I greatly fear that when I stated, somewhere in the course of the
foregoing narrative, that I had firmly resolved to exclude love-making
from its pages,—I greatly fear that none of my readers gave me credit
for sincerity. Yet it was not a stroke of Bushwhackerish humor; I was in
sober earnest, and was never more convinced than at this moment of the
folly of breaking my original resolution. Here I am with three pairs of
lovers on my hands,—all sighing like very furnaces—I, who am quite
incapable of managing one couple. I suppose I have only myself to blame.
I assembled a number of young Virginians in a country house. I should
have known better. Yet, when I brought them together, it was an
understood thing (on my part, at least) that there was to be no
nonsense.
The truth is, I think I have a just right to complain of my characters.
I had a little story to tell,—the simplest in the world—the merest
monograph,—and I introduced the main body of my personages as a
setting, merely; just as a jeweller surrounds a choice stone with small
pearls to bring its color into fuller relief.
And here they are, upsetting everything.
Look at Billy, for instance. I could not have gotten on at all without
him. In the first place, no Christmas party at Elmington could have been
complete without him and his jovial laugh. It would have been against
all nature not to have invited him, and equally against Billy’s nature
to have stayed away. But as ill luck would have it, his girl, though of
a different county, must needs be of the party; but I, knowing nothing
of this, caused him to gallop up to the Hall, that cold Christmas Eve,
simply that he might enliven the company with his “Arkansas Traveller”
and the rest of his not very classic repertoire, and still more by his
memorable dive under the table. Now I like my Billy; but his loves are
not to our purpose. And so—for I cannot have the course of my story
marred any longer by his antics—I have shipped him off to the
University. Imagine him bursting into No. 28, East Lawn, and shaking his
room-mate’s hand to the verge of dislocation. Five or six cronies have
crowded in to welcome the truant back (writhing, each in turn, under the
grasp of his obtrusively honest hand).
“No, Tom, you need not take that old gourd out of the box. My fiddling
days are over.”
“What!” exclaimed an indignant chorus.
“Come back solemn?” asked Tom. “Bad luck?”
Billy colored a little. “Solemn? Not I. But oh, boys, I have such a
story to tell you! You like to hear _me_ scrape,—wh-e-e-w!”
“What is it?”
Jones threw back his head and gave a roar as though Niagara laughed.
While he is telling the story of his discomfiture we will take our leave
of him; for as soon as the chorus have departed, he will begin to tell
his friend Tom about his girl, and we have no time to listen to any more
of that. But he is such a good fellow that I think we may forgive him
the delay his loves have cost us.
It is somewhat harder to pardon Charley’s falling in love so
inopportunely; but even as to him my heart relents when I remember that
it was his first offence, and how penitent, how sheepish, even, were his
looks, whenever I alluded to his fall. Let him go on casting out of the
corners of his eyes timid, admiring glances at the inimitable Alice;
drinking in deep, intoxicating draughts of her merry, laughter-spangled
talk; happy in her presence; in her absence fiercely wondering why, in
this otherwise wisely-ordered world (as we Virginians have been taught
to believe it), he alone was a stammering idiot. Let all this go on, and
more; but as with Jones, so with Charley, their loves must equally be
brushed from the path of this story.
The case of lover No. 3 presents greater difficulties. When I recall
certain passages of the preceding narrative, I am forced to acknowledge
that, in the case of the Don, I have unwittingly entered into an implied
obligation to my readers. Unwittingly, for I solemnly assure them that
when (for instance) I described the gallant rescue of Alice and Lucy by
the stalwart stranger, it did not so much as cross my mind what tacit
promise I thereby held out. Had I been a novel-writer or even a
novel-reader, instead of the philosopher and bushwhacker that I am, it
could not have escaped me that by suffering two of my heroines to be
valiantly rescued from deadly peril by a handsome, nay, a mysterious and
hence painfully interesting young man, I had, in effect, signed a bond
to bring about a marriage between the rescuer and one of the rescued, or
both; the more charming of the two being reserved for the end of the
book, the less to be thrown in earlier as a sort of matrimonial sop to
Cerberus,—an hymeneal luncheon, as it were. Yes, I allowed one of my
heroes to rescue two of my heroines, while a third gazed trembling upon
the scene from her latticed window. Nay, worse; for whether drawn on
insensibly by the current of events, or hurried thereto by the
entreaties of my friend and collaborator, Alice, who, woman-like,
declared that she would have nothing to do with my book unless I put
some love in it,—whether inveigled, therefore, or cajoled, it is a fact
that I have made allusion here and there, in the course of these pages,
to such sighings and oglings and bosom-heavings and heart-flutterings,
accompanied by such meaning starts and deep ineffable glances, that I am
willing to admit what Alice claims: that it would be almost an actual
breach of faith not to tell people what it all meant.
“If you are going to write a novel, Jack” (I have been plain Jack since
she married Charley), “why don’t you write one and be done with it?”
“How many times must I tell you that I am not writing a novel, but a
philosophico-bushwhackerian monograph on the theme—”
“Bushwhackerian fiddlestick!” cried Alice, impatiently, but unable to
suppress a smile at the rolling thunder of my title. “You may write your
monograph, as you call it, but who would read it?”
It was during this discussion that Alice agreed to edit the
love-passages that illumine these pages. But _what_ love-passages? After
much debate we effected a compromise. If she would engage to spare the
reader all save a mere allusion to the heart-pangs of the jovial Jones,
she should have full liberty to revel through whole chapters in the
loves of the Don. “As for your little affair with Charley,” I added, “I
agree to dress that up myself.”
“Indeed, indeed, Jack, if you were to put Mr. Frobisher and myself in
your book—and—and—make him—”
“Make him—” (Here I smiled.)
“You know, you villain!”
“Stammer forth praises of your loveliness?”
“You dare!”
And so we are reduced to a single pair of lovers: the Don and—