those in Virginia had possessions that would to-day rank him even among
moderately rich men. But they were scrupulously honorable men, they
were men of reasonable property, and their credit rested firmly upon
the fact that they were able to pay and the equally important fact
that they meant to pay. They lived lavishly, but the plantation itself
furnished most of the materials of the lavishness, so that there was no
extravagance in such living. For the rest they had a sufficient regard
for those who were to come after them to keep the total volume of the
debt upon the estate within such limits as the estate could easily
stand.
What I wish to emphasize here is that the methods of their monetary
transactions were such as to make of money a very infrequent subject
of consideration in their lives and conversations.
Economically it would have been better for them if things had been
otherwise, but socially, the utter absence of pecuniary flavor from
their intercourse, lent a peculiar charm to it, especially in the eyes
and mind of a youth brought up as I had been in an atmosphere positively
grimy with the soot of monetary considerations.
There was hardly one of those plantations whose utterly waste products
were not worth more in the markets near at hand than were the tobacco
and wheat which alone the planters sold. When I came into the practice
of law a few years later, and had charge of the affairs of a number of
estates, I brought this matter of waste to the attention of my clients,
with all the earnestness I could put into my pleading. I showed them
prices current to prove that if they chose to market their surplus
apples, potatoes, sweet potatoes, lambs, pigs, poultry, and dairy
products, all of which they gave away or suffered to go to waste, they
might discharge their hereditary debts at once and build up balances in
bank. They had sagacity enough to understand the facts, but not one of
them would ever consent to apply them practically. It would be "Yankee
farming," was the ready reply, and that was conclusive. It was not the
custom of the planters to sell any but staple products, and they were
planters, not farmers.
[Sidenote: The Charm of Leisureliness]
All these things helped, when I first came into relations with them, to
impress my young mind with the poise, the picturesqueness, the restful
leisureliness of the Virginian life, and the utter absence from it of
strenuousness, and still more of sordidness. For the first time in my
life I was living with people who thought of money only on those annual
or other occasions when they were settling their affairs and paying
their debts by giving notes for their sum; people who regarded time not
as something to be economized and diligently utilized for the sake of
its money value, but as a means of grace, if I may so speak without
irreverence; as an opportunity of enjoyment, for themselves and for
others; as a thing to be spent with the utmost lavishness in the doing
of things agreeable, in the reading of books that pleased, in the riding
of horses that put the rider upon his metal to match their tameless
spirit, in the cultivation of flowers, in the improvement of trees by
grafting and budding, and even in the idler pleasures of tossing grace
hoops, or hotly maintaining an indoor contest at battledore and
shuttlecock when it rained heavily. These and a score of other pastimes
seemed good in the eyes of the Virginian men and women. The men went
shooting or fox hunting or hare coursing, or fishing, each in its
season. The women embroidered and knitted nubias, and made fancy work,
and they walked long miles when not riding with escorts, and dug much in
the ground in propagation of the flowers they loved. They kept house,
too, with a vigilance born of the fact that in keeping house they were
also keeping plantation. For they must not only supervise the daily
dispensation of foodstuffs to all the negroes, but they must visit and
personally care for the sick, the aged, the infirm, and the infantile
among the black people. They must put up fruits and jams and pickles
and ketchups and jellies and shrubs and cordials enough to stock a
warehouse, in anticipation of the plantation needs. They must personally
cut out and direct the making of all the clothing to be worn by the
blacks on the plantation, for the reason that the colored maids,
seamstresses and dressmakers who were proud to fashion the gowns of
their young mistresses, simply would not "work for de field
hands,"--meaning the negroes of the plantation.
Yet with it all these women were never hurried, never scant of time in
which to do anything that might give pleasure to another. I never knew
one of them to plead preoccupation as a reason for not going riding or
walking, or rendering some music, or joining in a game, or doing
anything else that others wanted her to do.
The reason for all this was simple enough. The young women who kept
house--and it was usually the young women who did so--were up and at
it before the dawn. By the time that the eight-thirty or nine o'clock
breakfast was served, all their necessary work was done for the day;
often it was done in time to let them take a ride before breakfast
if the young man suggesting it happened to be an agreeable fellow.
After all was done upon which that day's conduct of the house and the
plantation depended, the gentlewomen concerned adopted the views of
their masculine mentors and exemplars. They accepted to-morrow as a good
enough stalking horse for to-day, and, having laid out their work well
in advance, they exacted of their servitors that the morrow's morning
should begin with a demonstration of to-day's work well done.
So they, too, had leisure, just as the meal hours had. I had been
brought up on five or six o'clock breakfasts, eleven-thirty or twelve
o'clock dinners, and early suppers. Here the breakfast hour was eight
thirty at the earliest and nine usually; "snack" was served about one to
those who chose to come to it, dinner at three or four, with no hurry
about it, and supper came at nine--the hour at which most people in the
West habitually went to bed.
The thing suited me, personally, for I had great ambitions as a student
and habitually dug at my mathematics, Latin, and Greek until two in the
morning. I was always up by daylight, and after a plunge into the cold
water provided for me in a molasses barrel out under the eaves, I
usually took a ride in company with the most agreeable young woman who
happened to be staying in the house at the time.
Sometimes I had two to escort, but that was rare. Usually there was
another young man in the house, and usually, under such circumstances, I
saw to it that he did not lie long abed. And even when there was no such
recourse, the "other girl" was apt to conjure up some excuse for not
wishing to ride that morning.
XXIII
[Sidenote: The Courtesy of the Virginians]
Indeed, one of the things that most deeply impressed me among the
Virginians was the delicacy and alert thoughtfulness of their courtesy.
The people of the West were not ill-mannered boors by any means, but
gentle, kindly folk. But they were not versed in those little momentary
courtesies of life which create a roseate atmosphere of active good
will. In all that pertained to courtesy in the larger and more
formal affairs of social life, the people of the West were even more
scrupulously attentive to the requirements of good social usage than
these easy-going Virginians were, with their well-defined social status
and their habit of taking themselves and each other for granted. But in
the little things of life, in their alertness to say the right word or
do the trifling thing that might give pleasure, and their still greater
alertness to avoid the word or act that might offend or incommode, the
Virginians presented to my mind a new and altogether pleasing example
of courtesy.
In later years I have found something like this agreeably impressed upon
me when I go for a time from New York to Boston. Courtesy could not
be finer or more considerate among people of gentle breeding who know
each other than it is in New York. But in their considerate treatment of
strangers, casually encountered in public places, the Boston people give
a finer, gentler, more delicate flavor to their courtesy, and it is a
delightful thing to encounter.
In Virginia this quality of courtesy was especially marked in the
intercourse of men and women with each other. The attitude of both was
distinctly chivalrous. To the woman--be she a child of two, a maiden
of twenty, or a gentlewoman so well advanced in years that her age was
unmentionable--the man assumed an attitude of gentle consideration, of
deference due to sex, of willingness to render any service at any cost,
and of a gently protective guardianship that stopped at nothing in the
discharge of its duty. To the man, be he old or young, the woman yielded
that glad obedience that she deemed due to her protector and champion.
I had never seen anything like this before. In the West I had gone to
school with all the young women I knew. I had competed with them upon
brutally equal terms, in examinations and in struggles for class honors,
and the like. They and we boys had been perfectly good friends and
comrades, of course, and we liked each other in that half-masculine way.
But the association was destructive of romance, of fineness, of delicate
attractiveness. There was no glamor left in the relations of young men
and young women, no sentiment except such as might exist among young
men themselves. The girls were only boys of another sort. Our attitude
toward them was comradely but not chivalric. It was impossible to feel
the roseate glow of romance in association with a young woman who had
studied in the same classes with one, who had stood as a challenge in
the matter of examination marks, and who met one at any hour of the day
on equal terms, with a cheery "good-morning" or "good-evening" that had
no more of sentiment in it than the clatter of a cotton mill.
[Sidenote: Sex and Education]
In my judgment, that is the conclusive objection to co-education,
except perhaps among the youngest children. It robs the relations of
the sexes of sentiment, of softness, of delicacy. It makes of girls an
inferior sort of boys, and of boys an inferior sort of girls. It cannot
completely negative sex, but it can and does sufficiently negative it
to rob life of one of its tenderest charms.
In Virginia for the first time I encountered something different.
There the boys were sent to old field schools where in rough and tumble
fashion, they learned Latin and robust manliness, Greek and a certain
graciousness of demeanor toward others, the absence of which would have
involved them in numberless fights on the playgrounds. The girls were
tenderly dame-nurtured at home, with a gentlewoman for governess, with
tutors to supplement the instruction of the governess, and with a year
or two, perhaps, for finishing, at Le Febre's or Dr. Hoge's, or some
other good school for young women.
Both the young men and the young women read voluminously--the young men
in part, perhaps, to equip themselves for conversational intercourse
with the young women. They both read polite literature, but they read
history also with a diligence that equipped them with independent
convictions of their own, with regard to such matters as the conduct of
Charlotte Corday, the characters of Mirabeau, Danton, and Robespierre,
the ungentlemanly treatment given by John Knox to Mary, Queen of Scots,
and all that sort of thing. Indeed, among the Virginia women, young and
old, the romantic episodes of history, ancient, mediaeval, and modern,
completely took the place, as subjects of conversation, of those gossipy
personalities that make up the staple of conversation among women
generally.
Let me not be misunderstood. These women did not assume to be "learned
ladies." It was only that they knew their history and loved it and were
fond of talking about it, quite as some other women are fond of talking
about the interesting scandal in the domestic relations of the reigning
matinee hero.
The intercourse between men and women thus educated was always easy,
gracious, and friendly, but it was always deferential, chivalric, and
imbued with that recognition of sex which, without loss of dignity on
either side, holds man to be the generously willing protector, and woman
the proudly loyal recipient of a protection to which her sex entitles
her, and in return for which she gladly yields a submission that has
nothing of surrender in it.
There was a fascination to me in all this, that I find it impossible to
describe and exceedingly difficult even to suggest.
I may add that I think the young women of that time in Virginia were
altogether the best educated young women I have ever encountered in any
time or country. And, best of all, they were thoroughly,
uncompromisingly feminine.
Of the men I need only say that they were masculine, and fit mates
for such women. I do not at all think they were personally superior
to men of other parts of the country in those things that pertain to
character and conduct, but at least they had the advantage of living
in a community where public opinion was all-dominant, and where that
resistless force insisted upon truth, integrity, and personal courage
as qualities that every man must possess if he expected to live in that
community at all. It was _noblesse oblige_, and it inexorably controlled
the conduct of all men who hoped for recognition as gentlemen.
The sentiment took quixotic forms at times, perhaps, but no jesting over
these manifestations can obscure the fact that it compelled men to good
behavior in every relation of life and made life sweeter, wholesomer,
and more fruitful of good than it otherwise would have been.
[Sidenote: The Voices of Virginia Women]
I must add a word with respect to that most fascinating of all things,
the Virginia girl's voice. This was music of so entrancing a sort that
I have known young men from other parts of the country to fall in love
with a voice before they had seen its possessor and to remain in love
with the owner of it in spite of her distinct lack of beauty when
revealed in person.
Those girls all dropped the "g"s at the end of their participles; they
habitually used double negatives, and, quite defiantly of dictionaries,
used Virginian locutions not sanctioned by authority. If challenged on
the subject their reply would have been that which John Esten Cooke gave
to an editor who wanted to strike a phrase out of one of his Virginia
romances, on the ground that it was not good English. "It's good
Virginian," he answered, "and for my purpose that is more important."
But all such defects of speech--due not to ignorance but to a charming
wilfulness--were forgotten in the music of the voices that gave them
utterance.
There are no such voices now, even in Virginia, I regret to say.
Not of their own fault, but because of contact with strangely altered
conditions, the altogether charming Virginia girls I sometimes meet
nowadays, have voices and intonations not unlike those of women in other
parts of the country, except that they preserve enough of the old lack
of emphasis upon the stronger syllables to render their speech often
difficult to understand. There is compensation for that in the gentle,
laughing readiness with which they repeat utterances not understood on
their first hearing.
XXIV
It was during the roseate years of the old Virginia life not long before
the war that I had my first and only serious experience of what is
variously and loosely called the "occult" and the "supernatural."
It is only in answer to solicitation that I tell the story here as it
has been only in response to like solicitation that I have orally told
it before.
In order that I may not be misunderstood, in order that I may not be
unjustly suspected of a credulity that does not belong to me, I wish to
say at the outset that I am by nature and by lifelong habit of mind a
skeptic. I believe in the natural order, in cause and effect, in the
material basis of psychological phenomena. I have no patience with the
mystical or the mysterious. I do not believe in the miraculous, the
supernatural, the occult--call it what you will.
And yet the experience I am about to relate is literally true, and the
story of it a slavishly faithful record of facts. I make no attempt to
reconcile those facts with my beliefs or unbeliefs. I venture upon no
effort at explanation. I have set forth above my intellectual attitude
toward all such matters; I shall set forth the facts of this experience
with equal candor. If the reader finds the facts irreconcilable with my
intellectual convictions, I must leave him to judge as he may between
the two, without aid of mine. The facts are these:
I was one of a house party, staying at one of the most hospitable
of Virginia mansions. I was by courtesy of Virginia clannishness
"cousin" to the mistress of the house, and when no house party was in
entertainment I was an intimate there, accustomed to go and come at
will and to reckon myself a member of the family by brevet.
[Sidenote: The Story of the West Wing]
At the time now considered, the house was unusually full, when a letter
came announcing the immediate coming of still other guests. In my close
intimacy with the mistress of the plantation I became aware of her
perplexity. She didn't know where and how to bestow the presently coming
guests. I suggested that I and some others should take ourselves away, a
suggestion which her hospitable soul rejected, the more particularly in
my case, perhaps, because I was actively planning certain entertainments
in which she was deeply interested. Suddenly it occurred to me that
during my long intimacy in the house I had never known anybody to occupy
the room or rooms which constituted the second story of the west wing of
the building. I asked why not bring that part of the spacious mansion
into use in this emergency, thinking that its idleness during all the
period of my intimacy there had been due only to the lack of need in a
house so large.
"Cousin Mary," with a startled look of inquiry upon her face, glanced
at her husband, who sat with us alone on a piazza.
"You may as well tell him the facts," he said in reply to the look.
"He won't talk."
Then she told me the history of the room, explaining that she objected
to any talk about it because she dreaded the suspicion of superstition.
Briefly the story was that several generations earlier, an old man
almost blind, had died there; that during his last illness he had had
his lawyer prepare his will there; that he was too feeble, when the
lawyer finished, even to sign the document; that he placed it under his
pillow; that during the night his daughter abstracted and copied it,
changing only one clause in such fashion as to defeat the long cherished
purpose of the dying man; that she placed her new draft under the pillow
where the old one had been and that in the morning the nearly blind old
man executed that instead of the other.
"Now I'm not superstitious, you know," said Cousin Mary very earnestly,
"but it is a fact that from that day to this there has been something
the matter with that room. During the time of my great uncle, who
brought me up, you know, and from whom I inherited the plantation, many
persons tried to sleep in it but none ever stayed there more than an
hour or two. They always fled in terror from the chamber, until at last
my uncle forbade any further attempt to occupy the room lest this should
come to be called a haunted house. Since I became mistress here three
persons have tried the thing, all of them with the same result."
"It's stuff and nonsense," I interposed, "but what yarns did they tell?"
"They one and all related the same singular experience," she answered,
"though neither of them knew what the experience of the others had
been."
"What was it?" I asked with resolute incredulity.
"Why, each of them went to the room in full confidence that nothing
would happen. Each went to bed and to sleep. After a while he waked to
find the whole room pervaded by a dim, yellowish gray or grayish yellow
light. Some of them used one combination of words and some the other,
but all agreed that the light had no apparent source, that it was
all-pervasive, that it was very dim at first, but that it steadily
increased until they fled in panic from its nameless terror. For ten
years we permitted no repetition of the experiment, but a year ago my
brother--he's an army officer, you know--insisted upon sleeping in the
room. He remained there longer than anybody else ever had done, but
between two and three o'clock in the morning he came down the stairs
with barely enough strength to cling to the balustrades, and in such
an ague fit as I never saw any one else endure in all my life. He had
served in the Florida swamps and was subject to agues, but for several
months before that he had been free from them. I suppose the terror
attacked his weakest point and brought the chills on again."
[Sidenote: A Challenge to the Ghosts]
"Did he have the same experience the rest had had?" I asked.
"Yes, except that he had stayed longer than any of them and suffered
more."
"Cousin Mary," I said, "I am going to sleep in that room to-night, with
your permission."
"You can't have it," she answered. "I've seen too much of the terror to
permit a further trifling with it."
"Then I'll sleep there without your permission," I answered. "I'll break
in if necessary, and I'll prove by a demonstration that nobody can
question, what nonsense all these imaginings have been."
Cousin Mary was determined, but so was I, and at last she consented
to let me make the attempt. She and I decided to keep the matter to
ourselves, but of course it leaked out and spread among all the guests
in the house. I suppose the negro servants who were sent to make up the
bed and supply bath water told. At any rate my coming adventure was the
sole topic of conversation at the supper table that night.
I seized upon the occasion to give a warning.
"I have borrowed a six-shooter from our host," I announced, "and if I
see anything to shoot at to-night I shall shoot without challenging. So
I strongly advise you fellows not to attempt any practical jokes."
The response convinced me that nothing of the kind was contemplated, but
to make sure, our host, who perhaps feared tragedy, exacted and secured
from each member of the company, old and young, male and female, a pledge
of honor that there should be no interference with my experiment, no
trespass upon my privacy.
"With that pledge secured," I said, perhaps a trifle boastfully, "I
shall stay in that room all night no matter what efforts the spooks may
make to drive me out."
It was about midnight, or nearly that, when I entered the room. It was
raining heavily without, and the wind was rattling the stout shutters of
the eight great windows of the room.
I went to each of those windows and minutely examined it. They were
hung with heavy curtains of deep red, I remember, for I observed every
detail. Four of them were in the north and four in the south wall of the
wing. The eastern wall of the room was pierced only by the broad doorway
which opened at the head of the great stairs. The door was stoutly built
of oak, and provided with a heavy lock of iron with brass knobs.
The western side of the room held a great open fireplace, from which a
paneled oaken wainscot extended entirely across the room and up to the
ceiling. Behind the wainscot on either side was a spacious closet which
I carefully explored with two lighted bedroom candles to show me that
the closets were entirely empty.
Having completed my explorations I disrobed, double-locked the door, and
went to bed, first placing the six-shooter handily under my pillow. I
do not think I was excited even in the smallest degree. My pulses were
calm, my imagination no more active than a young man's must be, and my
brain distinctly sleepy. The great, four-poster bed was inexpressibly
comfortable, and the splash and patter of the rain as it beat upon
the window blinds was as soothing as a lullaby. I forgot all about the
experiment in which I was engaged, all about ghosts and their ways,
and went to sleep.
[Sidenote: The Yellow-Gray Light]