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MR. & MRS. SÊN
By LOUISE JORDAN MILN
Author of
“Mr. Wu,” “The Feast of Lanterns,” “The
Green Goddess,” etc.
“The heyday of a great spirit knows no passing.”
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Published by arrangement with Frederick A. Stokes Company
Printed in U. S. A.
_Copyright, 1923, by_
Fredrick A. Stokes Company
* * * * *
_All rights reserved_
_Printed in the United States of America_
TO
MALCOLM MURREE MILN
FROM
HIS MOTHER
MR. AND MRS. SÊN
CHAPTER I
In this day of kaleidoscopic changes, of brand-new ultra “smartness,” of
emancipations so tremendous, so upheaving, so incalculably far-reaching
that to some they almost seem to forecast the end of all things, still
there are old bulwarks of customs, of character, of individualities and
of life itself that neither change nor are changed. The Townsends of
Virginia are today just what they were long before 1776.
There is only one of them left—Miss Julia—but she is they—the
Townsends of Virginia; gracious, unapproachable, deft in a small,
delicate way with her harpsichord, accomplished at her jellies, proud of
her naperies, tyrannous and over-indulgent to her darkies, a fine judge
of horseflesh, sure of herself, doubtful of you—unless your forebears
of the same “first-families” caste as hers, had been born, had wived and
begotten and borne, as hers invariably had, in Virginia—a stanch
Episcopalian, refined to the _n_th degree, intolerant, sentimental—but
too proud, and of too good form, to own or to show it—exclusive,
generous—except of her acquaintance and in her opinions—a writer of
feeble verses, brilliant along her own selected and approved lines, dull
and ill-informed on all others, autocratic and secretly supersensitive,
a _gourmet_ who ate very little, an expert judge of good wines who
rarely drank them—buttermilk was her one creature weakness—charitable
(although she was poorly enough off—had to count her dimes, and
couldn’t count with even pretense at accuracy)—charitable to every
“good work” she approved of or hungry creature that came to her back
door, relentlessly uncharitable to any cause she did not sympathize with
and to any “beggar” who presumed at her front door.
Rosehill, the home she lived in, had more and finer magnolias than it
had roses, but a great many and very beautiful roses grew at Rosehill.
And in August you could smell the musk and the heliotrope right across
the Potomac.
The exterior of the old red-brick “mansion” was beautiful only because
so many had loved it, because birth, bridal and death so often had
hallowed it, and because so many beautiful things grew about it, some of
them nailed up on its mellowed red walls, some climbing there needing no
nailing, for their young tendrils loved every tiny chink that time had
furrowed in those old bricks.
Rosehill was on the river-edge of Virginia, only a pleasant jaunt from
Washington, but it _was_ Virginia. In the core of the old virgin state
itself the Civil War had ruined or wrenched from them every holding the
Townsends ever had had. But Rosehill remained to the Southern general’s
widow, and here she had come with the two children the war had left her,
and lived in it bitterly enough to the hour of her death, but had kept
her Virginian state as far as she could with an altered purse in an
altered country, and modifying in nothing her Virginian ways or manner
of life. And here Julia Townsend had grown up and lived serenely enough,
for she had been in her cradle when Lee faced Appomattox, and she
remembered no other home. She inherited and kept all her mother’s
prejudices, but little of her mother’s bitterness. She even pitied all
Northerners more than she disliked them. She never by any chance broke
Northern bread, but now and then she permitted some distinguished few of
them to break her bread—a little “below the salt,” but graciously. But
no denizen of the White House could win through her gates, and she’d
have eaten crusts in a thieves’ kitchen, or, if it comes to that,
brimstone in a place and company she was too refined ever to mention,
far more willingly and with far less sense of degradation, than she
would have eaten or drunk at the White House, or soiled the sole of her
shoe on its carpets.
Her purse, such thin thing as it was, had freely been at the service of
Grover Cleveland’s election war-chest—but she never had received him.
The successor in Union office of Abraham Lincoln could not visit Julia
Townsend. But, beyond the stigma of “Union” the chief executive of these
United States was sunk even lower in the proud, unwavering estimate of
Julia Calhoun Townsend: on some days of his administration the President
of the United States received—he had to—_any_ citizen who chose and
made it convenient to file past him, had to receive and shake by the
hand. President Cleveland might have no escape from shaking hands with
his own negro coachman! True—Julia Townsend had lived and thrived for
nine months at the breast of a negro woman, rather darker of skin, as it
chanced, than Mr. Cleveland’s colored coachman—but that was different.
It was _done_ in Virginia, and though Mrs. Townsend had cried her heart
(and her rage) out on the same faithful black breast, she never had
shaken hands with her; neither she nor any other Townsend had ever done
such a thing—or could have done. You might (in her creed of caste)
caress a negro, you could not greet one on such show of social parity as
the shaking of hands implied; you might befriend them—clearly that was
your duty, and no Townsend ever shirked a duty; you could accept their
service to the last strain of their muscle, the last drop of red in
their veins; even, if you were a man, you might mingle the blood in your
blue veins with their blood—but you did not drink tea with them, or
shake their hands. This last branch of the subject—perhaps most
conveniently called the mulatto-quadroon-and-such branch, was one upon
which Miss Townsend never spoke and preferred not to think; but she was
quite familiar with it, and accepted it with a caste-complaisance that
completely and permanently anesthetized, even if it had not killed, as
probably it had, any moral revulsion, or, less than revulsion,
criticism. She accepted it easily and naturally as she did all else that
the “first families” had done since Raleigh named Virginia after
Elizabeth until now, long after War’s terrible arbitrament had made the
proud virgin state a desolation and a memory. At the thought that
President Cleveland might have had to shake a negro “citizen” by the
hand, her nostril quivered, her spleen rose, and her old soul stiffened.
She pitied Mr. Cleveland—a man she respected for much—but the dire
possible official necessity had made it forever impossible that Grover
Cleveland’s hand should ever touch the hand of Julia Calhoun Townsend.
During one administration, a Republican administration, the unspeakable
thing actually happened. And the mistress of Rosehill chuckled. She was
glad. The President’s wife, as determined a creature in her way as ever
her soldier had been in his, and far quicker of temper, one morning for
his impertinence summarily discharged her colored coachman, and that
same afternoon the dismissed negro turned up in the line of citizens
that filed past the President in the Blue Room, and held out a hand that
the President had to clasp—and did—probably did with an inward chuckle
of his own, for he himself had sometimes something to endure from his
wife’s metal. _She_ was furious. The story wild-fired through
Washington, it crossed the Potomac long before sunset, reached Miss
Townsend in her rose-and-magnolia-bound fastness, and gave her more
pleasure than she often had known. Ulysses Grant may live longer and
stronger in history than Grover Cleveland. But Grant was a Republican,
had fought Lee, and had presumed to defeat him. Julia Townsend chuckled
wickedly, and drank wine, quite a small glassful of a priceless vintage,
at her solitary supper that night.
She had been but a girl still during the Cleveland and Grant
administrations, but a girl with all a woman’s venom in her hot Southern
heart. And she had come into her heritage—such as the War had left
it—in her motherless girlhood; for the mother had not lived many years
after the defeat of the Confederacy. Hate killed her. The men of the
South forgave. The women could not—some of them have not even yet.
If Rosehill was but on the edge of Virginia, and a little discounted by
its too-nearness to the disloyal capital from which only the river saved
it and to which Long Bridge linked it, and lay not far from Arlington,
where the “blue” slept as well as the sainted “gray” and many civilians
stanchly Northerners, it was no alien or unsuitable residence for a
Townsend. Townsends had owned it for more than a century. A Townsend had
built the house. Only Townsends ever had lived in it. Miss Julia had
inherited it from her mother, for the mother had been born a Townsend
and had married a second cousin. Julia Townsend had a double right to
all the Townsend traits and possessions. Those possessions, great once,
had dwindled now to Rosehill and a narrow (even for one) income, but the
traits flourished and were strong, and Julia had her full double share
of them. The dwindled and still dwindling income scarcely sufficed for
the decent upkeeping of the simple old place, and the quiet old
gentlewoman; but they managed—Rosehill, Miss Julia Townsend and her
negroes: Rosehill flaunted its flowers, the darkies obeyed their
imperious, kindly ole’ missus, and Julia Townsend wore her poverty as a
duchess is supposed to wear her own ermine and her husband’s strawberry
leaves—and usually doesn’t.
Social Washington courted Miss Townsend—partly because she was well
worth courting, partly because she rather despised it, not a little
because, when she did offer hospitality, her “parties” were the
pleasantest functions that ever came the capital’s way.
You couldn’t “drop in” on Miss Julia—no matter who you were or why you
came. Her kitchen door was always on the latch. Her front door was
guarded stiffly. Into no function of hers could you penetrate casually.
You were hopelessly debarred unless she had sent you “a card” of
invitation—which was a card only in name. She invariably wrote the
“cards” herself, in her fine spidery hand, on sheets of cream-smooth,
velvet-thick paper, scorning the modernity of engraved invitations. If
she consented to receive you at all, she paid you the compliment of
telling you so in her own handwriting, which not only saved the expense
of engraving, and seemed to her more befitting her dignity, but filled
considerable time for her with an occupation she much enjoyed. Her
hair-line handwriting was peculiarly beautiful, and she delighted both
in producing it and in displaying it. Julia Townsend had many vanities.
But they all were innocent ones, and womanly. And, if her avoidance of
engraved “At Home” cards was one of her many economies, it was (and her
others were not) an accidental one. And her note-paper was a proud
extravagance. Only the best paper was good enough, she thought, to
record the honor of an invitation accorded from Rosehill, or to be
embellished with such beautiful writing as hers.
On “Second Thursdays,” as her visiting cards indicated in the lower
left-hand corner—her visiting cards were engraved—Miss Townsend was
“At Home,” but it was for no one to venture to call unless Miss Townsend
had “left cards” upon you. She called on no one; but once a month,
unless it was Lent, “Uncle Lysander,” dressed in his speckless best,
crossed the river and, with much ceremony and many bows, left a card of
his mistress’s upon those in the capital whom she cared to honor with
her acquaintance. And if such favor had not been shown you, you might be
very sure that you could induce Uncle Lysander neither to announce you
to Miss Townsend’s presence, nor to admit you inside her front door on a
second Thursday, or at any other time. A woman of very high Washington
social rank once had brought with her to a garden party at Rosehill,
without permission or invitation, an English Countess who was staying
with her. Miss Townsend had received Lady Haverhill graciously, had
chanced to like, and approve, her cordially, had sent cards to her—by
Lysander—and, when the Englishwoman had moved into quarters of her own
at Willard’s, had invited her to dinner. But Mrs. Wentworth never again
received a card of Miss Julia Townsend’s or admission to Rosehill. You
had to be very careful indeed with Miss Julia—if you wished to retain
her acquaintance. Even to men she indicated her willingness to receive
them by means of a card and Uncle Lysander. Women in Washington did not,
as a rule, leave visiting cards for their men friends. Miss Townsend saw
fit to: that was sufficient.
Except for her servants she lived quite alone in the old red-brick
house. At the close of the war they had been three—the mother and two
daughters. But Mrs. Townsend had died and Clara, the elder girl, had
done something very much worse.
Clara had been twenty when the guns had spit at Fort Sumter. Julia had
been born on the day of the first Battle of Bull Run. Of their four
brothers two—the twins—had been a little older than Clara, the other
two, one a year, one two years younger. Naturally all four had fought
for the Southern Cause. Three had fallen, as their father had, in
battle; Rupert, the youngest, had died in a Northern prison. If Ruth
Townsend had been without reasonableness in her hatred of the North, she
had not been without cause.
But it was Clara Townsend—who lived even now, though whether she did or
not her sister did not know and did not perhaps care—who had killed
their mother. The death of a man, in battle, with his face to the foe
and his breast set square to the guns, rarely kills a woman who loves
him. Clara had married a man who had worn not a gray but a blue uniform
in the terrible fratricidal war—a runaway marriage, of course. None
other had been possible. The mother never had mentioned her name again;
even the darkies who had adored her never whispered her name among
themselves—not even the “mammy” who had suckled her—they were far too
ashamed of her. And Julia, a baby still at the close of the war, soon
after which it had happened, had no memory of her sister.
Almost from her birth Miss Julia had lived a solitary life. She kept her
life aired, even somewhat sunned, but she shared it, or her self, with
none. Every one in Washington knew her, or tried to; and she knew every
one whom she considered worth knowing, or deserving it—rather different
things sometimes—but she had no intimates. She lived apart.
The three persons who came nearest to intimacy with Miss Julia Townsend,
so near it indeed that she had accorded them all permission to “come and
see me whenever you like,” were about the last people in Washington
society—needless to say they were in it—whom one might have expected
her to accept, let alone welcome.
They, as it happened, as yet were unacquainted, each with the others.
Miss Julia’s most nearly intimate friends, and the three she best liked,
were: a woman physician who, though of high Southern birth, had, like
the not-to-be-named sister Clara, disgraced herself by becoming the wife
of a Northern man; an English girl of no social position, beyond that of
a nursery governess who chanced to be a relative of her titled
employers; and a young man, in a minor and rather hazy position at one
of the legations—a Chinese.