The Beguiled Read online

  Alicia Simms

  First, my name is not Alice but Alicia. They call me Alice, all of them except Miss Harriet, but I was christened Alicia and Miss Harriet has the certificate to prove it. I sometimes really and truly believe that Miss Harriet Farnsworth is the only friend I have in the whole world. She is certainly the one person in the world who cares from one day to the next whether I live or die, and that’s more than you can say for anybody else around here.

  They think because I wasn’t born on a big plantation in Louisiana or Carolina or in some fine town house in Richmond or Atlanta, I’m not worth anything and I don’t know anything and I’ll never amount to anything. But they’re wrong about that. I’ll amount to more than the rest of them put together. I have more to work with than any of them . . . much more. And I think Miss Harriet realizes this even though she’s never told me so.

  I’ve been at this place three years, since the first summer of the war. The way it was . . . that spring my mother and I had gone to Washington. We had been living in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and thereabouts for a good long while before that, in the Jefferson Hotel mostly, which was not the worst hotel in town but I guess you certainly couldn’t call it the best.

  My mother, I ought to say, is the most beautiful woman in the world and she is also very kind sometimes, but she does have one serious drawback. Most of the time she is not very clever. It’s not that she’s unintelligent; it’s just that she doesn’t think very clearly in times of emotional strain. And this, as my mother herself is always the first to admit, is a serious weakness in a woman . . . especially a woman who has to support herself and her daughter.

  Well, we were living in this Jefferson Hotel in the spring of eighteen and sixty-one. We had two nice rooms on the fourth floor overlooking the Rappahannock River, compliments of Mister C. J. Moody, the owner of the hotel. We might have been there yet, if Mister Lincoln hadn’t decided to interfere in our business and those fools in South Carolina hadn’t decided to test their cannons on Fort Sumter and Mrs. C. J. Moody hadn’t decided she’d have to rush back from Mobile. Alabama, where she had been visiting her Mama, to check on the safety of her husband.

  She came back to town on the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac cars, only it was very late when she arrived owing to the fact that some Yankee sympathizers had ripped up a bit of the railroad track. It was after midnight by the time she got a carriage from the station to the hotel, and consequently I guess she was very surprised to find Mr. C. J. Moody in my mother’s room. The walls aren’t very thick in the Jefferson Hotel (I should say, weren’t very thick because I believe the entire building has been destroyed now by Yankee cannon fire) and therefore I was awakened very shortly after the argument started. Mr. C. J. Moody claimed that my mother was a bookkeeper he had hired during Mrs. Moody’s absence, which might have been true to begin with. I mean that, although my mother certainly knows nothing about bookkeeping, it might have been her original intention to learn the trade and Mr. C. J. Moody’s intention to teach her. However, I guess there is something about my mother that prevents men from keeping their minds on business very long. And obviously from what Mrs. C. J. Moody was saying, there wasn’t any evidence of any bookkeeping going on when she entered the room.

  Anyway, that next morning my mother and I went down to the railroad station ourselves and boarded the same cars that Mrs. C. J. Moody had ridden into town very likely, since the trains sometimes waited in Fredericksburg for several hours, and we set off for Washington. At that time, of course, hostilities hadn’t really started in earnest and there was a good deal of traveling still going on between the United States and the Confederate States.

  Our objective was to find my father. My mother said, as she had said many times before, that she had borne the burden of my upkeep long enough and it was time now for my father to lend a hand. We had gone through several campaigns of looking for him in past years in and around Virginia and Maryland—once we had even gone as far as New York City—but every time we’d be interrupted by people like Mr. C. J. Moody. But now, my mother stated, she was settling down to search with all her might. She was going to start off by going directly to the United States War Department. At that time neither my mother nor I had really made up our minds whether we were for the Yankees or the rebels.

  The War Department seemed the most logical place to go because my mother knew my father was a soldier. As a matter of fact, that’s about all she did know about him except that his first name was Clint and that he had a brown mustache, when she knew him, and that he was a second lieutenant, when she knew him. She reasoned now that he ought to be at least a major by this time, and with the war about to start in earnest, he might go even higher. So we got a room in a boarding house on G Street and that same afternoon walked down to the War Department.

  Several people, including a general and two or three colonels, were very cooperative and attentive to us at the offices but not very helpful considering the small amount of information we had to give them. They said that our description of the man we wanted would fit about half the officers in the army. We didn’t tell them it was my father we were looking for, of course, but just that it was a dear friend of our family whose last name we had forgotten. Well about all that came of it was my mother got invited out to dinner by a colonel of engineers and I had to go home by myself to the house on G Street.

  We stayed in Washington until July of that year, spending every afternoon walking the streets down around the capitol, going out to the parade grounds to watch the drilling, waiting at the railroad stations as regiment after regiment came into town. It didn’t seem hardly likely that my father could have been attached to any Ohio or Indiana volunteer regiment, for instance, since he was definitely in the regular army when my mother knew him, but she felt that he might have been reassigned to recruitment duties for one of the state militia regiments. And she was certainly making friends with a lot of officers, and some non-commissioned officers as well.

  By the middle of July, I was about willing to concede that my father must be dead or retired from the army and, frankly, at that point I didn’t much care. Then the Yankees decided if they were going to have a war they might as well get on with it, and so they decided as a first step they’d whip all the rebels in Northern Virginia. General McDowell—whom my mother knew but not well—was put in charge of the expedition and he got on his horse and led the whole army across the Potomac and down to Manassas Junction. A lot of other gentlemen and ladies—including Congressmen and Senators and their wives and such like—packed picnic lunches and drove down there in their carriages on the morning of the twenty-first of July because they figured the war was going to end with this one big battle and if they didn’t see this battle now, they might never see one again for the rest of their lives.

  My mother and I went along in the carriage of a Congressman from Iowa. We weren’t going just for the picnic, of course. We figured if most of the Union Army was going to be present at the battle, the chances were very good that my father might be there too.

  Well, if he was there, we didn’t find him. And if he ran like most of the other Yankees on that afternoon, I’m certainly glad we didn’t. We didn’t see much of the battle itself from the hillside where we stopped for our picnic, but we certainly heard plenty of cannon and musket fire and a lot of yelling. Then the Yankee troops began to retreat along the road where we were, with our boys pouring a lot of fire after them. I say “our boys” because it was just then that my mother and I definitely decided to take sides.

  Anyway, all that excitement was too much for the Congressman’s horse. The Congressman was standing in front of the carriage, trying to hold the horse’s head when the animal suddenly bolted off across a field, trying to get away from all the noise and smoke and dragging the carriage and my mother and me behind him.

  That was how we came back to the Confederate States. We were halfway to Warrenton before the horse got tired and w
e could quiet him. Then a company of Mississippi Cavalry came along headed by a handsome young captain. He unhitched our carriage and had one of his men walk our horse around for a spell to cool him off, and meanwhile the captain himself got in the carriage next to my mother and became acquainted with her. She told him we were sisters on our way to visit relatives in Richmond.

  Well, the captain escorted us to the home of some of his relatives in Warrenton and we spent several enjoyable days there. At least my mother and the captain enjoyed themselves and most of their dinner companions did too. They were all vastly entertained by my mother’s story of the battle—which of course we had happened upon accidentally—and the running Yankees. Naturally I grew rather tired of the whole thing after I heard it several times and I was happy when the Mississippi boys were ordered out of Warrenton and my mother decided to take up once more the search for my father.

  By that time, she had decided my father must be somewhere in the Confederate Army. It was really something we should have considered right from the first, since there were plenty of regular Union officers who converted over at Secession, including General Lee himself.

  Therefore, when Emily Stevenson suggested on that first afternoon—the afternoon when McBurney came—that my father was a high ranking Confederate officer who had been captured by the enemy, it could very well have been true, even though Emily thought she was lying when she said it.

  Of course, I really don’t want any sympathy from Emily or anybody else, although I will admit that she has treated me a lot nicer on some occasions than most of the other people around here. That’s with the exception of Miss Harriet, of course.

  And the best I can say for most of the others is that I probably don’t hate them now as much as I did when I first came. That’s partly because I’ve learned to disregard them almost entirely, and partly because there aren’t as many girls here now as there were in that summer of eighteen and sixty-one when I came.

  There must have been all of twenty or twenty-five girls here at that time, and it was said there had been even more students here in previous years—some northern girls even—before people began to talk seriously about war.

  The family with whom we had stayed at Warrenton had directed us to the school. My mother had decided she could get on with the search for my father much better if she weren’t encumbered with me. Also, although she didn’t say so, I think she had made an engagement to meet the cavalry captain in Richmond. My mother is always capable of transacting business like that right under my nose, seemingly without saying a word, the whole matter being handled with sighs and smiles and downcast eyes. I must say I have learned a great deal from my mother . . . much more than I ever have at this school.

  Well, we came to the Farnsworth school on that day in July a few days after that first battle of Manassas and my mother told Miss Martha Farnsworth somewhat the same story she had told the cavalry captain, except that this time she did admit she was my mother. She told Miss Martha we were from Fredericksburg and that she was on her way to Richmond to claim an inheritance and that she would be back to get me in a few weeks and would pay my tuition and board at that time. Privately, she said to me very much the same thing, except that instead of an inheritance it was a gentleman in Richmond who had promised to loan her a large sum of money whenever she needed it. So she drove off that day in the Congressman’s carriage. And never came back.

  I think Miss Martha and Miss Harriet sort of suspected the story right from the beginning. Miss Martha, I know, wanted me to leave very shortly after I came because, as I heard her tell Miss Harriet one time, she felt I was not a desirable influence in the school, even apart from the fact that I wasn’t paying anything. As a matter of fact, I don’t know how I could have been undesirable because I had hardly anything to do with any of the other girls, at that time or any time since. Unless it was because I looked undesirable.

  Anyway, Miss Harriet kept defending me in her very quiet way. Now ordinarily what Miss Harriet has to say on most subjects does not seem to mean a great deal to Miss Martha. Miss Martha always seems to have her mind made up before Miss Harriet begins to speak and nothing Miss Harriet can say will ever change it. However, in my case there was another factor to be considered. The enrollment kept falling off so badly as the war continued in this part of Virginia that the school could just not afford to lose any more students, whether paying or non-paying. I mean if you’re going to have a school, it stands to reason you’ve got to have students. And with so many girls leaving of their own free will, it was just not sensible to force any girl to leave . . . even if the girl happened to be me.

  I have thought many times about leaving on my own, especially at those times when I am having particularly bad trouble with Miss Martha. I am quite an independent person and most people think I look older than my age so I would have no fear about maintaining myself. I don’t get along too well with women, it’s true, but with men . . . well, I’m sure in time I could do quite as well as my mother. But then at those times when I am thinking these things at night, Miss Harriet will quite often come to my room and comfort me and ask me please to be patient and that although I may not realize it, she has problems too and by my presence I am a comfort to her, too, as well as she to me.

  I have a room of my own on the third floor. It used to be a storage room and when I first came I guess it was the only place they had since the school was certainly crowded. There is plenty of room now, of course, on the other floors. None of the girls share rooms now except by choice. Amelia and Marie, the youngest ones, share a room but Emily and Edwina each have their own. But this doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t come down now to join any of them even if they asked me.

  There is another reason why I stay. This is the place my mother left me and the only place she knows to get in touch with me. Most times I wish she would come back or at least write. Other times I hope she doesn’t.

  I was thinking some of these things on that afternoon as I ate the candy that Andy Wilkins gave me. I was really feeling very bad about taking it from him, even though I would never let the other girls know that, after he had carried it all that way from Georgia. He was really very likely hoarding that old candy to eat at some moment when it would bring the most comfort to him. Well, I could only hope that what he got in exchange was a comfort too.

  I was looking out the window right about then and I saw Amelia coming with McBurney.

  Emily Stevenson

  He looked half dead when Amelia brought him in. My first impression of him was that he wasn’t much bigger than Amelia and she’s rather a frail little person. However, as we grew to know him later, he seemed a bit larger.

  He was hopping on one foot and half stepping on, half dragging the toe of the other. Amelia was beaming as though, for the first time in her life, she had done something right.

  “Ladies,” he said, smiling rather pathetically I thought, “I give you greetings.” And made it to the settee and collapsed there.

  Lord, I thought, if they’re all as weak and defenseless looking at him, why has it taken us this long to beat them? I thought I might mention that to my father the next time I wrote him. Of course, I know my father has his hands full with them—their soldiers are better fed and better clothed than ours for instance—but they don’t have the sprit or the common purpose that our boys have and that is what will defeat them in the end. Our boys are all native born citizens of the Confederate States, while the Union army is made up of foreigners and immigrants and even some Negroes now they say, and the Lord only knows what else. Just like this creature that Amelia brought in—who was obviously from Ireland or some foreign place like that. Not that we don’t have a good number of respectable Irish people in Charleston, although they are somewhat the poorer class, but at least they are native born citizens of the South and not complete strangers hired or impressed to take part in a quarrel that is not their own.

  “He’s not dead is he?�
�� Amelia cried rushing to the settee. It was apparent that Amelia had made up her mind to add this Yankee to the collection of other odds and ends she had found in the woods—the rocks and leaves and butterflies and beetles—which she keeps in her room to the distress of all of us but most particularly to Miss Harriet who is a rather timid person and who got a severe shock on one occasion, I remember, when she found a huge spider in a pickle jar under Amelia’s bed. At any rate, Miss Harriet gathered her courage and accompanied Amelia to a spot sufficiently removed from the school where Amelia set her spider free. Even Miss Harriet would not have considered killing the spider, which indicates that she is a somewhat more gentle person than Miss Martha who, without any argument permitted, would have squashed the spider instantly underfoot. Well, it takes all kinds to make up a world, I suppose, or even a school. Amelia in time forgot about her darling spider and set about gathering other pets, one or two of which I’m sure she had in her room at the time McBurney came.

  Well he looked as though he wouldn’t last another moment. His face was as white as the linen antimacassar on the back of the settee. I took a closer look at him and saw that he was still breathing but in very quick and shallow gasps. It was obvious that he had to be given medical care immediately or not at all, and even then it seemed likely that nothing any of us could do would help him.

  “His leg is bleeding . . . all over Miss Martha’s Persian rug,” said Edwina, who always is the first to notice and report such things.

  “Soap and water will take it out,” I said. “But we won’t worry about that now. Amelia, fetch Mattie from the kitchen. Marie, go find Miss Harriet.”

  Marie and Amelia obeyed me but I must say not willingly. Miss Martha and Miss Harriet more or less depend on me to keep things in order when they’re not around and I do my best to carry out their wishes even though I realize that some of the girls resent it. Edwina Morrow resents it terribly, of course, because she is a year older than I and she has been a student at this school longer than anyone else here. Of course, that’s not entirely of her own choosing. Like Alice Simms, Edwina has nowhere else to go. She has no near relatives except her father and he’s too busy selling shoddy goods to our poor government to be concerned with a daughter like Edwina.