Speaker 1: In the Virginia Room by Arlow Bates. Childless was the
word which she murmured in her heart as she entered
the building, which had once been the presidential mansion of
Jefferson Davis, and now as the Confederate Museum. Why the
thought of her strange daughter flashed upon her as she
came to do honor to the memory of her long
dead husband, Missus Desborough could not have told. But so
overwhelmingly was the sadness of her mood that she could
hardly wonder if this bitter memory took advantage of her
moment of weakness to obtrude itself. She set her lips
tightly and put it determinedly into the background. She would
not think of the daughter who was lost to her
to day, and here no thought but should go back,
in loving homage and passionate grief to the hero whose
name she bore. She went at once to the Virginia Room,
bowing quickly but kindly to the custodian of the museum,
And as she pushed open the door of the sad place,
she thought herself alone. The heavy April rain which was
drenching Richmond outside, kept visitors away, and the building was
almost deserted in her yearly visits to this spot, those
pilgrimages which she had made as to a shrine. She
had once before had the Virginia Room to herself, untroubled
by the presence of strangers, and now with a quick
sigh of relief, she realized how great had been the
comfort of that solitude to her sensitive nature. It was
hard to stand before the memorials of her dead, and
yet to be aware that strange eyes, eyes curious if sympathetic,
might be reading in her face. All the emotions of
her very soul to preserve the calm necessary before the public,
had always seemed to her almost like being untrue to
the memory she came to consecrate, And to day it
was with a swelling sigh of relief that she threw
back her heavy widows with the free, proud motion which
belonged to the women of her race and time, the
women bred in the South before the war. She was
an old woman, though not much over sixty, for pain
can age more swiftly than time. The high bred mien
would be hers as long as life remained, and wonderful
was her self. Control. Again and again she bad felt
unshed tears burn in her eyes like living fire. Yet
had been sure that no stranger had had reason to
look upon her as more than a casual visitor to
the museum. But to be able to let her grief
have way seemed almost a joy. She felt the quick
drop start at the bare thought life had left her
no greater blessing than this liberty to weep undiscovered over
the memorials of her dead. At the instant, a man
came from behind one of the cases, so near that
she might have touched him. Instinctively, she tried to take
her handkerchief from her chateline, and in her confusion detached
the bag. It fell at the feet of the gentleman,
who stooped at once to pick it up. As he
held it out, she forced a smile to her fine
old face. Thank you, she said, I I was very awkward,
Not at all, he responded, those bags are easily unhooked.
The tone struck her almost like a blow. To the
disappointment of finding that she was not alone in this
solemn place was added the bitter fact that the intruder
had come upon her was not of her people. An
impulse of bitterness from the old times of blood and
of fire swept over her like a wave. The room
had carried her back, as it always did, to the past,
and after almost two score years, she for the first
time broke through the stern resolve that had kept her
from hostile speech. You are ann she exclaimed. The words
were nothing, but the tone she knew was hot with
all the long pin up bitterness. She felt her cheek
flush as almost before the words were spoken she realized
what she had said. The stranger, however, showed no sign
of resentment. He smiled, then grew grave again. Yes, do
no Northerners visit to the museum. I suppose nobody came
to Richmond without coming here. She was painfully annoyed, and
felt her thin cheeks glow as hotly as if she
were still a girl. To be lacking in politeness was
sufficiently humiliating, but to seem rude to one from the North,
to fall in living up to her traditions was intolerable.
I beg your pardon, she forced herself to say. To
come through that door is to step into the past.
And I spoke as I might have when when the
Yankee in the House of President David. This would have
required explicit explanation. The stranger finished the sentence she knew
not how to complete. Even in her discomposure, she appreciated
both the courtesy which spared her the embarrassment of being
left in the confusion of an unfinished remark, and the
adroitness which gave to his reply just the right tone
of lightness. He was evidently a man of the world.
Her instinct not to be outdone in politeness, least of
all by one of her race, made her speak again.
I was rude, she said, stiffly. Today is an anniversary
on which I always come here, and I forgot myself.
Then I must have seemed doubly obtrusive. He returned gravely.
He was certainly a gentleman. He was well groomed, moreover
with the appearance of quiet wealth. One of his hands
was ungloved, and she noted appreciatively how finely shaped it was,
how white and well kept. The North had all the
wealth now, she reflected, in voluntarily, while so many of
the descendants of old Southern families were forced to earn
their very bread by occupations unworthy of them. They could
not keep their fine hands, hands that told of blood
and breeding. For generations, as could this stranger before her.
His attractiveness, his air of prosperity were offensive to her,
but because they emphasized the pitiful poverty of so many
of her kin, whose forefathers had never known what want
could be. The museum is open to the public, she replied,
with increasing coldness. She expected him to bow and leave her.
Not only did he linger, but she seemed to see
in his face a look of pity. Before she could
resent this pity, however, she met his eyes with her own,
and the look seemed to her to be one of sympathy.
Will you pardon my saying that I too came here
today because it is an anniversary? An anniversary, she echoed,
How could an anniversary bring a northern a here? It
isn't mind exactly, It is my son's. His mother is
a Virginian. So highly strung was her mood that she
noticed almost with approval, that he had said is and
not was. He had at least not deprived his wife
of her birthright as a daughter of the sacred soul.
She began to be aware of a growing excitement. She
could hardly have heard, unmoved any allusion to a marriage
which had taken from the South, a woman born to
his traditions and to its sorrows. She felt a fresh
impulse of anger against his prosperous son of the North,
who had carried away from a Virginia mother a daughter,
as she had been robbed of hers. The cruel pang
of crushed motherhood which ached within her at the remembrance
of her own child, the child she had herself cast
off because of her marriage, was so fierce that for
a moment she could not command her voice. She could
not shape the question which was in her heart, but
she felt that with her eyes she all but commanded
the stranger to tell her more. We live in the North,
he explained. But she has long promised the boy that
when he was eight, he should see the relics of
his Virginian grandfather, which are in the museum here. Unfortunately,
when the time came, she was not well enough to
come with him, and as she wished him to be
here on this especial day, I have brought him. The
Southern woman felt her heart beating tumultuously, and it was
almost as if another spoke when she said, in a
manner entirely conventional, I trust that her illness is not serious.
If it were, I should not be here myself, he answered.
She collected her strengths, which seemed to be leaving her,
and forced herself to look around the room. She could
not have told what she expected, or whether she most
hoped or feared what she might see. But your son,
she asked. The man's face changed subtly. My father, he replied,
was an officer in the Union Army. I wished to
see this place first, to be prepared for Desbra's questions.
It isn't easy to answer the questions of a clever
lad whose two grandfathers had been killed in the same battle,
fighting on opposite sides. The name struck her like a blow.
She leaned over for support against the corner of the
nearest case, and fixed her gaze on the pathetic coat
of General Lee behind the glass, which showed her as
a faint wrath or reflection of her own face. Desbra
had been her husband's name, and this the anniversary of
his death. She felt as if the dead had arisen
to confront her, and that some imperative call in the
blood insistently responded. Yet she could not believe that her
son in law was before her, regarding her with that straightforward,
appealingly honest gaze. She said to herself that the name
was merely a coincidence, that every day in the year
was the anniversary of the death of some Virginian hero,
and that this could not be her daughter's husband. Have
you decided what to tell your son? She heard, her voice,
strange and far off, asking amid the thrilling quiet of
the room. The stranger regarded her as if struck by
the note of challenge in her tone. His serious eyes
seemed to her to be endeavoring to probe her own
in search of the cause of her sharpness. I can
do no more, was his answer than to tell him
what I have always told him, the truth as far
as I can see it, and the truth which you
can tell him here, here before the sacred relics of
our dead, the sacred memorials of our lost cause. She
could not go on, but stopped suddenly, that he might
not hear her voice break. He has never been taught
anything but that the men of the South fart for
what they believed, and that no man can do a
nobler thing than to give his life for his faith.
She became suddenly and illogically sure that she was talking
to her son in law. Although the ground of her
conviction was no other than the one she had just
before rejected, The whole thing flashed upon her mind as
perfectly simple. Her daughter knew that on this day she
was always to be found here, and had meant to
meet her with the little son bearing his grandfather's name.
The question now was whether the husband knew something in
the air, something half propitiatory, something certainly beyond the ordinary
deference offered to a lady who is a stranger. Gave
her a vague distrust. She was not in touch by
the desire for reconciliation. But she had again and again
resisted that before, and least of all, could she tolerate
the idea of being tricked. The possibility that her son
in law might be feigning ignorance to work the more
surely upon her sympathy angered her. Do you know who
I am? She demanded abruptly. I beg your pardon, he answered,
evidently surprised. But I have never been in Richmond before.
If you are well known here, or are the wife
of some men famous in the South, I am too
completely a stranger to recognize. Yet you seem to wish
to explain yourself to me. Why, I don't know, He began, hesitatingly,
searching her face with his straightforward gray eyes. Then he
flushed slightly and broke out with new feeling. Yes, I
do know. You came just as I was going away,
because I could not endure the sadness of it, when
every one of these cases seemed to me to drip
with blood and tears. That sounds to you extravagant. But
the whole thing came over me so tremendously that I
couldn't bear it. I do not understand, she returned, tremulously.
You have such collections at the North, I suppose, but
here it came over me that to all the sorrow
of loss was added the bitterness of defeat. I felt
that no Southerner could come here without feeling that all
the agony this commemorates had been in vain, and the
pity of it took me by the throat, so that
when I spoke to you, you were a sort of
impersonal nation of the South, of the Southern women, and
I wanted to ask for pardon. She drew a deep
breath and raised her head proudly not for the war,
he said quickly, with a gesture which seemed to wave
aside her pride, and showed her how well he had understood.
Her triumph at the admission seemingly implied in his words,
I am a Northern man, and I believe in my
whole soul that the North was right. I believe in
the cause for which my father died. Only I seem
now that if he had lived in the South, the
same spirit would have carried him into the Confederate army.
But for what should you ask, pardon if the North
was in the right, For myself, for not understanding, for
being so dull all these years that I have lived
with the wife, faithful to her heart to the South,
and too loyal to me to speak, We in the
North have forgiven, and we think that the South should forget.
It has come over me to day how easy it
is for the conquerors to forgive, and how hard that
must be for the conquered. You do not understand even now,
she said, her voice low with feeling. Because we are conquered.
We can forgive, but we should be less than human
to forget. The room was very still for a little,
and then following out her thought. She said, as if
in wonder, and you, a Northerner, have felt all this.
He shook his head with a little smile. It is
perhaps too much to ask, returned he that you Southern
women should realize that even a Northerner is still human. Yes, yes,
but to feel our suffering, to see it has always
been facing me. I understand now in my wife's eyes
the immeasurable pathos of a people beaten in a struggle.
They felt to be right. But she had been so
happy otherwise and never spoke of it. In the heart
of every Southern woman, she said solemnly, though now without bitterness,
is always the anguish of our lost cause. We cover
the surface, we accept, and God knows we have been patient.
But each of us has deep down a sense of
the blood that was poured out in vain, of the
agony of the men we lost, of how they were humiliated, humiliated,
and of the great cause of liberty, loss lost. For long,
bitter years, she had not spoken even to our nearest
friends as she was talking to this stranger, this Northerner.
The consciousness of this brought her back to the remembrance
that he was the husband of her daughter. Has your
wife no relatives in the South who might have made
you understand how Southern women must feel, she asked. He
grew instantly colder. I have never seen her Southern relatives.
Pardon the curiosity of an old woman. She went on,
watching him keenly. May I ask why my wife's mother
did not choose to know the Yankee her daughter married?
And you, I did not choose to force an acquaintance
or to be known on sufferance, he answered crisply. I
was aware of no wrong, and I did not choose
to ask to be forgiven for being a Northerner. She
knew that in her heart she was repeatedly accepting this strong,
fine man, alien as he was to all the traditions
of her life, and she was not ill pleased at
his pride. But have you even ever considered what it
must have caused the mother to give up her daughter?
Why need she have given her up? Marriages between the
North and the South had been common enough without any
family breach. She was utterly sure that he knew neither
to whom he was talking, nor what had been the
real cause of her separation from her daughter. She experienced
a sort of wild inner exultation that at last had
come the moment when she might justify herself, when she
might tell the whole, dreadful story, which had been as
eating poison in her veins. She raised her head proudly
and looked at him with her whole soul in her eyes.
If you have patience to listen, she said, feeling her
cheeks warm, and will pardon my being personal. I should
like to tell you what has happened to me. My
husband was a colonel in the Confederate Army. We were
married when I was seventeen, and a brief furlough he
won by being wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness.
I saw him in the four years of the war
before he fell at five forks less than a dozen times,
and always for the briefest visits. Poor scraps are fearful, hapless,
torn out of long stretches of agony. My daughter, my
only child, was born after her father's death. Our fortune
had gone to the cause. My father and my husband
both refused to invest money abroad. They considered it disloyal,
and they put everything into Confederate securities, even after they
felt sure they should get nothing back. They were too
loyal to withhold anything when the country was in deadly peril.
She paused, but he did not speak, and with swelling
breast and parching throat, she went on, at fivefolks, my
husband was killed in a hand to hand fight with
a northern officer. He struck his enemy down after he
had received his own death wound. I pray God he
did not know the day was lost. He had gone
through so much. I hope that would spared him on
the other side of death. He must have found some
comfort to help bad God must have had some comfort
for our poor boys when he permitted the cause of
liberty to be lost. She pressed her clenched hand against
her bosom, and she did so her eyes met those
of her companion. She felt the sympathy of his look.
But something recalled her to sense that she was speaking
to one from the north. It is not the cause
of liberty to you, she said, I have forgotten again.
I have not spoken of all this for so long
I have not dead. But today today I must speak,
and you must forgive me if I use the old language.
He dropped his glance, as if he felt an intrusion
to see her bitter remussion and said softly, I think
I understand. You need not apologize. After the war, she
went on hurriedly and abruptly. I lived for my daughter.
I worked for her. She was like her father. She choked,
but regained the appearance of composure by a mighty effort.
When she was a woman, she was still a child
to me over twenty, but I was not twice her age.
She went north and there she fell in love. She
wrote me that she was to marry a northerner, and
when she added his name, it was the son of
the man who killed her father. It is not possible,
the other exclaimed, you imagined it. Such things happened in
Melodramas she put up her hand and arrested his words.
This happened not in a melodrama, but in a tragedy
in my life, she said, I need not go into details.
She married him, and I have never seen her since.
Did he know? No. It was my wedding gift to
my daughter that I kept her secret. That was all
I had strength to do. You'd think I was an
unnatural mother, of course, But she saw that his eyes
were moist as he raised them in answering. I should
have said so yesterday, without any hesitation to day to day,
she echoed eagerly. As he paused to day, he answered,
letting his glance sweep over the pathetic memorials so thick
about them. To day, at least I understand, and I
do not wonder. She looked at him with all her
heart in her eyes, trying to read his most hidden feeling.
Then she touched his arm lightly with the tips of
her sender black gloved fingers, Come, she said. She led
him across the room and pointed to a colonel sash
and pistols, which lay in one of the cases under
a faded card. Those were my husband's. Those, he cried, you,
Louise's mother. It is impossible. It may be impossible, But
as I said of the other thing, it is true.
The other thing, he repeated, What do you mean, the
thing you said that my father and he that cannot
be true. I should surely have known it is true,
she insisted. At the moment it happened, they were surrounded
by our soldiers and his own men probably did not
realize just what had happened, But I I know every
minute of that fight. One of my husband's staff had
been at West Point with them both, and he told
me he saw it and tried to come between them.
Your wife married you, knowing you to be the son
of the man who killed her father. The northerner passed
his hand across his forehead, as if to wipe away
the confusion of his mind. His eyes were cast down,
but she saw that their lids were wet. Poor Louise,
he murmured, seemingly rather to himself than to her. How
she must have suffered over that secret, Poor Louise, you
come here, missus. Desber went on, feeling herself choked at
his words, but determined not to give way to the
warmer impulse of her heart. And even you are moved
by these sacred relics, what do you think they are
to us? She was half conscious that she was appealing
to the memorials around her to strengthen her in her purpose,
not to yield, not to make peace with the son
of the man who had slain her husband, her hero,
her love. She felt that in harboring for an instant
such an impulse, she was untrue to the cause, which,
though lost, was for her forever living with the deathless
devotion of love and anguish. These relics do move me,
her son in law said gently. They move me so
deeply that they seemed to me wrong. I confess that
I was thinking before you came in, that if I
were a Southerner, with the traditions of the South behind
me and the bitter sense of failure to embitter me,
they would stir me to madness, that I should feel
it impossible ever to be loyal to anything but the South.
The war is over. The South at last is understood.
She is honored for the incredible bravery with which, under
crushing AWDs, she fought for her conviction. Why prolonged the
inevitable pain? Why gather these relics to nourish of feeling
absolutely untrue, the feeling that the Union is less your
country than it is ours? Because it is just to
the dead, she answered, swiftly, because it is only justice
that we keep in remembrance. How true they were, how gallant,
how brave, how noble? And O God, that we make
some poor record of what we of the South have suffered.
He shook his head and sighed. She saw the tears
in his eyes and did not attempt to hide her own.
Would you have it forgotten? She demanded passionately, that the
grandfather of your son, the father of your wife, was
one of God's noblemen. Would you have him remembered only
as a beaten rebel? I tell you that if we
had not gathered these memorials, every clod that was wet
with their blood would cry out against us. In the north,
you call these men rebels. There is no battlefield in
the South where the very rustle of the grass does
not whisper over their graves that they were patriots and heroes.
And this, poor though it be, and she waved her
hand to the cases around them, is the best memorial
we can give them. He made a step forward and
held out both his hands impulsively. She did not take them,
and they dropped again. He hesitated, and then drew back.
It must be as it is, he said, sadly. Even
if I blamed you women of the South, I could
not say so here only, he added, his voice, falling,
Can you forget that the women of the north have
suffered too? I grew up in the shadow of a
grief so great that it sat the very life of
my mother, and in the end killed her. Do you
think I could visit that? Upon the innocent head of Louise.
I did not mean though to speak of myself. Now
that I know who you are, I will not intrude
on you. But my little son, with your husband's name
in his mother's eyes, is certainly guiltless. I will not
come with him. But may I not send him with
my man to see you this afternoon, so that I
may say to Louise that you have kissed him and
given him your blessing. Sorrow has taken away his other grandmother.
It seemed to her that she could not endure the
speaking of one syllable more. Her whole body trembled, and
she raised her hands in an impulsive gesture which implored
him to be silent. All the old mother loved for Louise,
the passionate crime of her lonely heart, for this unseen grandson,
with the blood of her dead husband warm in his veins,
The grief of black years and fidelity to old ideals
roared within her and tore her like wolves. She cast
a glance around, as if to find some way by
which she could flee from this position, which it was
too terrible to face. Then she saw her companion look
at her with infinite pity and sadness. Then he said,
I can only say good bye. But she sprang forward
as if she burst from chains, and threw herself upon
his breast, the agony of the long bitter past gushing
in a torrent of hot tears. Oh, my son, my son,
she sobbed end of in the Virginia Room,