The Long Roll

by Mary Johnston

"That depends, I imagine, on Jackson. Perhaps to-morrow, perhaps the next day. It will be bloody fighting when it comes—Heigho!"

"The bricks of the pavement know that," said Judith. "Sometimes, Fauquier, you can see horror on the faces of these houses—just as plain! and at night I hear the river reading the bulletin!"

"Poor child!—Yes, we make all nature a partner. Judith, I was glad to hear of Richard Cleave's happiness—as glad as I was surprised. Why, I hardly know, and yet I had it firmly in mind that it was Maury Stafford—"

Judith spoke in a pained voice. "I cannot imagine why so many people should have thought that. Yes, and Richard himself. It never was; and I know I am no coquette!"

"No. You are not a coquette. Ideas like that arrive, one never knows how—like thistledown in the air—and suddenly they are planted and hard to uproot. Stafford himself breathed it somehow. That offends you, naturally; but I should say there was never a man more horribly in love! It was perhaps a fixed idea with him that he would win you, and others misread it. Well, I am sorry for him! But I like Richard best, and he will make you happier."

He talked on, in his dry, attractive voice, moving beside her slender, wiry, resolute, trained muscle and nerve, from head to foot. "I was at the Officer's Hospital this morning to see Carewe. He was wounded at Port Republic, and his son and an old servant got him here somehow. He was talking about Richard. He knew his father. He says he'll be a brigadier the first vacancy, and that, if the war lasts, he won't stop there. He'll go very high. You know Carewe?—how he talks? 'Yes, by God, sir, Dick Cleave's son's got the stuff in him! Always was a kind of dumb, heroic race. Lot of iron ore in that soil, some gold, too. Only needed the prospector, Big Public Interest, to come along. Shouldn't wonder if he carved his name pretty high on the cliff.'—Now, Judith, I have stopped beneath this lamp just to see you look the transfigured lover—happier at praise of him than at garlands and garlands for yourself!—Hm! Drawn to the life. Now we'll go on to the President's House."

The President's House on Shockoe Hill was all alight, men and women entering between white pillars, from the long windows music floating. Beyond the magnolias and the garden the ground dropped suddenly. Far and wide, a vast horizon, there showed the eastern sky, and far and wide, below the summer stars, there flared along it a reddish light—the camp-fires of two armies, the grey the nearer, the blue beyond. Faint, faint, you could hear the bugles. It was a dark night; no moon, only the flicker of fireflies in magnolias and roses and the gush of light from the tall, white-pillared house. The violins within were playing "Trovatore." Warwick Cary, an aide with him, came from the direction of the Capitol and joined his daughter and brother. The three entered together.

There was little formality in these gatherings at the White House of the Confederacy. The times were too menacing, the city too conversant with alarm bells, sudden shattering bugle notes, thunderclaps of cannon, men and women too close companions of great and stern presences, for the exhibition of much care for the minuter social embroidery. No necessary and fitting tracery was neglected, but life moved now in a very intense white light, so deep and intense that it drowned many things which in other days had had their place in the field of vision. There was an old butler at the President's door, and a coloured maid hovered near to help with scarf or flounce if needed. In the hall were found two volunteer aides, young, handsome, gay, known to all, striking at once the note of welcome. Close within the drawing-room door stood a member of the President's Staff, Colonel Ives, and beside him his wife, a young, graceful, and accomplished woman. These smilingly greeted the coming or said farewell to the parting guest.

The large drawing-room was fitted for conversation. Damask-covered sofas with carved rosewood backs, flanked and faced by claw-foot chairs, were found in corners and along the walls; an adjoining room, not so brightly lit, afforded further harbourage, while without was the pillared portico, with roses and fireflies and a view of the flare upon the horizon. From some hidden nook the violins played Italian opera. On the mantles and on one or two tables, midsummer flowers bloomed in Parian vases.

Scattered in groups, through the large room, were men in uniform and civilians in broadcloth and fine linen. So peculiarly constituted were the Confederate armies that it was usual to find here a goodly number of private soldiers mingling with old schoolmates, friends, kindred wearing the bars and stars of lieutenants, captains, majors, colonels, and brigadiers. But to-night all privates and all company officers were with their regiments; there were not many even of field and staff. It was known to be the eve of a fight, a very great fight; passes into town were not easy to obtain. Those in uniform who were here counted; they were high in rank. Mingling with them were men of the civil government,—cabinet officers, senators, congressmen, judges, heads of bureaus; and with these, men of other affairs: hardly a man but was formally serving the South. If he were not in the field he was of her legislatures; if not there, then doing his duty in some civil office; if not there, wrestling with the management of worn-out railways; or, cool and keen, concerned in blockade running, bringing in arms and ammunition, or in the Engineer Bureau, or the Bureau of Ordnance or the Medical Department, or in the service of the Post, or at the Treasury issuing beautiful Promises to Pay, or at the Tredegar moulding cannon, or in the newspaper offices wrestling with the problem of worn-out type and wondering where the next roll of paper was to come from, or in the telegraph service shaking his head over the latest raid, the latest cut wires; or he was experimenting with native medicinal plants, with balloons, with explosives, torpedoes, submarine batteries; or thinking of probable nitre caves, of the possible gathering of copper from old distilleries, of the scraping saltpetre from cellars, of how to get tin, of how to get chlorate of potassium, of how to get gutta-percha, of how to get paper, of how to get salt for the country at large; or he was running sawmills, building tanneries, felling oak and gum for artillery carriages, working old iron furnaces, working lead mines, busy with foundry and powder mill.... If he was old he was enlisted in the City Guard, a member of the Ambulance Committee, a giver of his worldly substance. All the South was at work, and at work with a courage to which were added a certain colour and élan not without value on her page of history. The men, not in uniform, here to-night were doing their part, and it was recognized that they were doing it. The women, no less; of whom there were a number at the President's House this evening. With soft, Southern voices, with flowers banded in their hair, with bare throat and arms, with wide, filmy, effective all-things-but-new dresses, they moved through the rooms, or sat on the rosewood sofas, or walking on the portico above the roses looked out to the flare in the east. Some had come from the hospitals,—from the Officer's, from Chimborazo, Robinson's, Gilland's, the St. Charles, the Soldier's Rest, the South Carolina, the Alabama,—some from the sewing-rooms, where they cut and sewed uniforms, shirts, and underclothing, scraped lint, rolled bandages; several from the Nitre and Mining Bureau, where they made gunpowder; several from the Arsenal, where they made cartridges and filled shells. These last would be refugee women, fleeing from the counties overrun by the enemy, all their worldly wealth swept away, bent on earning something for mother or father or child. One and all had come from work, and they were here now in the lights and flowers, not so much for their own pleasure as that there might be cheer, music, light, laughter, flowers, praise, and sweetness for the men who were going to battle. Men and women, all did not come or go at once; they passed in and out of the President's House, some tarrying throughout the evening, others but for a moment. The violins left "Il Trovatore," began upon "Les Huguenots."