The Wave

Front matter

Ve te MRtOF>

JONATHAN CAPE AND HARRISON SMITH, INCORPORATED, 139 EAST

FORTY-SIXTH STREET, NEW YORK, N. Y., AND 77 WELLINGTON

Foreword

In the insertion in this text of the characters of mythical military leaders side by side with those who existed in fact, and in other deliberate inaccuracies of time and place, this book takes a number of liberties with “history.” These digressions from the accepted fact were not made, however, until after the acquisition of information from acknowledged sources. Phyllis Crawford Scott, G. S. Fechter, and Lola Catesby Jones, not to be held responsible for this arbitrary interpretation of records, were most generous in assisting the search for the necessary, even if half discarded, background for a wilful narrative. The help they gave is very much appreciated.

There is also a debt to be happily acknowledged to “Mammy” Alice Johnson, deceased, whose personal recollections extended backward to the period embraced herein. Not all the songs she recalled were included, but the reminders of the past which she _ offered were given with her confident expectation that she would see her name on this page. I hope her faith in a prophesied solution of large issues has been fulfilled, and that her death, before the completion of this book, is no barrier to the satisfaction I have thought she would feel in the fulfilment of her anticipation. —

“The water of the ocean is never still. It is blown into waves by the wind, it rises and falls with the tides. . . . The waves travel in some definite direction, but a cork thrown into the water does not travel with the waves. It moves up and down, to and fro, but unless it is blown by the wind or carried by a current it returns’to the same position with each wave and does not permanently leave its place. .

In deep water the motion of the particle at the surface [of the wave] is nearly circular. At the crest the movement of the particle is forward, at the middle of the hinder slope it is downward, in the trough backward, and at the middle of the front slope upward . . . waves have very little effect excepting near the surface ... when a wave approaches a shelving shore it keeps its form as.a wave until it is near the land and then the top falls forward and the wave breaks. This is due in part to the fact that the wave travels more slowly as the water becomes shallower. . . . When the water is deep close up to the shore, the waves, if they break at all . . . appear to throw themselves against the cliff . . . and the water dashes . . . some times to a very great height.”—Physical Geography, by Philip Lake, M.A.

I

T was so quiet in Charleston Harbour, that Dickie Ross, working his row-boat out to sea, felt as if half drowned in the tides that he could hear, while they moved invisibly. That was the night, trickling from the blades of his oars; or, if the wind ran along his forehead and lifted his hair, it was the night, too, making his mind vague. Fort Sumter was there, however, compelling him to excitement, preventing his enjoyment of the dreamier elation of freedom. He rose, faced forward, and pushed hard, drawing his oars up until they dug into his chest over his heart, which was so large with the very amplitude of darkness as to impede his breathing.

Milt Smith said that President Davis’s ultimatum to Major Anderson had been sent. If the government did not surrender the fort at once, the trouble, long awaited, would begin at last, Dickie, guilty in his intrusion upon the quiet, anticipated joyfully, brutally, as though it were a stealthy revenge which he would be allowed to take upon his mother and his sister, that first shot promised to his ears if the Yankees, foolishly, did not give up.

He was far enough from land. His skiff nosed a clot of shadow that was an island, and he sat down suddenly, the oars clattering. The lights on the mainland gave him the impression of veiled sig- | nalling. He resented it that his privileged aloofness allowed him no | definite sense of what impended. The rocking of his boat lulled, | but he rejected the indolence which made daily life bearable. Mr. Wright, his boss, was organizing a corps of volunteers, and Dickie had been one of the first to enlist in it. The gesture had invited Sister Mollie to usual ridicule, and she had reiterated her opinion that Dickie ‘never had an idea of his very own,’ but that he behaved, constantly, as Mr. Wright suggested.

And why not? Mr. Wright had been in the army previously. He had been to Mexico. He had gone West and knew how the Indians

I were fought. Dickie felt that it was like a girl to condemn a gentleman because, first, of course, he was a bachelor, and, secondly, because his head was baldish and his nose so big.

He was a cotton merchant, prosperous, but not careful of his appearance, and smoked a corncob pipe. Dickie considered Mr. Wright too modest. The dingy planter’s hat, the wrinkled cotton trousers and the soiled cravat produced an effect unrelated to his character. If Sister Mollie could ever hear Wright swearing she would change her notion of him. It exasperated Dickie that Mr. Wright made ‘no more show.’ Mr. Wright displayed an embarrassment before women with which Dickie did not sympathize. Women were devious, they were contemptible, they were jealous, and they resented masculine prerogatives and liberty because they could not share them.

Only yesterday, Dickie had realized, suddenly, that it was necessary, inevitable, when a man began to think and act upon his own initiative, that he should hurt somebody. On this account he would leave his savings to his mother. He would pay her off. He was nineteen. For three years he had been learning bookkeeping, in order, with his earnings, though he was not much more than an apprentice, to assist Mrs. Ross, who was a teacher in the Charleston- Ladies’ Seminary. Maybe, if he went to war and left her, she would accept the ‘offer’ tendered her by old Mr. Childers. It was a fact that for ten years or more she had made her son and daughter her excuse for continuing to wear her widow’s weeds. “‘You are just like your papa, Dickie,” Mrs. Ross often declared, “and I thank the dear God who has given you to me to take his place.” There was something here which the son could not express—why it was that he could not be grateful for her long devotion to him. It must be that he was a ‘no-account.’ But he was not oppressed by his wicked nature. When there was a scrap brewing, as at present, he was hard, he was cold, he was almost happy. He believed that he did not care ‘a tinker’s damn’ how his mother suffered.

She was a lady, and to see how she had ‘come down in the world’ should have aroused his pride of family, given him ambition. Well, he was proud enough, if she only knew it, and he reckoned that - his impulses, however reckless, were those of an aristocrat. The poor whites, Dickie reflected scornfully, to the heavy lisps of the darkness, will be on the side of the damned Abolitionists.

Why was it so hard to get his mother out of his mind? Her physical presence seemed upon him even here in the harbour. He had an hallucinatory certainty of her large, brown, humorous eyes, filled with a constant doubt of him. She was too thin. For some reason, he was annoyed by this. When, the other day, he had seen her, for the first time, with her black dress relieved by a low-neck and a fichu, he had been revolted. He could endure vulgarities when they were perpetrated by other women. Toward her alone he could not be tolerant. No doubt, he had idealized her. She was old. When he had shown a dislike for Mr. Childers, it had been for her sake. It had distressed him, in the winter, that she had gone to school wearing mended mittens. To look so shabby made her ridiculous. She was so tall, so stately. She taught a little French and the use of globes to her silly schoolgirls. If he should really find that she was not respected, he would cut his throat.

The night kept running by, over his oars, over his forehead. But that was a woman’s life, in this silly town, with its silly gossip. He was going to leave it all, shake it off. Getting drunk hadn’t done it. The need to think of money, and of propriety, often seemed identical. If Mr. Wright had been a drinker, Dickie might have attempted to carouse more frequently. And then, the next day, there was Mother with the look that you could not escape. She did not reproach. She was silent, she was offended, and very kind. Dickie recalled, without connection, a story he had heard about a man who owned a nigger wench whom he would beat unmercifully when he grew angry with anybody.

The boat floated, carrying Dickie, sightless, with it. He was grounding on the island, and pushed himself resentfully away again. When would it happen? When would it happen? A man had a right to a little excitement. Dickie felt ugly.

In Charleston, things were always the same. He worked a little for Mr. Wright. He went home to dinner. He came back down town again. Or it was late, and he idled in the office window. The streets by the water always stank of fish. He could catch the same smell now in the night. It seemed to him that he envied the doggone niggers who were always happy, who were made to work. It was when he really expected a change to come, that he felt so feverish. When he had earned the commendation of his general, his mother would not silently reprove his selfishness. There were qualities, like courage, which nobody understood. And if he told her that he loved her too much to remain at home, she would not believe him. The hard sensation contracted his heart again. There were times when you could wish that the world would go clean to hell. How say that to his mother, and, worst of all, to his grandmother; to the humped old lady with her clean dry hands, and her clean dry apron, who was always so industrious about the house, who gazed at him more questioningly than even his mother did. Mrs. Kinnibrew, his grandmother, was now eighty-six, and she was dependent upon his mother for everything. She wanted Dickie Ross to love her, so she always listened admiringly to all he said. When he was obliged, in duty, to kiss the powdery cheek she offered him, he often hated her. It was, he said, in defence of his mother. Mrs. Kinnibrew was weak, she was eager, she was mercilessly grateful to him. He had no word for her state.

It was mostly because of her that he nursed lusts. He had a life that she did not recognize. That was his own. He kept it out of the tumble-down cottage by the harbour. He was a man, and they didn’t believe it yet. He supposed that, were he thirty, they would still consider that he was growing up.

As Dickie waited, the night seemed heavier. The presage of dawn was withheld almost unbearably. He would do anything, he felt, that would hurry the day, He was helpless. It was awful to be as poor as he in a place like Charleston, and with his capacities. If the sun would come, if the war would commence, he would be able to explain, by his actions, what his dissatisfaction meant. He despised loose women, but, if he had to seek them at his age, his mother drove him to it. It would even make you feel good if you could let loose in a quiet place like this, and shoot straight into the air. If there were only fish to hear you and they would scuttle, it would be relieving. Day itself would be the herald of some precious alarm, When the sky cracked with day, in the early morning, there was always a sense of something to do. The frantic obligation was to be fulfilled. But before it was accomplished, the night, when people went to wasted resting, closed in again. Dickie sometimes grudged the experience of his father, who had died of an — accidental wound while on a hunting expedition. Father, smug and liberated, now regarded his wife, his mother, and his son and daughter, from a plush-framed daguerreotype on the parlour wall

He had escaped Charleston. He was dead—like a betrayer. I don’t believe I would have got on with Father anyhow, Dickie said to himself.

Shot! The explanation came tardily, long after the noise. There was a glow in the sky. Dickie trembled blankly, and the compulsion to meditate in self-justification passed away. Smell was later, and confirmed conviction. His elation was an illness. A plushswathed hammer pommeled at the dusky air. His skiff, rocked violently by his uneasy motions, seemed to awaken with him to the aliveness of ruddied ripples that had not existed for him while the world was black. He huddled. He was conscious of his chilled, body, and his beaten posture. Blum, blu-uum, low in the night behind a curtain; and a rain of ponderous invisible objects sank into the water, as if a million miles beneath. There was a pause, long, utterly hopeless. He began to wonder where the sound had come from, for he could not see the Sumter that his side were firing at.

A disease of incredulity persisted. Then his confused, seeking pupils widened on another faint radiance. Blum. Blum-bluuum, full with anticipated echo. His mother and sister would be listening. He longed almost viciously for knowledge that they had been awakened. Blum. Blum-blum-blum. He was on his feet again, toppling, staring, looking for Sullivan’s Island. Then the accents grew thicker, quicker, as though castanets clicked. A weight splintered on a giant anvil. A dusty sneezing brought a glow that made the harbour deeper and more impenetrable under its flitting skim of fire. Echoes thrashed the passive distant scenes of ocean. It would go on, for years and years. It would never cease. His throat ached with tension, with the realization of some ghastly joy. This was life. This was seeing life. A strange cry swelled in him, chokingly. He ‘hoped to God’ that the damned Yankees would never ‘get enough.’ What did it matter who was hurt, who died? What did it matter how long the war would take? They would be wiped out, the dad-blamed Yankees, the intruders, the Abolitionists. Maybe they’re too cowardly to stand it, he wondered. He was sick, wanting an opponent worthy of his mettle. They would have to fight, by God, they would! A man like Wright—why, he would make them fight. And there was purification in this sudden frenzy. Dickie felt ‘good,’ he was glad. His mother must needs acquiesce.

It was like the Deluge. It was a calamity demanding ‘men.’ . He wanted to see the niggers run through the Charleston streets. He wanted to have his mother and his sister behold. There were reasons for existence plain to a man which were not included in their vocabulary. He would get down to brass tacks. Life wasn’t all smooth and slick and genteel. It began somewhere. It began with fighting, it began with keeping niggers in their rightful place, it began with giving hell to Yankees, it began with loyalty to Mr. Davis, to the new Confederacy. Let ’em hurt me, Dickie insisted fretfully. He preferred to be hurt. He wanted to feel, at last. This was ‘real,’

Metal cards slid in a box. The day broke. Sullivan’s Island surprised him, abruptly, by actually being there, beneath a smoking, flowery canopy. Now he was sorry that the folks in Charleston knew what had happened. The daylight took his secret from him. There was a woodpecker tapping on the island near him in the underbrush. Behind the spit of sand, the flat-spread claws of the groined palmettos spread their glistered fans. Beyond this stale hostility of green, scrub oaks, vaguely bulky with lilac clouds of Spanish moss, rose occasionally, adding something suffocating to the growing calm of morning. A gull, flying against the rising sun, was as large as an eagle; until, swooping heavily upon the beach and drawing in its wings, it shrank to the dimensions of this usual, this nothing, and, strutting primly, parallel to the skiff, watched Dickie oddly, from its large bright eyes placed too far back in its head.

To the right of him, in the path of the fierce grey light, the garnished ocean exuded mists. The glare’s shattered rays revealed the oozy tracks of dragging currents. And there was Sumter, low, with hazy walls, under a slight flag colourless as an apparition. He had expected to see it crushed by the blows that had dinned his ears. Its chill double-image in the smooth, far-off reflecting ripples defied him. The spell which enwrapped him always had not been broken. Things did change. They must change. Weakened by his prolonged emotion, he could yet aspire toward Sullivan’s Island which was ~ steaming under a dry white cloud above a sea like milk.

Dickie wished to row, to move—but where? Quiet, and the daylight bred new agitations. He was safe here, and, even if he were not safe, he was not afraid. He tried to rest himself in the boat 6 on the elevations of the tide. The small waves, thrown back from the beach, lopped on the hull. A pink crab sidled to the water. Was this a world where even crabs were secure, and would the long days go on and on as always, ignoring him?

There was a burst as of sunny thunder. He breathed. Jesus, let ’em hear it. Let the folks in Charleston hear it. Let Mother waste her time at a young ladies’ seminary. The damp-throttled noises were swelling suddenly. The heat, as if concentrated by a burning glass in April, beat on his neck. Energy compelled him. He stood up, teetering, and began to shout—at last, at last, he began to shout whole-heartedly, and to drown out the stealthy rustles of the harbour and the morning, so big and so indifferent to him. “Hurrah for President Davis! Hurrah for the Confederacy! Hurrah for the war, by gum, and playing hell with everybody 1?

The sun douched him in a warmth foetid with salt, with fish smells from the swamps and islands, with a kind of rotten quiet. When he had left off ‘hollering,’ he felt like a fool. But the mortars and cannon kept on. There was no mistaking it now, with the daylight here to prove it. The war had begun. There was something that a fellow could do. It was a great age that he was living in. This was a great life. His mother could talk all she liked about brutality. They were in for trouble.

Tr

Percy was annoyed because he had misdated a letter and Lawyer Burroughts, of Burroughs, Pierce, and Franklin, had reprimanded him. The meticulous rewriting of the letter had kept Percy at work in the office after Raeburn had gone home to get his dinner, and Coulter had retired to the back verandah to eat his lunch. There! was a calendar on the stained wall flaunting the nineteenth of April, above an advertisement of Arthur’s Home Gazette. Percy, as if to rebuke the calendar, had gone on scratching with a splintered goosequill long after he had lost a human audience for his assiduity. He hoped that Eva would regret his delay, but he could not be blamed. It was a sticky day, springlike, but too warm and moist. He was conscious of his heavy face, dewy with a kind of greasy sweat, and of the young flies that, in their weak delicate persistence, alighted upon his high forehead repeatedly. As not even Coulter seemed left to observe the degree of martyrdom which duty demanded, Percy at last got up.

He had never called himself handsome, for his bad eyesight and his spectacles embittered his natural shyness. He was reliable and self-dependent, however, he decided, and what he lacked in ‘prettiness’ was compensated for by his ‘character.’ He had married Eva chiefly because she had appreciated this.

Percy, wary before a mirror, and careful to be unseen, placed his little flat-crowned hat on thoughtfully. Trousers were very round this season and his coat so short that he jerked furtively at the tail. He would quarrel about the price of a garment, but he was relieved to permit Eva to select the fashion for him. Clothes, as he regarded them, were an investment. It ‘paid’ to buy only the best materials, whereas Eva was likely to purchase a dress that would show wear and look shabby before she could have it ‘turned.’ He wished to educate Eva to his precious view of life. He was interested in her management of their cottage home. He was often exasperated by her ignorance of proper cooking, and he would ask the men whom he met daily in the office their advice on sauces. He was penurious, he admitted—if you wished to call it that—but because he was an ‘Epicurean,’ and enjoyed things well done. Methodical in his employment, he sometimes invited his wife’s criticism; but he was satisfied with himself as he was. To be nagged, made him frantic. He was cautious, yet he now and then displayed a childish peevishness to his superiors, and, by imprudent retort to comment, had risked his position. This was one of the mornings when he felt ‘fract’ous,’ as the niggers said, and only restrained his temper until he could return to Eva where he could find something appropriate to quarrel about.

Nothing was as offensive to him as disorder. And since this talk of war was troubling all his neighbours, disorder threatened. Eva had persuaded him to wear his Sunday clothes to work. It was weakness to listen to her. He would as soon appear in mud-splashed brogues and the corduroys in which, on summer holidays, he took fishing trips. He defied Lawyer Burroughs to object. Was a man paid for his effiiciency, or were clerks chosen for their silky whiskers? Look at Coulter—wretched, cringing little toady. What did he get by it?

Percy, the sulky rage of his expression a just protest against 8 accustomed poverty, strode heavily through the bare hallway on which the offices abutted, and reached the street while under a treasured impression that his dinner would be cold and not fit to eat when he arrived at home. It was a strain to offer, for Eva’s adoration, a perpetual spectacle of masculine aggression. There was so much that really did not interest him which she longed to have him care about. Through the winter, he had forgiven her. When he came in tired at evening and saw that his dressing-gown was warmed and his slippers toasting, he felt a mild, depressing love for her. If she would only learn to let him live his life according to his fancy, he would grant her his protection for ever. But today, he was certain, she would be ‘at him’ again, quoting Great Aunt Phoebe’s hope that he would ally himself with the Secessionists. Percy would not be pushed. His conscience as a Southerner was as insistent as a toothache. But he and Eva owed Aunt Phoebe five hundred dollars. Did Aunt Phoebe imagine that, for five hundred dollars, she could buy his freedom of decision, his right to act for himself? Did she keep that debt in the background as a club over him? He left people alone. Let them leave him alone. He had a mind, sometimes, to distress Eva and defend Unionism just to spite Aunt Phoebe. Ske had the slaves and, the money. She was deucedly careful that he and Eva should not benefit by either until she was dead. These men who were idling, filling up the streets today, they need not stare at him as if they expected him to hiss the government. On the other hand, if trouble did break out, he was not going to waste his sympathy on Lincoln’s soldiers, when the governor and the marshal had joined in a warning, and had been certain beforehand that to send the troops through Baltimore this morning would be an invitation to rioting.

Percy walked quickly along the thronged sidewalk, his gait one, of purposed awkwardness. His little brown eyes cast incessantly, through his spectacles, contemptuous glances. He despised alike those of staid appearance and the hoodlums who were gathering. The soldiers must be marching by this route to the depot. Well, let them get out.

On a corner, Percy’s way was blocked. He resigned himself unwillingly to the slow pace of a congesting multitude. He wished to cling to his indifference, but that was difficult with his certain premonition that Eva was waiting and would feel abused. It was sultry. The day greyed, as the sun, in the blue, still sky, was buried temporarily in fleecy depths of cloud. Percy fumbled fretfully the soft whiskers beneath his plump chin, and sucked irritably at his bare upper lip. But he could disdain passion. He would be controlled. Eva, though she placated him insultingly, had once gone so far as to tell him that, when his indolent temper was aroused, he behaved badly. He had felt her subtly couched rebuke as a design upon his liberty.

Halted just before Percy, was a little old negro man, in a greenish, shapeless kind of preacher’s coat. The glare was beating glisteningly upon his bare head thinly dotted with speckled wool. He was squatting, peering, with a sort of demureness, between the boldly planted legs of some men in front of him. Percy, disturbed, guarding the confidence which he could show to an inferior; said, “What’s the matter, Uncle? What are you leering at between those feet? What’s happening down the street today?”

The small, shrivelled negro, with a deafness which Percy thought pretence, hesitated to reply, and the interrogation, to bring an answer, had to be repeated. Then the small, old monkey spoke as if to himself.

“Um—um, Mistah. Um—yes-suh, Cap’n. Hit’s de Union sojers.” His head was cocked sidewise. His eyes glinted moistly, and his. information, given with a doubtful chuckle, was like a timid challenge. The crafty satisfaction of his wise, harsh face somehow disgusted Percy. “Dey’s seb’n companies come frum de nawthun to de suthun depots. Folks say dey won’ let no othah hawse cars pass. an’ dese has to walk.”

Percy, nervously keen to suspect insolent intention, ignored the negro suddenly. Why should #e care how and when the soldiers came and went? The politicians were a selfish lot at best. It was. just as likely that what they wanted most was to irritate a stupid crowd like this. He had told Eva that he and she were going to ‘keep cool’ and let the ‘rabble’ fight it out. The South was at fault, and the North as well. For years the South had kept a majority in the Senate, and now the North was jealous, was taking its revenge.. A man like Lincoln, an upstart playing for popular favour, was making hay while the sun shone. If the government compromised properly with Southern interests he would forfeit his opportunity for playing a spectacular part. Wars, Percy meditated grudgingly, Te)

were an offence to reason. History did not record one just war, one war carried on rationally and not for the gratification of a prejudice.

He was tall, yet he was obliged to elevate his bulky body on his tiptoes in order to see beyond the people who were jostling him. Damp, sun-dazzled profiles, blobbed now and then by the shadows of the jerking, new-leafed trees, filled all the street. This imposition of an absorption which he did not share was maddening. He cursed a thin man under a stove-pipe hat, a fat man wearing a wide-brimmed straw, and, above all, the women, whose bonnets, just exceeding his shoulders, scratched at his cheeks. All at once his perturbation focused on a shocking view of the light-crackling tips of bayonets, and on arresting repetitiousness of uniforms like the crest of a tide. This explained the monotonous, constant shuffling of so many feet.

“The devil take the whole crew!” he ejaculated unpremeditatedly. And it was as if he were being forced to a risky defence of his self-respect. He had anticipated soldiers, certainly, but not so actually; and he saw so many, It was like the ‘damned presumptuousness’ of military authority to thrust such a martial sight upon peaceful Baltimore. If we don’t consider the war our affair, why won’t they let us decent people keep out of it! It was as though the United States government had failed utterly to appreciate the steady qualities of those citizens on whom depended the state’s security. Percy felt that his own rising choler was the result of ‘their’ tricks. It was a fact that, after you heard one lot talk, and then the other, your single desire was to keep your mind clear and remain aloof from both. Lincoln says he won’t meddle with the slaves, and Aunt Phoebe and President Davis seem sincerely convinced that he is doing so already. Percy wondered why he, had drudged in an office for the last ten years to witness chaos, acclaimed as the reward of his endeavours. He could feel his ears burning, his face hot. His intensity of indignation was like a proof that he was right, and the others, ‘curse their gizzards,’ who wanted war, were without scruple, without conscience, without any sense of justice. “All this excitement about you worthless niggers,” he exclaimed, finding the occasion for reproof still beside him in the person of the elderly darky whom, the instant previous, he had desired to evade. ‘‘I never saw a nigger yet who was valuable enough to fight about.” Of course it was only the niggers, and this