



Produced by David Widger





THE CRISIS

By Winston Churchill

BOOK III


Volume 6.



CHAPTER I

INTRODUCING A CAPITALIST

A cordon of blue regiments surrounded the city at first from Carondelet
to North St. Louis, like an open fan. The crowds liked best to go to
Compton Heights, where the tents of the German citizen-soldiers were
spread out like so many slices of white cake on the green beside the
city's reservoir. Thence the eye stretched across the town, catching the
dome of the Court House and the spire of St. John's. Away to the west, on
the line of the Pacific railroad that led halfway across the state, was
another camp. Then another, and another, on the circle of the fan, until
the river was reached to the northward, far above the bend. Within was a
peace that passed understanding,--the peace of martial law.

Without the city, in the great state beyond, an irate governor had
gathered his forces from the east and from the west. Letters came and
went between Jefferson City and Jefferson Davis, their purport being that
the Governor was to work out his own salvation, for a while at least.
Young men of St. Louis, struck in a night by the fever of militarism,
arose and went to Glencoe. Prying sergeants and commissioned officers,
mostly of hated German extraction, thundered at the door of Colonel
Carvel's house, and other houses, there--for Glencoe was a border town.
They searched the place more than once from garret to cellar, muttered
guttural oaths, and smelled of beer and sauerkraut, The haughty
appearance of Miss Carvel did not awe them--they were blind to all manly
sensations. The Colonel's house, alas, was one of many in Glencoe written
down in red ink in a book at headquarters as a place toward which the
feet of the young men strayed. Good evidence was handed in time and time
again that the young men had come and gone, and red-faced commanding
officers cursed indignant subalterns, and implied that Beauty had had a
hand in it. Councils of war were held over the advisability of seizing
Mr. Carvel's house at Glencoe, but proof was lacking until one rainy
night in June a captain and ten men spurred up the drive and swung into a
big circle around the house. The Captain took off his cavalry gauntlet
and knocked at the door, more gently than usual. Miss Virginia was home
so Jackson said. The Captain was given an audience more formal than one
with the queen of Prussia could have been, Miss Carvel was infinitely
more haughty than her Majesty. Was not the Captain hired to do a
degrading service? Indeed, he thought so as he followed her about the
house and he felt like the lowest of criminals as he opened a closet door
or looked under a bed. He was a beast of the field, of the mire. How
Virginia shrank from him if he had occasion to pass her! Her gown would
have been defiled by his touch. And yet the Captain did not smell of
beer, nor of sauerkraut; nor did he swear in any language. He did his
duty apologetically, but he did it. He pulled a man (aged seventeen) out
from under a great hoop skirt in a little closet, and the man had a
pistol that refused its duty when snapped in the Captain's face. This was
little Spencer Catherwood, just home from a military academy.

Spencer was taken through the rain by the chagrined Captain to the
headquarters, where he caused a little embarrassment. No damning evidence
was discovered on his person, for the pistol had long since ceased to be
a firearm. And so after a stiff lecture from the Colonel he was finally
given back into the custody of his father. Despite the pickets, the young
men filtered through daily,--or rather nightly. Presently some of them
began to come back, gaunt and worn and tattered, among the grim cargoes
that were landed by the thousands and tens of thousands on the levee. And
they took them (oh, the pity of it!) they took them to Mr. Lynch's slave
pen, turned into a Union prison of detention, where their fathers and
grandfathers had been wont to send their disorderly and insubordinate
<DW65>s. They were packed away, as the miserable slaves had been, to
taste something of the bitterness of the <DW64>'s lot. So came Bert
Russell to welter in a low room whose walls gave out the stench of years.
How you cooked for them, and schemed for them,