandfather's chair, and described to the women the battle at sea.
”We were encamped on the Warwick River--infantry, and a cavalry company, and a battalion from New Orleans. Around us were green flats, black mud, winding creeks, waterfowl, earthworks, and what guns they could give us.
At the mouth of the river, across the channel, we had sunk twenty ca.n.a.l boats, to the end that Burnside should not get by. Besides the ca.n.a.l boats and the guns and the waterfowl there was a deal of fever--malarial--of exposure, of wet, of mouldy bread, of homesickness and general desolation. Some courage existed, too, and singing at times.
We had been down there a long time among the marshes--all winter, in fact. About two weeks ago--”
”Oh, Edward, were you very homesick?”
”Devilish. For the certain production of a very curious feeling, give me picket duty on a wet marsh underneath the stars! Poetic places--marshes--with a strong suggestion about them of The Last Man....
Where was I? Down to our camp one morning about two weeks ago came El Capitan Colorado--General Magruder, you know--gold lace, stars, and black plume! With him came Lieutenant Wood, C. S. N. We were paraded--”
”Edward, try as I may, I cannot get over the strangeness of your being in the ranks!”
Edward laughed. ”There's many a better man than I in them, Aunt Lucy!
They make the best of crows'-nests from which to spy on life, and that is what I always wanted to do--to spy on life!--The men were paraded, and Lieutenant Wood made us a speech. 'The old Merrimac, you know, men, that was burnt last year when the Yankees left Norfolk?--well, we've raised her, and cut her down to her berth deck, and made of her what we call an iron-clad. An iron-clad is a new man-of-war that's going to take the place of the old. The Merrimac is not a frigate any longer; she's the iron-clad Virginia, and we rather think she's going to make her name remembered. She's over there at the Gosport Navy Yard, and she's almost ready. She's covered over with iron plates, and she's got an iron beak, or ram, and she carries ten guns. On the whole, she's the ugliest beauty that you ever saw! She's almost ready to send to Davy Jones's locker a Yankee s.h.i.+p or two. Commodore Buchanan commands her, and you know who he is! She's got her full quota of officers, and, the speaker excepted, they're as fine a set as you'll find on the high seas! But man-of-war's men are scarcer, my friends, than hen's teeth! It's what comes of having no maritime population. Every man Jack that isn't on our few little s.h.i.+ps is in the army--and the Virginia wants a crew of three hundred of the bravest of the brave! Now, I am talking to Virginians and Louisianians. Many of you are from New Orleans, and that means that some of you may very well have been seamen--seamen at an emergency, anyhow!
Anyhow, when it comes to an emergency Virginians and Louisianians are there to meet it--on sea or on land! Just now there is an emergency--the Virginia's got to have a crew. General Magruder, for all he's got only a small force with which to hold a long line--General Magruder, like the patriot that he is, has said that I may ask this morning for volunteers.
Men! any seaman among you has the chance to gather laurels from the strangest deck of the strangest s.h.i.+p that ever you saw! No fear for the laurels! They're fresh and green even under our belching smokestack. The Merrimac is up like the phoenix; and the last state of her is greater than the first, and her name is going down in history! Louisianians and Virginians, who volunteers?'
”About two hundred volunteered--”
”Edward, what did you know about seamans.h.i.+p?”
”Precious little. Chiefly, Unity, what you have read to me from novels.
But the laurels sounded enticing, and I was curious about the s.h.i.+p.
Well, Wood chose about eighty--all who had been seamen or gunners and a baker's dozen of ignoramuses beside. I came in with that portion of the elect. And off we went, in boats, across the James to the southern sh.o.r.e and to the Gosport Navy Yard. That was a week before the battle.”
”What does it look like, Edward--the Merrimac?”
”It looks, Judith, like Hamlet's cloud. Sometimes there is an appearance of a barn with everything but the roof submerged--or of Noah's Ark, three fourths under water! Sometimes, when the flag is flying, she has the air of a piece of earthworks, mysteriously floated off into the river. Ordinarily, though, she is rather like a turtle, with a chimney sticking up from her sh.e.l.l. The sh.e.l.l is made of pitch pine and oak, and it is covered with two-inch thick plates of Tredegar iron. The beak is of cast iron, standing four feet out from the bow; that, with the rest of the old berth deck, is just awash. Both ends of the sh.e.l.l are rounded for pivot guns. Over the gun deck is an iron grating on which you can walk at need. There is the pilot-house covered with iron, and there is the smokestack. Below are the engines and boilers, condemned after the Merrimac's last cruise, and, since then, lying in the ooze at the bottom of the river. They are very wheezy, trembling, poor old men of the sea!
It was hard work to get the coal for them to eat; it was brought at last from away out in Montgomery County, from the Price coal-fields. The guns are two 7-inch rifles, two 6-inch rifles, and six 9-inch smoothbores; ten in all.--Yes, call her a turtle, plated with iron; she looks as much like that as like anything else.
”When we eighty men from the Warwick first saw her, she was swarming with workmen. They continued to cover her over, and to make impossible any drill or exercise upon her. Hammer, hammer upon belated plates from the Tredegar! Tinker, tinker with the poor old engines! Make s.h.i.+ft here and make s.h.i.+ft there; work through the day and work through the night, for there was a rumour abroad that the Ericsson, that we knew was building, was coming down the coast! There was no chance to drill, to become acquainted with the turtle and her temperament. Her species had never gone to war before, and when you looked at her there was room for doubt as to how she would behave! Officers and men were strange to one another--and the gunners could not try the guns for the swarming workmen. There wasn't so much of the Montgomery coal that it could be wasted on experiments in firing up--and, indeed, it seemed wise not to experiment at all with the ancient engines! So we stood about the navy yard, and looked down the Elizabeth and across the flats to Hampton Roads, where we could see the c.u.mberland, the Congress, and the Minnesota, Federal s.h.i.+ps lying off Newport News--and the workmen rivetted the last plates--and smoke began to come out of the smokestack--and suddenly Commodore Buchanan, with his lieutenants behind him, appeared between us and the Merrimac--or the Virginia. Most of us still call her the Merrimac. It was the morning of the eighth. The sun shone brightly and the water was very blue--blue and still. There were sea-gulls, I remember, flying overhead, screaming as they flew--and the marshes were growing emerald--”
”Yes, yes! What did Commodore Buchanan want?”
”Don't be impatient, Molly! You women don't in the least look like Griseldas! Aunt Lucy has the air of her pioneer great-grandmother who has heard an Indian calling! And as for Judith--Judith!”
”Yes, Edward.”