Love and War

joy in a voice that shook the room.

Still later, deep in the night, she slept against his shoulder, making occasional small sounds. They had shared themselves a third time, and she had closed her eyes afterward. He couldn't seem to doze or even calm down. What he had done tonight, learned tonight, kept his eyes open and his heart beating much too fast for a man in the soft aftermath of love.

He was fearful because his feelings were no longer hidden. He knew he loved her when he stood by the house unable to force himself to action for a few moments because he cared so much.

Then his emotions rendered him mistake-prone. In the kitchen he looked at Gus first, instead of at the young Yank. In the army he had seen men rendered impotent as soldiers by worry over loved ones. The worst cases deserted. He held them in contempt. But after his own near-fatal error, how could he? How was he different?

Finally, and perhaps worst, he had been prepared to kill the coward's way, with a ruthless joy, and to do it in a place supposedly safe from violence and all of the other spreading poisons of the war.

You oughtn't to be here. But how could he be anywhere else? He had been falling in love since he first saw her.

How was it possible to be so fulfilled and so torn? He saw the conflict in a homely little mind picture: two liquids from an apothecary's shelf poured into a mortar and swirled with a pestle.

He loved Gus. She was passion, peace, merriment, contemplation, companionship. He admired her nature, he wanted her physically, she was everything he had ever desired in a woman without expecting to find it.

But there was Hampton, and the Yankees.

The pestle swirled. The hours went by. The apothecary's hopes counted for nothing. The liquids would not mix.

Problem was, he couldn't give up as easily as an apothecary could. Couldn't give up Gus and couldn't give up his duty. Love and war were opposite states, and he was inescapably caught in both. He had no choice except to go forward, wherever the disparate forces might carry him — and her.

Full of foreboding he slipped his arm under her warm shoulders and held her close.

BOOK FOUR 'LET US DIE TO MAKE MEN FREE'

I would like to see the North win, but as to any interest in . . . supporting the Emancipation Proclamation I in common with every other officer and soldier in the army wash my hands of it. I came out to fight for the restoration of the Union . . . and not to free the niggers.

A   UNION   SOLDIER, 1863

64

'Social suicide,' he said when she proposed the idea. 'Even for an abolitionist like you.'

'Do you think I care about that? It's a fitting place to be tomorrow night.'

'I agree. I'll take you.'

So here they were, George and his Roman Catholic wife, seated in one of the gold-trimmed pews of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church. Only a third of the candles in the chandeliers had been lit, for this was an hour of meditation, an hour to look backward and ahead. The choir hummed the 'Battle Hymn' while the minister stood with head bowed, black hands gripping the marble of the pulpit. His short message to the worshipers, most of them members of the affluent Negro congregation — there were no more than a dozen whites present — had been drawn from Exodus 13: And Moses said unto the people, Remember this day, in which ye came out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

Midnight was near. Though not a religious man, George was moved by the experience of sitting here and seeing the dark faces upturned, many showing tears, and some with expressions approaching rapture. A shiver down his spine, he reached for his wife's hand and clasped it tightly.

All across the North, similar watch-night services were being held to observe the coming of the new year. In the morning Lincoln would sign the proclamation. George felt tension grow as the final minute passed. The choir fell silent, and the entire church. Then, in the steeple, the first bell note.

The minister raised his head and hands. 'O Lord our God, it has come. Thou hast delivered us. Jubilo at last.'

'Yes, jubilo.' 'Amen!' 'Praise God!' Throughout the church, men and women proclaimed their joy, and the sound of the bell seemed to swell. The shiver rippled down George's back again. Constance had tears in her eyes.

The bell pealed, soon overlaid by a counterpoint of other bells in other churches ringing through the starry dark. The joyful exclamations grew louder. George felt like shouting too. Then suddenly, sickeningly, like a hailstorm, rocks struck the church. He heard epithets, obscenities.

Several men jumped up, George among them. He and two whites and half a dozen blacks stormed up the aisle. The hooligans were jeering shadows on the run by the time the men reached the steps.

George shoved his dress saber back in its scabbard, listening to the bells chime across the black arch of winter sky. The brief exaltation had passed. The rock-throwing brought him back to the realities of this first day of 1863.

Although the mood of the worship service had been broken, nothing could cancel the power of it. That was clear from the faces of the men and women scattering to the carriages left in the care of little black boys bundled against the cold. Rattling homeward to Georgetown through deserted streets, Constance snuggled close and said, 'Are you happy we went?'

'Very much so.'

'You looked so grave toward the end of the service. Why?'

'I was speculating. I wonder if anyone, Lincoln included, knows precisely what this proclamation portends for the country.'

'I certainly don't.'

'Nor I. But as I sat there, I had the oddest feeling about the war. I'm not certain the term war applies any longer.'

'If it isn't a war, what is it?'

'A revolution.'

Silently, Constance clung to his arm as they absorbed the bite of the wind. George had preferred to drive tonight rather than ask one of their hired Negro freedmen to be absent from his family. The bells kept tolling, ringing their knell of changes across the city and the nation.

Washington had undergone drastic change in the months the Hazards had lived there. Business had seldom been better, but that was true everywhere in the North. Hazard's was operating at capacity, and the Bank of Lehigh Station, opened in October, was enjoying great success.

Scores of European immigrants, attracted in spite of the conflict — or perhaps because of it; war brought boom times — added to the general overcrowding in Washington. The martial spirit of the early days was gone, washed away by bloodshed in the great battles lost by the Union. No elegant uniforms could be seen on parade on the mall; no military bands performed for the public. At book and novelty stores, people bought Confederate bank notes and kepis picked up by souvenir hunters after Second Bull Run. They paid with government promissory notes; with Treasury-issued fractional currency — green-backed bills in denominations under a dollar, derisively called shinplasterers; or with war­time coins minted by private firms and bearing their advertising. They accepted the