I picture thee to my fancy, my Ah Yung Whack, popping thine almond eyes
out of all almond shape. No? Then thou hast not read my last chapter.
Couldst not? Ah, but thou must. I felt that it would be so much Choctaw
to thee. Still, thou must read it; for in that chapter I strike the
key-note of this, my Symphonic Monograph.
I know it is Choctaw to thee; nay, Comanche; but I rejoice, rather, in
that; for it gives me a pretext for writing an entire chapter for thine
enlightenment. Nor exclusively for thine; for I would make matters clear
for the contemporary reader, who will, I trust (or else alas for my poor
publishers!),—who will, I trust, outnumber thee.
This, then, is my case. I have thrown upon my canvas a young person who
has had the misfortune to fall in love with a man of whom she may be
fairly said to know nothing. (Her feminine intuitions cannot, of course,
pass muster as knowledge with us Bushwhackers and philosophers.) And
this young person, so far as is made to appear, is anxious to know but
one thing in regard to her lover. Had she been a good sensible girl,
with no nonsense about her, it might have been supposed that she would
have been curious to know whether he were rich. Then, being but just
turned of eighteen, who could have blamed her if she had wondered
whether he were of a jealous temper, and likely to put an end to her
dancing with other men? Again; many women have a pardonable ambition to
shine in the eyes of their friends; and was he, if rich, generous as
well? And was she likely to dazzle Alice with her diamonds, perhaps, or
beam upon Lucy from a handsome equipage? He had shown, too, some
fondness for field sports, and would he—ah, would he (harrowing thought
to every truly feminine bosom)—would he bring her into the country,
there to drag out a weary, dreary life, and shoppinglessly vegetate?
Nay, was this splendid creature (as is too often the case with splendid
creatures), was he, perhaps, a slave to creature comforts? Would he be
an exacting critic of her housekeeping? Might not muddy coffee
exacerbate even an heroic soul? Could it be that a roast not done to a
turn might corrugate that admirable brow?
No; we have not painted her as anxious in respect to any of these
things. Yet I beg the reader will not accuse me of drawing a monstrosity
of a girl, one destitute of the common instincts of her sex. Far from
it. She, very likely, trusting implicitly to her intuitions (as women
will), felt too confident as to these possibilities of her future to
give them a second thought. Besides, was she not desperately in love?
And we all know (or, at least, _I_ believe, which amounts to the same
thing, so far as this book is concerned) that there are women who, if
but deeply enamoured, would scorn such thoughts, as a degradation to
true love. At any rate, the fact was as I have stated it. Mary, while
seemingly careless (though that may have been due to confidence) as to
the mere details of her destiny in this world, was morbidly solicitous
touching her lover’s views as to the next.
Laugh not, gentle reader. True, I am a humoristic Bushwhacker by trade;
but I would not have you smile out of order. And as for thee, my
great-to-the-tenth-power-grandson, brush the wrinkles from thy yellow
brow, lest thou crack, not this nut, but thine addled pate, instead.
Know, then, all men (and by all men I mean, of course, all women and
clergymen, who, alone, in these busy days, have leisure to read
symphonic monographs)—
Know, all women and clergymen, of this and more or less future
generations, that the story I am telling has very narrow limitations, as
well in time as in space. It is of Virginia[1] alone that I am writing.
Of Virginia _not_ in the fourth quarter, but Virginia in the beginning
of the second half of the nineteenth century. Strolling through this
narrow field, at this particular harvest-time, I have selected three
sheaves wherewith to fashion such rural picture as my hand should have
cunning to form.
Lucy, I chose, originally, as symbolizing the purity and simplicity of
the womanhood of our old Virginia life. But of her I am conscious that I
have given the merest outline; and I find that I cannot fill in the
picture adequately, and at the same time maintain the rigidly
monographic type of my work. Let her stand, therefore, just outside of
our central group (where the full light falls), illumining the
half-shadow with her gentle, St. Cecilia look. Is that a smile that
lights her eye, or is it the glancing of a tear?
Our Alice illustrates for us, as I have said elsewhere, the careless
freedom of those old days, and shows how our democratic-aristocratic
Virginia girls could be gay without being indiscreet, joyous yet not
loud, unconventional yet full of real dignity; how, in the hundreds of
years that separate them from the mother-country, they have shaken off
English stiffness, while clinging fast to English love of liberty. But
she is fully capable of speaking for herself; and we pass on to Mary
Rolfe.
The reader has already, I hope, a tolerably clear conception of this
young person. Stature below the average, eyes full of soul, a manner
painfully shy with strangers, childlike and confiding with intimates; a
mind admirably stored, considering her years, with all that can adorn;
often silent, and preferring to hear rather than to be heard, but
murmuring, when, forgetting her reserve, she does speak, like a brook,
and in a voice of such surpassing sweetness that one could have wished
that, like the brook, she would go on forever. Eloquent rather than
witty. And I fear few would have called her wise. For the rest, full of
high imaginings, and a born hero-worshipper.
Such was Mary Rolfe in herself; and to know her as such has sufficed for
the reader, so far. But a crisis is approaching in Mary’s life; and to
foretell how people are going to act in crises, it is not enough to know
what they are in themselves, merely. What they are is something; the
where and the when are more. Do you see that pleasant, genial-looking
man walking along the streets of a Southern city? Could anything be
gentler than his look, kinder than his eye? Yet it was but the other day
that he went out, deliberately, to a secluded spot called the Field of
Honor, and sent a ball through the person of an excellent gentleman, who
at the same time was addressing a bullet to his care. These worthy
persons were no worse than other people (true, they were editors), but
they lived in the South. That was the trouble. In the North the same man
would have simply said, _you’re another_, and called the account square.
And I, for one, applaud the North, and say she is right and the South
wrong.
No; if you would forecast the actions of men, you must be acquainted
with their environment, as Herbert Spencer would call it. To use an
illustration that this leader of modern scientific thought would not
object to; you strike that white ball with your cue. The table being
smooth, it would seem that it would maintain its initial direction till
the initial force was exhausted, or at least till it struck the opposite
cushion; but, lo! it strikes a light red ball that lies in its path, and
off it flies at a tangent. If Mr. Spencer held the cue and were
conducting the experiment in person, our illustration would now be at an
end (for I am told that he is the worst billiard-player in all England);
but let us suppose that that cue-thrust was delivered by one of those
solid-headed young men (in shirt-sleeves) who delight in what they
humorously call the scientific game. The white strikes the light red and
darts away; but click! and off it speeds along a different track. It has
carromed on the dark red.
And are we not, we mortals, so many billiard-balls, launched forth upon
our little arena by we know not what force, and rolling we know not
whither? It may be a little wider or a trifle narrower, perhaps, the
stage on which we play our several parts; but all the same, around it
rise the unscalable barriers of human life, the adamantine limitations
of human endeavor. And we, embracing within our little selves (as did
the tusk whence that ball was cut) countless conflicting forces, the
inextricably intermingled traits, that is, of numberless
ancestors,—fashioned, too, by the loving hands of father, mother,
brother, sister, teacher; we spin forth on the journey of life. And a
seemly roll of it we may have, and a safe, perhaps, if we be but smooth
and round and mediocre (not bulging on this side, say, with big
thoughts, or jagged on that with untamable conscience). There stands the
goal, and making for it, merrily we spin forth,—but, click! click! and
where are we? Nay, may not a pinch of cigar-ashes wrest victory from an
expert? And hath not, sometime, a mere rumpled thread sufficed to bring
triumph to a tyro? Surely it is not a great matter to stoop and pick up
a pin; but was it not enough, once, as we are told, to make a beggar a
millionaire? And who shall say that the merest casual fly, alighting on
the intent nose of some gunner in beleaguered Toulon, might not have so
warped the parabola of a shell as to have rendered needless the
slaughter of Waterloo?
I have made life a parallelogram, I see, though it is notoriously a
circle; and I have symbolized failure in life by carroming on the light
and dark reds; whereas, as we all know, that is success in billiards.
But, my Ah Yung Whack, is it not night in China when it is day with us?
And does not white raiment signify grief there? And do they not take off
their shoes instead of their hats when calling on a friend, and shake
their own hands rather than the other fellow’s? We will let the
illustration stand, my boy, for your sake; for, in the new Flowery
Kingdom which is coming, all things will be changed. In that day, when
the wielder of the cue shall also wear one (spell it how he will), the
game will be to miss rather than to hit; so that what seemed, at the
first blush, to be due to the buck-jumping of a mustang Pegasus, turns
out to be, in reality, the prophetic vision of a philosophic
Bushwhacker.
But the environment of Mary?
And now, at last, it has come,—that chapter which I have so long
dreaded,—my chapter on Virginia theology.
“Dearest Alice, could you not manage it for me?”
A backward toss in her rocking-chair, one ejaculatory clapping together
of her plump hands, one shout of laughing amazement was her answer.
“I?” said Charley. “You must have forgotten that I am hard at work on
that _Essay on Military Glory_ which you say you will shortly need.”
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[1] Conspicuously inexact; but the reader must judge for herself.—_Ed._