Chapter IV

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.