EVEN at that period, when I visited my father’s Northern kindred,
I failed to bring them to a right comprehension of the frank, and
oftentimes intimate, relations existing between the young people of
both sexes in my Virginia home. I have marvelled within myself since,
how these relations came to be established at the first. We brought
to the New World, and retained, scores of English customs of domestic
management, and traditions of social obligations. It was never the
fashion in England, or in her Northern colonies, for boys to begin
“visiting the young ladies” before they discarded roundabouts, and to
keep up the fascinating habit until they tottered into the grave at
fourscore. For the same dozen young fellows to call at least once a
week upon as many young girls; to read, chat, jest, flirt, drive, ride,
and walk with them, month after month, and year after year, perhaps
choosing one of the dozen as a lifelong partner, and quite as often
running off for a season to another county or State, and bringing home
a wife, with whom the philosophic coterie speedily got acquainted
amiably, widening the circle to take her in, with never a thought of
chagrin.
The thumbnail sketches I have jotted down in my “purposeful” chapter,
bring in the same names, again and again. They were, indeed, and in
truth, household words. None of the young men and maidens catalogued
in the Christmas doggerel I shall speak of, presently, intermarried.
Two—perhaps four—had secret intentions that tended toward such a
result in the fulness of time. Intentions, that interfered in nowise
with their participation in the general hilarity. If there were any
difference in the demeanor of the engaged, or partially betrothed,
pairs from the behavior of the fancy-free, it was in a somewhat too
obvious show of impartiality. Engagements were never “announced,” and
if suspected, were ignored in general society. Thus it often happened
that a direct proposal took a girl utterly by surprise.
I was but sixteen, and on a summer vacation in Albemarle County,
when a collegian of nineteen, who was swinging me “under green apple
boughs”—lazily, because the rapid rush through the air would interfere
with the chat we were carrying on, in full sight of groups scattered on
the porch steps and about the lawn—brought down my thoughts—which had
strayed far afield under the influence of the languorous motion, the
sunset and the soft mingling of young voices—with stunning velocity,
by declaring that he adored me, and “couldn’t keep it to himself any
longer.”
With never the suspicion of a blush, I looked him straight in the eyes
and begged him not to make a goose of himself, adding: “I didn’t think
you mistook me for a girl who enjoys that kind of badinage. It is not a
bit to my taste. And we have been such good friends!”
When he suffocated himself dangerously with protestations that actually
brought tears to his eyes, I represented that lookers-on would think
we had quarrelled if I left the swing and his society abruptly, as I
certainly should do if he did not begin to talk sensibly, out of hand.
I set the example by calling to a boy who was passing with a basket of
apples, and calmly selecting one, taking my time in doing it.
Coquetry? Not a bit of it! I liked the lad too well to allow him to
make a breach in our friendship by love-making. When he came to his
senses (four years later!) he thanked me for not taking the matter
seriously.
We gave, and attended, few large parties. But there were no dead calms
in our intercourse. Somebody was always getting up a frolic of some
sort. Tableaux, musicales, “sociables,” where, in Christmas week,
and sometimes at other times, we played old-fashioned games, such as
“Consequences” upon slips of paper, and “Kings of England” with cards,
and “What is my thought like?” _viva voce_. We had picnics in warm
weather. Richmond College boys invited us out to receptions following
orations on February 22d, and we had Valentine parties, with original
verses, on February 14th.
Nowhere, and at no time, was there romping. Still less would
kissing-games be allowed among really “nice” young people. This was
deemed incredible by my Boston cousins, and yet more strange the fact
that we kept up among ourselves decorous conventions that appeared
stiff and inconsistent to those not to the manor born and bred. For
example, while I might, and did, name our most intimate masculine
visitors, “Tom,” “Dick,” or “Harry” in chat with my girl friends, I
addressed them as “Mr. Smith,” “Jones,” or “Robinson,” and always spoke
of them in the same manner in mentioning them to strangers. For a man
to touch a lady’s arm or shoulder to attract her attention, was an
unpardonable liberty. If a pair were seen to “hold hands,” it was taken
for granted that they were engaged or—as I heard a matron say, when she
had surprised a couple walking in the moonlight, the fair one’s hand on
the swain’s arm, and his laid lightly upon it—“they ought to be.”
The well-bred girl of the fifties might be a rattle; she might
enjoy life with guileless abandon that earned her the reputation of
“dashing”; she parried shaft of teasing and badinage with weapons
of proof; but she was never “fast.” She kept her self-respect, and
challenged the reverent respect of the men who knew her best.
To this code of social and ceremonial ethics, and to the ban put upon
dancing and card-playing by church and parents, is undoubtedly due the
fact that Southern women of that generation were almost invariably what
we would call, “good talkers.” In the remembrance, and in contrasting
that all-so-long-ago with the times in which we live, I could write a
jeremiade upon “Conversation as a Lost Art.”
From the list of names drawn into line by some Yule-tide rhymes of
my own, bearing the date of “1852,” I single two that must have
more than a passing notice if I would write the true story of my
threescore-and-ten years.
Mary Massie Ragland was, at that Christmas-tide, twenty-two years of
age. I had liked and admired her from the first. In time she grew into
a place in my heart no other friend had ever held, and which, left
vacant by her death six years later, has never been taken. I think no
man or woman has more than one complete, all-satisfying friendship in
a lifetime. Her portrait hangs against the wall in my bedchamber now.
I awake each morning to meet her gaze bent, as in life, on mine. In
sorrow and in joy, I have gone secretly to my room, as to an oratory,
to seek in the depths of the beautiful eyes the sympathy never denied
while she was with me, and visible to my dull vision. To a mind stored
richly with the best literature, eager to acquire and faithful to
retain, she added exquisite fancies, poetic tastes, and love for the
beautiful that was a passion. Her heart was warm, deep, tender, and
true. It well-nigh breaks mine in remembering _how_ true! In all the
ten years in which we lived and loved together in closest intimacy, not
a cloud ever crossed the heaven of our friendship.
One remark, uttered simply and with infinite gentleness by her, after
a great loss had chastened her buoyant spirits, stands with me as the
keynote to action and character.
I was commenting somewhat sharply upon my disappointment in not
meeting, from one whom I loved and trusted, the fulness of sympathy I
thought I had a right to expect in what was a genuine trial to myself.
“She was hard and critical!” I moaned. “You saw it, yourself! You
cannot deny it! And she was absolutely rude to _you_!”
“Dear!” The stroking fingers upon my bowed head were a benediction; the
sweet voice was eloquent with compassion. “Don’t judge her harshly!
She is _good_, and true to you and to the right. But she has never had
sorrow to make her tender.”
How boundless was the tenderness, my mentor, who comforted while she
admonished, learned in the school of pain in which she studied until
Death dismissed her spirit, was fully known to Him alone whose faithful
disciple she was to the end.
To the world she showed a smiling front; her merry laugh and ready
repartee were the life of whatever company she entered, and over and
through it all, it might be reverently said of the true, heroic soul,
that, to high and humble, “her compassions failed not.”
“Refined by nature and refined by grace!” said one above her coffin.