LATE in the October vacation the tranquil routine of our household was
stirred by news of import to us children. We were to have a tutor of
our own, and a school-room under our roof in true Old Virginia style—a
fashion transplanted from the mother-country, eight generations before.
Our father “did not believe in boarding-schools,” holding that parents
shirked a sacred duty in putting the moral and mental training of their
offspring into the hands of hirelings, and sending them away from home
at the formative age, just when girls and boys are most in need of the
mother’s love and watchful care of their health and principles. Yet he
fully appreciated the deficiencies of the small private schools we had
attended, and would not hearken for a moment to the suggestion that
we should be entered as day-scholars in the “Old-Field School,” which
prefigured the Co-educational Institute of to-day. “Nice” girls and
well-born boys attended a school of this kind, and lads were prepared
for college there. The master was himself a college graduate. And the
school was within easy distance of Scottville.
“Too much of an _omnium gatherum_ to suit my taste!” I had overheard
my father say to a friend who urged the advantages of this place,
adding that B. L. was “a good teacher and fair classical scholar.” “He
may be proficient in the classics, but he spells the name of one dead
language, ‘Latten.’ I saw it in his own handwriting. I doubt not that
he can parse in that tongue. _I_ believe him capable of talking of the
‘three R’s.’ My children may never become accomplished, but they shall
be able to write and speak—and _spell_—their mother-tongue correctly!”
Besides Mea and myself there were to be in the home-class ten other
pupils, the daughters of personal friends of like mind with the
independent thinker, and my brother Herbert, lately inducted into the
integuments distinctive of his sex, was to have his trial taste of
schooling. Our mother had taught us all to read and to write before
committing our scholastic education to other hands. I fancy we may
attribute to her training in the rudiments of learning the gratifying
circumstance that one and all of her children have spelled—as did both
parents—with absolute correctness.
The big dining-room in the left wing of the rambling house to which we
had removed from Bellevue when the owner desired to take possession of
it, was to be divided by a partition into school-room and hall; a room
opening from the former would be the tutor’s chamber, and an apartment
in another wing was to be the dining-room. Among other charming changes
in house and family, Dorinda Moody, a ward of my father’s of whom I was
particularly fond, was to live with us and attend “our school.”
I trod upon air all day long, and dismissed the fairy and wonder
tales, with which I was wont to dream myself to sleep nightly, for
visions of the real and present. “Our Tutor”—a title I rolled as a
sweet morsel under my restless tongue—was a divinity student from
Union Theological Seminary, in Prince Edward County. The widow of the
founder of this school of the prophets, and the former pastor of my
parents, lived in the immediate neighborhood of the seminary, and was
the intermediary in the transaction. Through her my father was put
into communication with the faculty—scholars and gentlemen all of
them!!—who agreed in recommending the student whom I have dubbed “Mr.
Tayloe” in my _Old-Field School-Girl_. (The significance of the twin
exclamation-points will be manifest in the next few pages.)
The sun had shivered out of sight below the horizon on a raw November
day when I returned home after a tramp over soaked and sere fields,
attended by my young maid and her elder sister—“bright” mulattoes—and
was met in the end-porch by their mother, my mother’s personal
attendant and the supervisor of nursery-tenants. She was the prettiest
mulatto I have ever seen, owing her regular features and long hair, as
she was proud of telling, to an Indian ancestor. He had entailed upon
her the additional bequest of a peppery temper, and it was on deck now.
She was full of bustle and tartly consequential.
“Lordy, Miss Virginny! whar have you been traipsin’ so late with jus’
these chillun to look after you? It’s pretty nigh plum dark, an’ you, a
young lady, cavortin’ roun’ the country like a tom-boy!”
She hauled me into the house while she talked, and pulled off my shawl
and hood, scolding vehemently at the sight of my muddy shoes, and
promising Molly and Paulina a whipping apiece for not bringing me back
sooner.
I cared not one whit for her scolding after I heard the news with which
she was laden.
Mr. Tayloe had come! My dream-castle had settled into stability upon
rock bottom.
Ten minutes afterward the school-room door was pushed open timidly,
and a childish figure appeared upon the threshold. I was rather tall
for my years, and as lean and lithe as a greyhound. My touzled hair
had been wet and sleeked by Mary Anne’s vigorous fingers. I wore a
brown “Circassian” frock and a spandy clean white apron. The room was
comfortably furnished with desks and chairs, now pushed to the wall,
the carpeted area about the hearth being intended as a sitting-room for
the tutor. There were a table, a desk, and four or five chairs. The
room was bright with lamp and firelight. In front of the red hearth sat
my father and a much smaller man.
His diminutive stature was the first of a series of shocks I was
destined to receive. I had expected him to be tall and stately.
Village wags—with none of whom he was popular—spread the story that he
intermitted his studies for a year in the hope that in the interim he
might grow tall enough to see over the front of a pulpit.
My father looked over his shoulder and held out his hand.
“Come in, my daughter,” in kindly, hearty accents. And, as I obeyed,
“Mr. Tayloe, this is my second daughter—Miss Mary Virginia.”
The hero of my dreams did not rise. There was naught amiss or unusual
in the manner of the introduction. I was “Miss Virginia” to men of my
father’s age, as to youths and boys. I was used to see them get up from
their seats to speak to me, as to a woman of treble my years. I looked,
then, almost aghast at the man who let me walk up to him and offer
my hand before he made any motion in recognition of the unimportant
fact of my presence. His legs were crossed; his hands, the palms laid
lightly together, were tucked between his legs. He pulled one out to
meet mine, touched my fingers coldly, and tucked both hands back as
before.
“How do you do, Mr. Tayloe?” quoth I, primly respectful, as I had been
trained to comport myself with strangers.
He grunted something syllabic in response, and, chilled to the backbone
of my being, I retreated to the shadow of my father’s broad shoulder.
He passed his arm about me and stroked what he used to call my
“Shetland pony mane.” He seldom praised any one of us openly, but he
was a fond father, and he and the “tom-boy” were close comrades.
“I hope you will not find this young lady stupid, Mr. Tayloe,” he went
on, the strong, tender hand still smoothing the rebellious locks. “She
is a bit flighty sometimes, but she has packed away a good deal of
miscellaneous information in this curly pate. I hope she may become a
steady student under your care. What she needs is application.”
Receiving no answer beyond a variation of the grunt, the tutor staring
all the time into the heart of the fire, the dear man went on to tell
of books that had been read aloud in the family, as a supplementary
course to what we had learned in school, referring to me now and then
when he did nor recall title or subject. I fancy, now, that he did this
to rid us both of the embarrassment of the first interview, and to draw
out the taciturn stranger who was to guide my mind in future. Loyal
as was my worshipful admiration of my father, I could not but feel,
although I could not have formulated the thought, that the trend of
talk was not tactful.
Nevertheless, I glowed inwardly with indignation that the third person
present never once took his eyes from the roaring fire, and that his
face, round, fair, and almost boyish in contour, wore a slight smile,
rather supercilious than amused, his brows knitting above the smile in
a fashion I was to know more of in the next ten months.
I have drawn Mr. Tayloe’s portrait at full length in _An Old-Field
School-Girl_, and I need not waste time and nervous tissue in
repetition of the unlovely picture. He was the Evil Genius of my
childhood, and the term of his tutelage may be called the dark
underside of an otherwise happy school-life. Looking back from the
unclouded heights of mature age, I see that my childish valuation of
him was correct. He was, in his association with all without the walls
of the school-room—always excepting the servants, who took his measure
amazingly soon—a gentleman in bearing and speech. He was, I have heard,
well-born. He had gained rank as a student in the university of which
he was a graduate.
At heart and in grain he was a coarse, cruel tyrant, beloved by none of
his pupils, hated by my brother Herbert and myself with an intensity
hardly conceivable in children of our tender years. I owe him one
evil debt I can never forget. Up to now I had had my little gusts of
temper and fleeting grudges against those who angered me. Save for the
episode of the doll-whipping recorded in an earlier chapter, I had
never cherished—if I had felt—an emotion of vindictiveness or a desire
for revenge. This man—this embryo minister of the gospel of love and
peace—aroused in me passions that had slumbered unsuspected by all—most
of all, by myself.
From the beginning he disliked me. Perhaps because he chose to assume,
from the manner of my introduction to him, that I was a spoiled,
conceited child who ought to be “taken down.” Perhaps because, while I
flushed up hotly under rebuke and sarcasms that entered lavishly into
the process of “taking down,” I never broke down abjectly under these,
after the manner of other pupils. Our father had the true masculine
dislike for womanish tears. He had drilled us from babyhood to restrain
the impulse to cry. Many a time I was sent from the table or room when
my eyes filled, with the stern injunction, “Go to your room and stay
there until you can control yourself!” I thought it harsh treatment,
then. I have thanked and blessed him for the discipline a thousand
times since. Our tutor, I verily believed then, and I do not doubt now,
gloated in the sight of the sufferings wrought by his brutality. I can
give it no milder name. I have seen him smile—a tigerish gleam—when he
had scolded the ten outsiders—the “_externes_,” as the French call
them—into convulsive weeping. Mea and I felt the lash of his tongue
quite as keenly as the rest, but our home-drill stood us in good stead.
He rarely found fault with her. She was a comely girl, nearly fourteen,
and womanly for that age, exemplary in deportment, and an excellent
student. It could never be said of her that she “lacked application.”
If one thing were more hateful to me than his surliness and sneers to
me, it was his cubbish gallantry to my pretty sister. He pronounced
her openly the most promising of his scholars, and volunteered to give
her private lessons in botany. Such tokens of preference may have been
the proof of a nascent attachment on his part, or but another of his
honorable ways of amusing himself. It was a genuine comfort to me to
see that she met his gallantries with quiet self-possession and cool
indifference remarkable in a country girl who knew nothing of “society”
and flirtation.
I was the black sheep of the flock, as he took pains to say twice or
a dozen times a week, in the hearing of the school. To me he imparted
privately the agreeable information that I “would never be anything
but a disgrace to my parents; that, in spite of what my father might
say to the contrary, I was stupid by nature and incorrigibly lazy.”
He rang the changes upon that first unfortunate interview until I was
goaded to dumb frenzy. The persecution, begun with the opening day of
the term, was never abated. He would overhear from his chamber window
snatches of talk between my mates and myself, as we played or sat in
the garden below—merry, flippant nothings, as harmless as the twitter
of the birds in the trees over our heads. When we were reassembled
in the school-room he would make my part in the prattle the text of
a lecture ten minutes long, holding the astonished, quivering child
up to ridicule, or stinging her to the quick with invectives. When he
lost his temper—which happened often—he spared nobody. He went out of
his way to attack me. Lest this should read like the exaggeration of
fancied slights to the self-willed, pert youngling he believed me to
be, let me cull one or two sprigs of rue from the lush growth that
embittered ten months of my existence:
I cut my finger to the bone one morning (I carry the scar still). My
mother bound it up in haste, for the school-bell was ringing. I got
into my seat just in time for the opening exercises. A chapter was
read—verse by verse—in turn by the pupils, after which the prospective
divine “offered” a prayer. He stood with his eyes shut and his forehead
knitted into a frown. We knelt with our backs to him before our chairs
around the room. It seems but natural to me, in reflecting upon that
perfunctory “exercise,” that our reading “in course” should never,
during Mr. Tayloe’s reign, have gone beyond the Old Testament. We read
that exactly as it came—word for word. There was nothing of the New
Testament in his walk or conversation.
On this day we had a chapter in Kings—First or Second—in which occurred
a verse my father would have skipped quietly at our family worship.
Sarah L. was the biggest girl in the class—in her sixteenth year, and
quite grown up. She dexterously slipped past the bit of Bible history,
taking the next verse, as if by accident.
“Go back and read your verse!” thundered the young theologue. “I will
have no false modesty in my school.”
My cheeks flamed as redly with anger as Sarah’s had with maiden shame,
as I followed suit with the next passage. I resented the coarse insult
to a decent girl, and the manner thereof. I was faint with the pain of
the wounded finger, and altogether so unnerved that my voice shook and
fell below the pitch at which we were taught to read aloud.
Out barked the bulldog again over the top of the open Bible he held:
“What ails Miss High-and-Mighty to-day? In one of your tantrums, I see.
Read that verse again, and loud enough to be heard by somebody besides
your charming self!”
Where—will be asked by the twentieth-century reader—was parental
affection all this while? How could a fearless gentleman like your
father submit for an hour to the maltreatment of his young daughter and
the daughters of friends who confided in his choice of a tutor?
My answer is direct. We never reported the worst of our wrongs to
our parents. To “tell tales out of school” in that generation was
an offence the enormity of which I cannot make the modern student
comprehend. It was a flagrant misdemeanor, condemned by tradition, by
parental admonition, and by a code of honor accepted by us all. I have
known pupils to be expelled for daring to report at home the secrets
of what was a prison-house for three-fourths of every working-day.
And—strangest of all—their mates thenceforward shunned the tale-tellers
as sinners against scholastic and social laws.
“If you get a flogging at school, you will get another at home!” was a
stock threat that set the seal of silence upon the culprit’s lips. To
carry home the tale of unjust punishment meted out to a school-fellow
would be a gross breach of honorable usage.
The whole system smacked of inquisitorial methods, and gave the
reactionary impetus to the pendulum in the matter of family discipline
and school jurisdiction which helped on the coming of the Children’s
Age in which we now live.
The despotism of that direful period, full of portents and pain, may
have taught me fortitude. It awoke me to the possibilities of evil
hitherto undreamed of in my sunny life. I have lain awake late into the
night, again and again, smarting in the review of the day’s injuries,
and dreading what the morrow might bring of malicious injustice and
overt insult, and cudgelling my hot brain to devise some method of
revenge upon my tormentor. Childish schemes, all of them, but the
noxious seed was one with that which ripens into murder in the first
degree.
One absurd device that haunted and tempted me for weeks was that I
should steal into the tutor’s room some day, when he had gone to ride
or walk, and strew chopped horsehair between the sheets. The one
obstacle to the successful prosecution of the scheme was that we had
no white horses. Ours were dark bay and “blooded chestnut.” No matter
how finely I might chop the hairs, which would prick like pins and bite
like fleas, the color would make them visible when the sheets were
turned down.
It was a _crime_!—this initiation of a mere infant into the mysteries
of the innate possibilities of evil in human nature. I had learned
to _hate_ with all my heart and soul. In all my childish quarrels I
had never felt the temptation to lift my hand against a playmate. I
understood now that I could smite this tyrant to the earth if I had the
power and the opportunity. This lesson I can never forget, or forgive
him who taught it to me. It was a new and a soiled page in the book of
experience.
Despite the continual discouragement that attended the effort to keep
my promise to study diligently, I worked hard in school, partly from
love of learning, partly to please my parents—chiefly, it must be
confessed, because I shrank, as from the cut of a cowhide, from the
pitiless ridicule and abuse that followed upon the least lapse from
absolute perfection in recitation.
Mathematics was never my strong point, and the tutor quickly detected
this one of many weak joints in my armor. There was meaning in the grin
with which he informed me one day, not long after Christmas, that he
had set a test-sum for each of the second class in arithmetic.
“If you can do that sum without, any, help, from, anybody,” slowly,
the grin widening at each comma, “you may go on with the next chapter
in arithmetic. If not, you will be turned back to Simple Division. Of
course, _you_ will do yours, if nobody else can work out the answer!”
Sneer and taunt stung and burned, as he meant they should. I took the
slate from his hand, and carried it to my desk before glancing at it.
It was a _horrible_ sum! I knew it would be, and I forthwith made up my
mind not to try to do it. He might turn me back to Addition, for all I
cared. The worm had turned and stiffened in stubborn protest.
At recess I discovered that not another girl of the six in our class
had an imposition half so severe as my enemy had set for me. The effect
was totally unlike what he had anticipated. My spirit leaped to arms. I
would do that sum and keep up with my class—or _die_!
I bore the slate off to my room as soon as school was out that
afternoon, and wrought mightily upon the task until the supper-bell
rang. My work covered both sides of the slate, and after supper I
waylaid my sister in the hall and begged her to look at what I had
done. She was the crack arithmetician of the school, and I could trust
her decision. She sat down upon the stairs—I standing, wretched and
suspenseful, beside her—and went patiently over it all.
Then she said, gently and regretfully: “No, it is not right. I can’t,
of course, tell you what is wrong, but you have made a mistake.”
With a hot lump in my throat I would not let break into tears, I rushed
off up-stairs, rubbed out every figure of my making, and fell to work
anew upon the original example. Except when I obeyed the summons
to prayers, I appeared no more below that night. My sister found me
bent over the slate when she came up to bed, and said not a word to
distract my attention. By ten o’clock the room was so cold that I got
an old Scotch plaid of my father’s from the closet, and wrapped myself
in it. Still, my limbs were numb and my teeth chattered when, at _one
o’clock_ in the morning, I laid the slate by, in the joyous conviction
that I had conquered in the fight. I had invented a proof-method of
my own—truly ingenious in a child with no turn for mathematics—but
this I did not suspect. I honestly believed, instead, that it was an
inspiration from Him to whom I had been praying through all the hours
of agonized endeavor. I thanked the Author before I slept.
When the class was called upon to show their sums next morning, it
appeared, to my unspeakable amazement and rapture, that my example and
one other—that done by Sarah L., who was backward in figures, although
advanced in years—were right, and all the others wrong.
The gentle shepherd of our fold took up my slate again when the
examination was over, and eyed it sourly, his head on one side, his
fingers plucking at his lower lip, a trick which I knew prefaced
something particularly spiteful. Surely I had nothing to fear now?
Having wrung from him the reluctant admission that my work was correct,
I might rest upon my laurels.
I had underrated his capacity for evil-doing. When he glared at me over
the upper frame of the big slate, the too-familiar heart-nausea got
hold upon me.
“_You_”—he seldom deigned to address me by my proper name—“pretend to
tell me that nobody helped you with this sum?”
“Nobody!” I uttered, made bold by innocence.
“Ha-a-a-a!” malevolence triumphant in the drawl waxing into a snarl.
“As I happened to see you and your sister last night in the hall, and
heard you ask her to show you how to do it, that tale won’t go down, my
lady.”
“She didn’t help me—” I began, eagerly.
“_Silence!_” thumping the slate upon the table, and scowling
ferociously. “How dare you _lie_ to me?”
I glanced at Mea in an agony. She arose in her place, pale to the lips,
albeit she had never felt his wrath, but her voice was firm:
“I only told her the sum was not right. I did not tell her what part of
it was wrong.”
The blending of snarl and smile was something to be recollected for all
time. The smile was for her, the snarl for me.
“It is natural that your sister should try to defend you. But will you
please tell me, Miss Pert, what more help you could have wanted than
to be told by somebody who knew—as your sister did—that your sum was
wrong? Of course, you could rub out and begin again. But for her you
would not have tried a second time. Bring that sponge here!”