Chapter 15

He was, he recognized by the greater blackness ahead, near the outskirts of the city--for Richmond was burning. The towering black mass of smoke was growing more perceptible in the slowly lightening dawn. Elim Meikeljohn could now hear the low sullen uprush of flames, the faint crackling of timbers, and a hot aromatic odor met him in faint waves.

His scabbard beat awkwardly about his heels, and he impatiently unhooked it and threw it into the gloom of the roadside. The service revolver was still in its holster; but he had forgotten its presence and use. In the multicolored confusion of his mind but one conscious impression remained; and, in its reiteration, he said aloud, over and over, in dull tones, “Two, Linden Row.”

The words held no concrete meaning, they constructed no vision, embodied no tangible desire; they were merely the mechanical expression of an obscure and dominating impulse. He was hardly more sensate in his progress than a nail drawn irresistibly by a magnet.

The gray mist dissolved, and his long haggard face grew visible; it had not aged in the past four years of struggle--almost from boyhood it had been marked with somber longitudinal lines--but it had grown keener, more intense, with the expression of a man whose body had starved through a great spiritual conflict. His uniform, creased and stained, and now silvery with dew, flapped about a gaunt ironlike frame; and from under the leather peak of his kepi, even in his fever, his eyes burned steady and compelling.

Scattered houses, seemingly as unsubstantial as shadows, gathered about him; they grew more frequent, joined shoulder to shoulder, and he was in a city street. On the left he caught a glimpse of the river, solid and smooth and unshining; a knot of men passed shouting hoarsely, and a wave of heat swept over him like a choking cloth. Like the morning, his mind partially cleared, people and scenes grew coherent. The former were a disheveled and rioting rabble; the conflagration spread in lurid waves.

The great stores of the tobacco warehouses had been set on fire, and the spanning flames threatened the entire city. The rich odor of the burning tobacco leaves rolled over the streets in drifting showers of ruby sparks. The groups on the streets resolved into individuals. Elim saw a hulking woman, with her waist torn from grimy shoulders, cursing the retreating Confederate troops with uplifted quivering fists; he saw soldiers in gray joined to shifty town characters furtively bearing away swollen sacks; carriages with plunging frenzied horses, a man with white-faced and despairingly calm women. He stopped hurrying in the opposite direction and demanded:

“Two, Linden Row?”

The other waved a vague arm toward the right and broke away.

The street mounted sharply and Elim passed an open space teeming with hurrying forms, shrill with cries lost in the drumming roar of the flames. Every third man was drunk. He passed fights, bestial grimaces, heard the fretful crack of revolvers. The great storehouses were now below him, and he could see the shuddering inky masses of smoke blotting out quarter after quarter. He was on a more important thoroughfare now, and inquired again:

“Two, Linden Row?”

This man ejaculated:

“The Yankees are here!” The fact seemed to stupefy him, and he stood with hanging hands and mouth.

Elim Meikeljohn repeated his query and was answered by a negro who had joined them.

“On ahead, capt'n,” he volunteered; “fourth turn past the capitol and first crossing.”

The other regained his speech and began to curse the negro and Elim, but the latter moved swiftly on.

Above him, through the shifting tenebrous banks, he saw a classic white building on a patch of incredible greenery, infinitely remote; and then from the center of the city came a deafening explosion, a great sullen sheet of flame, followed by flashes like lightning in the settling blackness.

“The powder magazines,” Elim heard repeated from person to person. An irregular file of Confederate soldiers galloped past him, and the echo of their hoofs had hardly died before a troop of mounted Union cavalry, with slanting carbines, rode at their heels. They belonged, Elim recognized, to Kautz' command.

He had now reached the fourth turn beyond the withdrawn vision of the capitol, and he advanced through a black snowing of soot. Flames, fanlike and pallid, now flickered about his feet, streamed in the gutters and lapped the curbs. He saw heaps of broken bottles against the bricks, and the smell of fine spilled wines and liquors hung in his nostrils. His reason again wavered--the tremendous spectacle of burning assumed an apocalyptic appearance, as if the city had burst spontaneously into flame from the passionate and evil spirits engendered and liberated by war.

He stopped at the first crossing and saw before him a row of tall brick houses, built solidly and set behind small yards and a low iron fencing. They had shallow porticoes with iron grilling, and at this end a towering magnolia tree swept its new glossy greenery against the third-story windows.

“Linden Row,” he muttered. “Well--Number Two?”

He swung back a creaking gate and went up a flight of bricked steps to the door. He had guessed right; above a brass knocker filmed with the floating muck of the air he saw the numeral, Two, painted beneath the fanlight. The windows on the left were blank, curtained. The house rose silent and without a mark of life above the obscene clamor of the city. He knocked sharply and waited; then he knocked again. Nothing broke the stillness of the façade, the interior. He tried the door, but it was solidly barred. Then a second fact, a memory, joined the bare location in his brain. It was a name--Rose--Rosemary Roselle. He beat with an emaciated fist on the paneling and called, “Roselle! Roselle!”

There was a faint answering stir within; he heard the rattle of a chain; the door swung back upon an apparently empty and cavernous cool hall.

VI

A colored woman, in a crisp white turban, with a strained face more gray than brown, suddenly advanced holding before her in both hands a heavy revolver of an outworn pattern. Elim Meikeljohn could see by her drawn features that she was about to pull the trigger, and he said fretfully:

“Don't! The thing will explode. One of us will get hurt.” She closed her eyes, Elim threw up his arm, and an amazingly loud report crashed through the entry. He stood swaying weakly, with hanging palms, while the woman dropped the revolver with a gasp. Elim Meikeljohn began to cry with short dry sobs.... It was incredible that any one should discharge a big revolver directly at his head. He sank limply against a chest at the wall.

“Oh, Indy!” a shaken voice exclaimed. “Do you think he's dying?” The colored woman went reluctantly forward and peered at Elim. She touched him on a shoulder.

“'Deed, Miss Rosemary,” she replied, relieved and angry, “that shot didn't touch a hair. He's just crying like a big old nothing.” She grasped him more firmly, gave him a shake. “Dressed like a soldier,” she proceeded scornfully, “and scaring us out of our wits. What did you want to come here for anyhow calling out names?”

Elim's head rolled forward and back. The hall seemed full of flaming arrows, and he collapsed slowly on the polished floor. He was moved; he was half-conscious of his heels dragging upstairs, of frequent pauses, voices expostulating and directing thinly. Finally he sank into a sublimated peace in, apparently, a floating white cloud.

He awoke refreshed, mentally clear, but absurdly weak--he was lying in the middle of a four-posted bed, a bed with posts so massive and tall that they resembled smooth towering trees. Beyond them he could see a marble mantel; a grate filled with softly smoldering coals, and a gleaming brass hod; a highboy with a dark lustrous surface; oval gold frames; and muslin curtains in an open window, stirring in an air that moved the fluted valance at the top of the bed. It was late afternoon, the light was fading, the interior wavering in a clear shadow filled with the faint fat odor of the soft coal.

The immaculate bed linen bore an elusive cool scent, into which he relapsed with profound delight. The personality of the room, somber and still, flowed about him with a magical release from the inferno of the past years, the last hours. He heard a movement at a door, and the colored woman in the white turban moved to the side of the bed.

“I told her,” she said in an aggrieved voice, “there wasn't nothing at all wrong with you. I reckon now you're all ready to fight again or eat. Why did you stir things all up in Richmond and kill good folks?”

“To set you free!” Elim Meikeljohn replied.

She gazed at him thoughtfully.

“Capt'n,” she asked finally, “are you free?”

“Why, certainly----” he began, and then stopped abruptly, lost in the memory of the dour past. He recalled his father, with a passion for learning, imprisoned in the narrow poverty of his circumstances and surroundings; he remembered Hester, with her wishful gaze in the confines of her invalid chair; his own laborious lonely days. Freedom, a high and difficult term, he saw concerned regions of the spirit not liberated--solved--by a simple declaration on the body. The war had been but the initial, most facile step. The woman had silenced his sounding assertion, humiliated him, by a word. He gazed at her with a new, less confident interest. The mental effort brought a momentary recurrence of fever; he flushed and muttered: “Freedom ... spirit.”

“You're not as wholesome as you appeared,” the woman judged. “You can't have nothing beside a glass of milk.” She crossed the room and, stirring the fire, put on fresh coal that ignited with an oily crackle. Again at the door she paused. “Don't you try to move about,” she directed; “you stay right in this room. Mr. Roselle, he's downstairs, and Mr. McCall, and--” her voice took on a faint insistent note of warning. He paid little heed to her; he was lost in a wave of weariness.

The following morning, stronger, he rose and tentatively trying the door found it locked. The colored woman appeared soon after with a tray which, when he had performed a meager toilet, he attacked with a pleasant zest.

“The city's just burning right up,” she informed him, standing in the middle of the floor; “the boats on the river caught fire and their camions banged into Canal Street.” She had a pale even color, a straight delicate nose and sensitive lips.

“Are the Union troops in charge?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. They got some of the fire out, I heard tell. But that's not the worst now--a body can't set her foot in the street, it's so full of drunken roaring trash, black and white. It's good Mr. Roselle and Mr. McCall and Mr. John are here,” she declared again; “they could just finish off anybody that offered to turn a bad hand.”

This, Elim felt, was incongruous with his reception yesterday.

Still he made no inquiry. The breakfast finished, he relapsed once more on his pillows and heard the key stealthily turn in the door from the outside.

He told himself, without conviction, that he must rise and join his command. The war, he knew, was over; the courage that had sustained him during the struggle died. The simple question of the colored woman had largely slain it. His own personality, the vision of his forthcoming life and necessity, rose to the surface of his consciousness. Elim realized what had drawn, him to his present situation--it had, of course, been the memory of Rosemary Roselle. The days when he--an assistant to a professor of philosophy and letters--had read and marked her essays seemed to lie in another existence, infinitely remote. How would he excuse his presence, the calling of her name before the house? This was an inopportune--a fatal--moment for a man in the blue of the North to make his bow to a Richmond girl, in the midst of her wasted and burning place of home. He decided reluctantly that it would be best to say nothing of his connection with her academic labors, but to depart as soon as possible and without explanation of his first summons.... Rosemary Roselle--the name had clung persistently to his memory. It was probable that he would see her--once. That alone was extraordinary. He marveled at the grim humor of circumstance that had granted him such a wildly improbable wish, and at the same time made it humanly impossible for him to benefit from it.

VII

The leisurely progress of his thoughts was interrupted by hasty feet without; the bolt was shot back and his door flung open. It was the colored woman--the Indy of the essay--quivering with anger and fear.

“Capt'n,” she exclaimed, gasping with her rapid accent, “you come right down to the dining room, and bring that big pistol of yours. There's two, two----” Words failed her. “Anyhow you shoot them! It's some of that liberty you brought along, I reckon. You come down to Miss Rosemary!”

She stood tense and ashen, and Elim rose on one elbow.

“Some of our liberty?” he queried. “Did Miss Roselle send for me?”

“No, sir, she didn't. Miss Rosemary she wouldn't send for you, not if you were the last man alive. I'm telling you to come down to the dining room.... We've tended you and--”

“Well,” he demanded impatiently, “what do you want; whom shall I shoot?”

“You'll see, quick enough. And I can't stand here talking either; I've got to go back. You get yourself right along down!”

With painful slowness Elim made his preparations to descend; his fingers could hardly buckle the stiff strap of his revolver sling, but finally he made his way downstairs through a deep narrow hall. He turned from a blank wall to a darkened reception room, with polished mahogany, somber books and engravings on the walls, and a rosy blur of fire in the hearth. A more formal chamber lay at his right, empty, but through an opposite door he caught the faint clatter of a spoon.

Rosemary Roselle was seated, rigid and white, at the end of a table that bore a scattered array of dishes. There were shadows beneath her eyes, and her hands, on the table, were clenched. On her left a man in an unmarked blue uniform sat, sagging heavily forward in his chair, breathing stertorously, with a dark flush over a pouched and flaccid countenance. Opposite him, sitting formally upright, was a negro in a carefully brushed gray suit, with a crimson satin necktie surcharged by vivid green lightning. His bony face, the deep pits of his temples, were the dry spongy black of charcoal, and behind steel-rimmed glasses his eyes rolled like yellow agates. He glanced about, furtive and startled, when Elim Meikeljohn entered, but he was immediately reassured by Elim's disordered uniform. He made a solemn obeisance.

“Colonel,” he said, “will you make one of a little informal repast? We are, you see, at the lady's table.”

Overcome by a sharp weakness, Elim slipped into the chair at his side and faced Rosemary Roselle. The latter gave no sign of his presence. She sat frozen into a species of statuesque rage. “Like you,” the negro continued pompously, “we invited ourselves. All things are free and easy for all. The glorious principle of equality instituted lately has swept away--swept away the inviderous distinctions of class and color. The millenium has come!” He made a grandiloquent gesture with a sooty hand.

“'Ray!” the sodden individual opposite unexpectedly cried.

“We came in,” the other continued, “to uphold our rights as the exponents of--of----”

“You sneaked in the kitchen,” the woman in the doorway interrupted; “and I found you rummaging in the press.”

“Silence!” the orator commanded. “Are you unaware of the dignity now resting on your kinks--hair, hair.” He rose, facing Elim Meikeljohn. “Colonel, gentleman, in a conglomeration where we are all glorious cohevals of--of--”

“Shut up!” said the apostrophized colonel, sudden and fretful. “Get out!”

The orator paused, disconcerted, in the midflow of his figures; and unaccustomed arrogance struggled with habitual servility. “Gentleman,” he repeated, “in a corposity of souls high above all narrow malignations--”

Elim Meikeljohn took his revolver from its holster and laid it before him on the table. The weapon produced an electrical effect on the figure nodding in a drunken stupor. He rose abruptly and uncertain.

“I'm going,” he asserted; “come on, Spout. You can be free and equal better somewheres else.”

The negro hesitated; his hand, Elim saw, moved slightly toward a knife lying by his plate. Elim's fingers closed about the handle of his revolver; he gazed with a steady cold glitter, a thin mouth, at the black masklike countenance above the hectic tie and neat gray suit.

The latter backed slowly, instinctively, toward the rear door. His companion had already faded from view. The negro proclaimed:

“I go momentiously. There are others of us banded to obtain equality irrespectable of color; we shall be back and things will go different.... They have gone different in other prideful domestications.”

Elim Meikeljohn raised the muzzle lying on the cloth, and the negro disappeared. Rosemary Roselle did not move; her level gaze saw, apparently, nothing of her surroundings; her hands were still clenched on the board. She was young, certainly not twenty, but her oval countenance was capable of a mature severity not to be ignored. He saw that she had wide brown eyes the color of a fall willow leaf, a high-bridged nose and a mouth--at present--a marvel of contempt. Her slight figure was in a black dress; she was without rings or ornamental gold.

“That talking trash gave me a cold misery,” the colored woman admitted. She glanced at the girl and moved a bowl of salad nearer Elim Meikeljohn. “Miss Rosemary,” she begged, “take something, my heart.”

Rosemary Roselle answered with a slow shudder; she slipped forward, with her face buried in her arms on the table. Elim regarded her with profound mingled emotions. In the fantastic past, when he had created her from the studied essays, he had thought of her--censoriously--as gay. Perhaps she danced! He wondered momentarily where the men were Indy had spoken of as present; then he realized that they had been but a precautionary figment of Indy's imagination; the girl, except for the woman with the tender brown hand caressing her shoulder, was alone in the house.

He sat with chin on breast gazing with serious speculation at the crumpled figure opposite him. Indy, corroborating his surmise, said to the girl:

“I can't make out at all why your papa don't come back. He said yesterday when he left he wouldn't be hardly an hour.”

“Something dreadful has happened,” Rosemary Roselle insisted, raising a hopeless face. “Indy, do you suppose he's dead like McCall and--and--”

“Mr. Roselle he ain't dead,” the woman responded stoutly; “he's just had to keep low trash from stealing all his tobacco.”

“He could easily be found,” Elim put in; “I could have an orderly detailed, word brought you in no time.” The girl paid not the slightest heed to his proposal. From the street came a hoarse drunken shouting, a small inflamed rabble streamed by. It wouldn't be safe to leave Rosemary Roselle alone here with Indy. He recalled the threat of the black pomposity he had driven from the house--it was possible that there were others, banded, and that they would return. It was clear to him that he must stay until its head reappeared, order had been reestablished--or, if he went out, take the girl with him.

“You let the capt'n do what he says,” the woman urged. Rosemary Roselle's eyes turned toward Elim; it was, seemingly, the first time she had become aware of his presence. She said in a voice delicately colored by hate:

“Thank you, I couldn't think of taking the--the orderly from his conquests.”

“Then I'll find your father myself,” Elim replied. “You will come with me, of course; show me where to go. It would be a good thing to start at once. I--we--might be of some assistance to him with his tobacco.”

Indy declared with an expression of instant determination:

“We'll go right along with you.” She silenced Rosemary's instinctive protest. “I'll get your hat and shawl,” she told the girl.

And, before the latter could object, the colored woman hurried from the room.

Silence enveloped the two at the table. Elim replaced his revolver in its belt. He had never before studied a girl like Rosemary Roselle; fine white frills fell about her elbows from under the black short sleeves. Her skin was incredibly smooth and white. It was evident that her hands had never done manual labor; their pointed little beauty fascinated him. He thought of the toil-hardened hands of the women of his home. This girl represented all that he had been taught to abjure, all that--by inheritance--he had in the abstract condemned. She represented the vanities; she was vanity itself; and now he was recklessly, contumaciously, glad of it. Her sheer loveliness of being intoxicated him; suddenly it seemed as absolutely necessary to life as the virtues of moral rectitude and homely labor. Personally, he discovered, he preferred such beauty to the latter adamantine qualities. He had a fleet moment of amazed self-consciousness: Elim Meikeljohn--his father an elder in the house of God--astray in the paths of condemned worldly frivolities! Then he recalled a little bush of vivid red roses his mother carefully protected and cultivated; he saw their bright fragrant patch on the rocky gray expanse of the utilitarian acres; and suddenly a light of new understanding enveloped his mother's gaunt drearily-clad figure. He employed in this connection the surprising word “starved.” ... Rosemary Roselle was a flower.

Indy returned with a small hat of honey-colored straw and a soft white-silk mantilla. The former she drew upon the girl's head and wrapped the shawl about the slim shoulders.

“Now,” she pronounced decisively, “we're going to find your papa.” She led Rosemary Roselle toward the outer door. Elim found his cap in the hall and followed them down the bricked steps to the street. It was at present deserted, quiet; and they turned to the left, making their way toward the river and warehouses.

The fires had largely subsided; below them rose blackened bare walls of brick, sullen twisting flags of smoke; an air of sooty desolation had settled over the city. Houses were tightly shuttered; some with broken doors had a trail of hastily discarded loot on the porticoes; still others were smoldering shells.

A bugle call rose clear and triumphant from the capital; at one place they passed Union soldiers, extinguishing flames.

They descended the flagged street over which Elim had come, turned into another called--he saw--Cary, and finally halted before a long somber façade. Here, too, the fire had raged; the charred timbers of the fallen roof projected desolately into air.

A small group at a main entrance faced them as they approached; a coatless man with haggard features, his clothes saturated with water, advanced quickly.

“Miss Rosemary!” he ejaculated in palpable dismay. He drew Elim Meikeljohn aside. “Take her away,” he directed; “her father ... killed, trying to save his papers.”

“Where?” Elim demanded. “Their house is empty. She can't stay in Richmond alone.”

“I'd forgotten that!” the other admitted. “McCall and John both gone, mother dead, and now--by heaven!” he exclaimed, low and distressed, “she has just no one. I'm without a place. Her friends have left. There's a distant connection at Bramant's Wharf, but that's almost at the mouth of the James.”

Rosemary Roselle came up to them.

“Mr. Jim Haxall,” she asked, direct and white, “is father dead?”

He studied her for a moment and then answered:

“Yes, Miss Rosemary.”

She swayed. Indy, at her side, enveloped her in a sustaining arm.

“Indy,” the girl said, her face on the woman's breast, “he, too!”