Thomas Wolfe, page 353
The South was stunned and prostrate now, and Theodore himself was more stunned and prostrate than most of the men who came back from the war. The one bit of purpose he had found in life was swallowed up in the great defeat, and he had no other that could take its place. He did not know what to do with himself. Half-heartedly, he “took the bar” again, and for the third time failed. Then, in 1869, he pulled himself together, and, using money that his brothers loaned him, he repaired the school and opened it anew.
It was a gesture of futility, really—and a symptom of something that was happening all over the South in that bleak decade of poverty and reconstruction. The South lacked money for all the vital things, yet somehow, like other war-struck and war-ravaged communities before it, the South found funds to lay out in tin-soldierism. Pigmy West Points sprang up everywhere, with the attendant claptrap of “Send us the boy, and we’ll return you the man.” It was a pitiable spectacle to see a great region and a valiant people bedaubing itself with such gimcrack frills and tin-horn fopperies after it had been exhausted and laid waste by the very demon it was making obeisance to. It was as if a group of exhausted farmers with blackened faces, singed whiskers, and lackluster eyes had come staggering back from some tremendous conflagration that had burned their homes and barns and crops right to the ground, and then had bedecked themselves in outlandish garments and started banging on the village gong and crying out: “At last, brothers, we’re all members of the fire department!”
Theodore took a new lease on life with the reopening of the Joyner Military Academy. When he first decided to restore the place he thought he could resume his career at the point where the war had broken in upon it, and things would go on as though the war had never been. Then, as his plans took shape and he got more and more into the spirit of the enterprise, his attitude and feelings underwent a subtle change. As the great day for the reopening approached, he knew that it would not be just a resuming of his interrupted career. It would be much better than that. For the war was a heroic fact that could not be denied, and it now seemed to Theodore that in some strange and transcendental way the South had been gloriously triumphant even in defeat, and that he himself had played a decisive part in bringing about this transcendental victory.
Theodore was no more consciously aware of the psychic processess by which he had arrived at this conclusion than were thousands of others all over the South who, at this same time, were coming to the same conclusion themselves. But once the attitude had crystallized and become accepted, it became the point of departure for a whole new rationale of life. Out of it grew a vast mythology of the war—a mythology so universally believed that to doubt its truth was worse than treason. In a curious way, the war became no longer a thing finished and done with, a thing to be put aside and forgotten as belonging to the buried past, but a dead fact recharged with new vitality, and one to be cherished more dearly than life itself. The mythology which this gave rise to acquired in time the force of an almost supernatural sanction. It became a kind of folk-religion. And under its soothing, otherworldly spell, the South began to turn its face away from the hard and ugly realities of daily living that confronted it on every hand, and escaped into the soft dream of vanished glories—imagined glories—glories that had never been.
The first concrete manifestation of all this in Theodore was an inspiration that came to him as he lay in bed the night before the great day when the Joyner Military Academy was to reopen its doors. As he lay there, neither quite awake nor yet asleep, letting his mind shuttle back and forth between remembered exploits on the field of battle and the exciting event scheduled for the morrow, the two objects of his interest became fused: he felt that they were really one, and he saw the military school as belonging to the war, a part of it, a continuation and extension of it into the present, and on down through the long, dim vista of the future. Out of this there flowed instantly into his consciousness a sequence of ringing phrases that brought him as wide awake as the clanging of a bell, and he saw at once that he had invented a perfect slogan for his school. The next day he announced it at the formal convocation.
It is true that Theodore’s slogan occasioned a good deal of mirth at his expense when it was repeated all over town with Zachariah’s running commentary upon it. The father of a student at the school was one of Zack’s most intimate friends: this man had attended the convocation, and he told Zach all about it afterwards
“Theodore,” this friend reported, “gave the boys a rousing new motto to live up to—earned, he said, by their predecessors on the glorious field of battle. Theodore made such a moving speech about it that he had all the mothers in tears. You never heard such a blubbering in your life. The chorus of snifflings and chokings and blowing of noses almost drowned Theodore out. It was most impressive.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Zack. “Theodore always did have an impressive manner. If he only had the gray matter that ought to go with it, he’d be a wonder. But what did he say? What was the motto?”
“First at Manassas——”
“First to eat, he means!” said Zachariah.
“—fightingest at Antietam Creek——”
“Yes, fightingest to see who could get back first across the creek!”
“—and by far the farthest in the Wilderness.”
“By God, he’s right!” shouted Zachariah. “Too far, in fact, to be of any use to anyone! They thrashed around all night long, bawling like a herd of cattle and taking pot-shots at one another in the belief that they had come upon a company of Grant’s infantry. They had to be gathered together and withdrawn from the line in order to prevent their total self-destruction. My brother Theodore,” Zachariah went on with obvious relish, “is the only officer of my acquaintance who performed the remarkable feat of getting completely lost in an open field, and ordering an attack upon his own position. . . . His wounds, of course, are honorable, as he himself will tell you on the slightest provocation—but he was shot in the behind. So far as I know, he is the only officer in the history of the Confederacy who possesses the distinction of having been shot in the seat of the pants by one of his own sharpshooters, while stealthily and craftily reconnoitering his own breastworks in search of any enemy who was at that time nine miles away and marching in the opposite direction!”
From this time on, the best description of Theodore is to say that he “grew” with his academy. The institution thrived in the nostalgic atmosphere that had made its resurrection possible in the first place, and Theodore himself became the personal embodiment of the post-war tradition, a kind of romantic vindication of rebellion, a whole regiment of plumed knights in his own person. And there can be no doubt whatever that he grew to believe it all himself.
According to contemporary accounts, he had been anything but a prepossessing figure when he went off to war, and, if any part of Zachariah’s extravagant stories can be believed, anything but a master strategist of arms on the actual field of battle. But with the passage of the years he grew into his role, until at last, in his old age, he looked a perfect specimen of the grizzled warrior.
Long before that, people had stopped laughing at him. No one but Zachariah now dared to question publicly any of Theodore’s pronouncements, and Zachariah’s irreverence was tolerated only because he was considered to be a privileged person, above the common mores. Theodore was now held in universal respect. Thus the youngest of “the Joyner boys”—the one from whom least had been expected—finally came into his own as a kind of sacred symbol.
In Libya Hill during those later years it was to be a familiar spectacle every Monday—the day when the “cadets” enjoyed their holiday in town—to see old Colonel Joyner being conveyed through the streets in an old victoria, driven by an aged Negro in white gloves and a silk hat. The Colonel was always dressed in his old uniform of Confederate gray; he wore his battered old Confederate service hat, and, winter or summer, he was never seen without an old gray cape about his shoulders. He did not loll back among the faded leather cushions of the victoria: he sat bolt upright—and when he got too old to sit bolt upright under his own power, he used a cane to help him.
He would ride through the streets, always sitting soldierly erect, gripping the head of his supporting cane with palsied hands, brown with the blotches of old age, and glowering out to left and right beneath bushy eyebrows of coarse white with kindling glances of his fierce old eyes, at the same time clinching his jaw grimly and working sternly at his lips beneath his close-cropped grizzled mustache. This may have been just the effect of his false teeth, but it suggested to awed little boys that he was muttering warlike epithets. That is what every inch of him seemed to imply, but actually he was only growling out such commands as “Go on, you scoundrel! Go on!” to his aged charioteer, or muttering with fierce scorn as he saw the slovenly postures of his own cadets lounging in drugstore doors:
“Not a whole man among ’em! Look at ’em now! A race of weaklings, hollow-chested and hump-backed—not made of the same stuff their fathers were—not like the crowd we were the day we all marched out to a man—the bravest of the brave, the flower of our youth and our young manhood! One hundred and thirty-seven under nineteen!—Hrumph! Hrumph!—Get along, you scoundrel! Get along!”
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CHAPTER 6
THE BATTLE OF HOGWART HEIGHTS
Theodore had married the year after he reopened the Joyner Military Academy, and everyone agreed at the time that he had made an exceedingly good match. He went to Virginia for his wife. She was Miss Emily Drumgoole, daughter of a Confederate officer, another plumed veteran of the war who, like Theodore, ran a military school near Winchester. Thus she was also a daughter of the Shenandoah Valley, which had boasted stately houses, courtly manors, and green acres in the days of powdered hair and periwigs, when the wild fastnesses of Zebulon County had been broken only by the moccasin of the Cherokee.
Yes, decidedly, Theodore had done well. His wife was not only a Drumgoole of the Virginia Drumgooles, she was also a lady of quite considerable beauty, flawed only a little by the unfriendly hauteur of a long, cold nose. She came to Catawba in the role of a disdainful invader, and she never dropped the role throughout the remainder of her life.
Being a person of considerable confidence and force, however, she did not spend too much time bemoaning the vanished splendors of her past. Her vision was dominated not so much by the thought of what she had lost as by the calculation of what she was now willing to accept. In her cold, sure way, it was never so much a question of what she was going to take as to what she was going to reject. It was in this frigid frame of mind that she came as Theodore’s bride to Hogwart Heights, and settled down there as the glacial monarch of all that she was willing to survey.
And what was she willing to survey? Well, very little, certainly, from the small precincts of Libya Hill.
Robert Joyner and his family she was pleased to welcome among the picked circle of her intimates, for he had been a Brigade Commander in the Civil War and the bosom friend of General Jubel Early—and Jubel Early, like herself, came from Virginia. So when Jubel Early or other great ones came to visit Robert Joyner, she would always invite him to call and bring his guests.
Zachariah was too strong meat for her. She tried to stomach him, but could not, so she coldly turned away. She could not stand his ribaldry and his coarseness. She suspected very shrewdly that in her presence he literally outdid himself in these respects for her special benefit. True, he was a famous man—but in Catawba. He had been Governor of the state—but the state was Catawba. He was now a member of the nation’s Senate—but from Catawba. He chewed tobacco and he spat tobacco juice, he made coarse jokes and uttered words that no gentleman would ever utter—all in the presence of a lady. And although he knew much better, and could speak with elegance and beauty when he would, he often deliberately used the language of a backwoods yokel, mentioning with disgusting relish such revolting foods as “hawg and hominy,” and delighting in crude anecdotes about how his father had gone barefoot and had never learned to read and write until he was forty years old—this, too, before a lady and her friends.
Miss Hattie Joyner was too much like her celebrated brother in character and plain speaking to find a cordial welcome on the hill. And Rufus, so the lady felt, smelt strongly of his store—a kind of compost of general merchandise, her proud, cold nose informed her, mixed of dry goods and of groceries, and dominated, it seemed to her, by the especial commonness of cheese and calico.
The Joyner clan being thus disposed of, the survivors of her choice were few. She admitted the existence of Dr. Burleigh and his wife and their three mannish and unmarried daughters. He was a dentist, it was true, and dull as dust, but he had come from Charleston and had good connections. The Randolphs also were accepted in her graces. They were Virginia people, and their family was a good one even there.
Her standards of selection were as rigid as the law of the Medes and the Persians, and just as incomprehensible to most of her neighbors; but she knew well enough what they were, and she adhered to them to the end of her days. Wit did not count with her, nor did wisdom, charm, grace, intelligence, character, or any other happy faculty with which men are endowed by nature. The only standard that she had, really, was “family.” To her credit be it said that money counted with her not at all. Old Dr. Burleigh was as poor as he was dull. The Randolph fortune was a very meager one. But both of them had “family”—in her own quite definite and restricted meaning of the word. So she received them.
Mrs. Theodore Joyner presented her warlike mate with three offspring, and their arrivals occurred in a sequence almost as rapid as nature would allow. The daughter, Emma-line, was born the year after her parents’ marriage. Eleven months later the lady rewarded her delighted spouse with a male heir, who was promptly named Drumgoole to perpetuate the proud accents of his mother’s line. The next year she gave birth to her third child, also a boy. The Colonel was secretly a little resentful of the fact that his wife had named the first son, and he claimed for himself the right to name this one; so, after great cogitation and much thumbing of military histories—the only books he ever read—he finally ruled out Hannibal and Quintus Fabius and settled upon Gustavus Adolphus. Mrs. Joyner objected that the boys would call him Gus, but Theodore stood his ground. He pointed out that Dolph had a pleasant sound and was just as easy to say as Gas, and that Dolph would likely stick if the family used it, so that is what they called him. And it became apparent fairly soon that whatever brains and physical attractions these children were to possess would be held in almost exclusive monopoly by the last and youngest of them.
Emmaline grew up under her mother’s exacting tutelage, a gawky and unlovely girl, preserved from God-knows-what contaminations by the proud isolation of Hogwart Heights. Of her mother’s beauty, character, and personality she inherited nothing except the extravagant snobbishness, as evidenced by the same long, cold nose. In the course of time she was sent off to the approved girls’ finishing school in Virginia, which, then as now, was a kind of elegant country club for Southern maidens—a sanctuary where they could wait till marriage or early spinsterhood claimed them, and meanwhile could fill their empty heads, not with any smattering of conceivably useful knowledge, but with vicious triviality, gossip, and the accepted rituals and mannerisms of their own grotesque, aborted little world. The school was attended by none but born snobs like Emmaline herself, but most of the others were much more personable and far more adept than she in the dreary drivel that has always been held in such high esteem by the professional representatives of “Southern charm.”
After four years of this, Emmaline was pronounced “finished” and she returned home again, having learned all the accents and vocabularies of the approved mode, but without having found wholly adequate substitutes for a long nose, a flat bosom, and a small, dull mind. At twenty-two she was already confirmed, though by no means reconciled, to a life of unsullied virginity.
Young Drumgoole, or Drum as they called him, was brought up with the same narrowness of view which his mother had so painstakingly implanted in his sister. From the beginning his father had fondly hoped that the youth would carry on the war-like strain and had envisioned the proud day when he should be a candidate for West Point. And eventually the proud day came, and Drum was sent away into the very heart of the enemy’s country with many fond flourishes of fatherly advice and admonition. But it was all to no purpose. He never saw the conclusion of his first term at the great academy on the Hudson. He was a casualty to the rapid fire of trigonometry. He was cut down- the first charge. He never even heard the booming of the heavy guns upon the distant front of calculus.
After this, of course, there was nothing left for him to do except to go to Charlottesville and enroll himself among the princelings of the blood at the University of Virginia. Any other alternative was clearly impossible. A gentleman could still attend the United States Military Academy without dishonor, for Lee himself had been a West Point man, but to submit his person to the Yankee degradations of Harvard, Yale, or Princeton was, in the eyes of the Colonel and his wife, unthinkable.
So Drum was sent to Charlottesville as the next-best thing to West Point. Of his life there, there is little to record save that he finally scraped through and learned “to hold his liquor like a gentleman”—which apparently has always been one of the stiffest requirements of the curriculum at that famous university. At length Drum came home again wearing a small blonde mustache, and was instantly appointed a Major in his father’s celebrated corps, and second in command, the appointment also carrying with it an instructorship in mathematics, trigonometry and calculus included.
