the fever epidemic he had found time during the autumn to institute
many economies in the management of both plantations. He had shipped and
sold the large surplus crops of apples and sweet potatoes--a thing
wholly unprecedented in that part of Virginia, where no products of the
soil except tobacco and wheat were ever turned to money account. He was
laughed at for what his neighbors characterized as “Yankee farming,” but
both his conscience and his bank account were comforted by the results.
In the same way, having a large surplus of corn that year, he had
fattened nearly double the usual number of hogs, and was now preparing
to sell so much of the bacon as he did not need for plantation uses. In
these and other ways he managed to diminish the Wyanoke debt by more
than a third and that of Pocahontas by nearly one-half, during his first
year as a planter.
“If they don’t quit laughing at me,” he said to Archer Bannister one
day, “I’ll sell milk and butter and even eggs next summer. I may
conclude to do that anyhow. Those are undignified crops, perhaps, but
I’m not sure that they could not be made more profitable than wheat and
tobacco.”
“Be careful, Arthur,” answered his friend. “It isn’t safe to make
planting too profitable. It is apt to lead to unkindly remark.”
“How so? Isn’t planting a business, like any other?”
“A business, yes, but not like any other. It has a certain dignity to
maintain. But I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking of Robert
Copeland.”
“I wish you’d tell me about him, Archer. What has he done? I observe
that everybody seems to shun him--or at least nobody seems quite willing
to recognize him as a man in our class, though they tell me his family
is fairly good, and personally he seems agreeable. Nobody says anything
to his discredit, and yet I observe a general shoulder shrugging
whenever his name is mentioned.”
“He makes too many hogsheads of tobacco to the hand,” answered Archer
smiling but speaking with emphasis and slowly.
“Is he cruel to his negroes?”
“Yes, and no. He is always good natured with them and kindly in his
fashion, but he works them much too hard. He doesn’t drive them
particularly. Indeed I never heard of his striking one of them. But he
has invented a system of money rewards and the like, by which he keeps
them perpetually racing with each other in their work. They badly
overtax themselves, and the community regards the matter with marked
disfavor. In the matter of family he isn’t in our class at all, but his
father was much respected. He was even a magistrate for some years
before his death. But the son has shut himself out of all social
position by over working his negroes, and the fact that he does it in
ways that are ingenious and not brutal doesn’t alter the fact, at least
not greatly. Of course, if he did it in brutal ways he would be driven
out of the county. As it is he is only shut out of society. I was
jesting when I warned you of danger of that sort. But if you are not
careful in your application of ‘practical’ methods down here, you’ll get
a reputation for money loving, and that wouldn’t be pleasant.”
Arthur stoutly maintained his right and his duty to market all that the
two plantations produced beyond their own needs, especially so long as
there were debts upon them. Till these should be discharged, he
contended, he had no moral right to let products go to waste which could
be turned into money. Archer admitted the justice of his view, but
laughingly added:
“It isn’t our way, down here, and we are so conservative that it is
never quite prudent to transgress our traditions. At the same time I
wish we could all rid our estates from debt before the great trouble
comes. For it is surely coming and God only knows what the upshot of it
all will be. Don’t quote me as saying that, please. It isn’t fashionable
with us to be pessimistic, or to doubt either the righteousness or the
ultimate triumph of our cause. But nobody can really foresee the outcome
of our present troubles, and whatever it may be, the men who are out of
debt when it comes--if there are any--will be better equipped to meet
fate with a calm mind than the rest of us.”
XXIX
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF DOROTHY
_F_rom the very beginning of her travels Dorothy revealed herself to
Arthur in rapidly succeeding letters which were--at the first, at
least--as frank as had been her talks with him during their long morning
rides together. If in the end her utterance became more guarded, with a
touch of reserve in it, and with a growing tendency to write rather of
other things than of her own emotions, Arthur saw in the fact only an
evidence of that increasing maturity of womanhood which he had intended
her to gain. For Arthur Brent studied Dorothy’s letters as
scrutinizingly as if they had been lessons in biology. Or, more
accurately speaking, he studied Dorothy herself in her letters, in that
way.
From Richmond she wrote half rejoicings, half lamentations over the long
separation she must endure from him and from all else that had hitherto
constituted her life. Arthur observed that while she mentioned as a
troublesome thing the necessity of having still another gown made
before leaving for the North, she told him nothing whatever about the
gown itself.
“Gowns,” he reflected, “are merely necessary adjuncts of life to
Dorothy--as yet. She’ll think of them differently after a while.”
From Washington she wrote delightedly of things seen, for although the
glory of the national capital had not come upon it in 1860, there was
even then abundant interest there for a country damsel.
From Baltimore she wrote:
“I’ve been wicked, and I like it. Edmonia took me to Kunkel and Moxley’s
Front Street Theatre last night to hear an opera, and I haven’t yet
wakened from the delicious dream. I think I never shall. I think I never
want to. Yet I am very sorry that I went, for I shall want to go again
and again and again, and you know that I mustn’t listen to such music as
that. It will make me bad, and really and truly I’d rather die than be
bad. I don’t understand it at all. Why is it wrong for me to hear great
music when it isn’t wrong for Edmonia? And Edmonia has heard the
greatest music there is, in New York and Paris and Vienna and Naples,
and it hasn’t hurt her in the least. I wish you would tell me why I am
so different, won’t you, Cousin Arthur?”
From New York she wrote of music again and many times, for she had
accepted Arthur’s assurance that there was no harm but only good for her
in listening to music; and in obedience to his injunction she went twice
each week to the opera, where Edmonia’s friends, whose guest she was,
had a box of their own. Presently came from her a pleading letter,
asking if she might not herself learn to play a little upon the violin,
and availing herself of Arthur’s more than ready permission, she toiled
ceaselessly at the instrument until after a month or so Edmonia reported
that the girl’s music master was raving about the extraordinary gifts
she was manifesting.
“I am a trifle worried about it, Arthur,” Edmonia added. “Perhaps her
father was right to forbid all this. Music is not merely a delight to
her--it is a passion, an intoxication, almost a madness. She is very
fond of dancing too, but I think dancing is to her little more than a
physical participation in the music.
“And she mightily enjoys society. Still more does society enjoy her. Her
simplicity, her directness and her perfect truthfulness, are qualities
not very common, you know, in society, in New York or anywhere else.
People are delighted with her, and, without knowing it, she is the
reigning attraction in every drawing room. Ah me! She will have to know
it presently, for I foresee that ‘the young Virginia belle’ as they all
call her, will have many suitors for her hand before we sail--two weeks
hence.
“She astonishes society in many ways. She is so perfectly well always,
for one thing. She is never tired and never has a headache. Most
astonishing of all, to the weary butterflies of fashion, she gets up
early in the morning and takes long rides on horseback before breakfast.
“In certain companies--the sedater sort--she is reckoned a brilliant
conversationalist. That is because she reads and thinks, as not many
girls of her age ever do. In more frivolous society she talks very
little and is perhaps a rather difficult person for the average young
man to talk to. That also is because she reads and thinks.
“On the whole, Arthur, Dorothy is developing altogether to my
satisfaction, but I am troubled about the music. Dr. South had a reason,
of which you know nothing, for fearing music in her case, as a dangerous
intoxication. Perhaps we ought not to disobey his instructions on the
subject. Won’t you think the matter over, Arthur, and advise me?”
To this request Arthur’s reply came promptly. It was an oracular
deliverance, such as he was accustomed to give only when absolutely sure
of his judgment.
“Have no fear as to the music,” he wrote. “It is not an intoxication to
Dorothy, as your report shows that indulgence in it is not followed by
reaction and lassitude. That is the sure test of intoxication. For the
rest Dorothy has a right to cultivate and make the most of the divine
gifts she possesses. Every human being has that right, and it is a cruel
wrong to forbid its exercise in any case. I am delighted to see from
your letters and hers that she has not permitted her interest in music
to impair her interest in other things. She tells me she has been
reading a book on ‘The Origin of Species’ by Charles Darwin. I have
heard of it but haven’t seen it yet, as it was published in England only
a few months ago and had not been reprinted here when I last wrote to
New York for some books. So please ask Dorothy to send me her copy as
soon as she has finished it, and tell her please not to rub out the
marginal notes she tells me she has been making in it. They will be
helpfully suggestive to me in my reading, and, as expressions of her
uninfluenced opinion, I shall value them even more than the text of the
book itself. She tells me she thinks the book will work a revolution in
science, giving us a new foundation to build upon. I sincerely hope so.
We have long been in need of new foundations. But, pardon me, you are
not interested in scientific studies and I will write to Dorothy herself
about all that.”
At this point in her reading Edmonia laid the letter in her lap and left
it there for a considerable time before taking it up again. She was
thinking, a trifle sadly, perhaps, but not gloomily or with pain.
“He is right,” she reflected. “I sympathize with him in his high
purposes and I share the general admiration of his character and genius.
But I do not share his real enthusiasms as Dorothy does. I have none of
that love for scientific truth for its own sake, which is an essential
part of his being. I have none of his self-sacrificing earnestness, none
of that divine discontent which is the mainspring of all his acts and
all his thinking. It is greatly better as Fate has ordered it. I am no
fit life partner for him. Had he married me I should have made him happy
in a way, perhaps, but it would have been at cost of his deterioration.
It is better as it is--immeasurably better,--and I must school myself
to think of it in that way. If I am worthy even of the friendship that
he so generously gives me, I shall learn to rejoice that he gives the
love to Dorothy instead, and not to me. I must learn to think of his
good and the fit working out of his life as the worthiest thing I can
strive for. And I _am_ learning this lesson. It is a little hard at
first, but I shall master it.”
A few days later Dorothy, in one of her unconsciously self-revealing
letters, wrote:
“I am sending you the Darwin book, with all my crude little notes in the
margins. I have sealed it up quite securely and paid full letter postage
on it, because it would be unjust to the government to send a book with
writing in it, at book postage rates. Besides, I don’t want anybody but
you to read the notes. Edmonia asked me to let her see the book before
sending it, but I told her I couldn’t because I should die of shame if
anybody should read my presumptuous comments on so great a book. For it
is great, really and truly great. It is the greatest explanation of
nature that anybody ever yet offered. At least that is the way it
impresses me. Edmonia asked me why I was so chary of letting her see
notes that I was entirely willing for you to see, and at first I
couldn’t explain it even to myself, for, of course, I love Edmonia
better than anybody else in the world, and I have no secrets from her. I
told her I would have to think the matter over before I could explain
it, and she said: ‘Think it out, child, and when you find out the
explanation you may tell me about it or not, just as you please.’ She
kindly laughed it off, but it troubled me a good deal. I couldn’t
understand why it was that I couldn’t bear to let her see the notes,
while I rather _wanted_ you to read them. I found it all out at last,
and explained it to her, and she seemed satisfied. It’s because you know
so much. You are my Master, and you always know how to allow for your
pupil’s wrong thinking even while you set me right. Besides, somehow I
am never ashamed of my ignorance when only you know of it. Edmonia said
that was quite natural, and that I was entirely right not to show the
scribbled book to her. So I don’t think I hurt her feelings, do you?
“Now, I want to tell you about another thought of mine which may puzzle
you--or it may make you laugh as it does other people. There’s a woman
here--a very bright woman but not, to my taste, a lovely one--who is
very learned in a superficial way. She knows everything that is current
in science, art, literature, and fashion, though she seems to me
deficient in thoroughness. She ‘has the patter of it all at her tongue’s
end,’ as they say here, but I don’t think she knows much behind the
patter. A wise editor whom I met at dinner a few days ago, described her
as ‘a person who holds herself qualified to discuss and decide anything
in heaven or earth from the standpoint of the cyclopædia and her own
inner consciousness.’ She writes for one of the newspapers, though I
didn’t know it when she talked with me about Darwin. I told her I
thought of Darwin’s book as a great poem. You would have understood me,
if I had said that to you, wouldn’t you? You know I always think of the
grass, and the trees and the flowers, and the birds and the butterflies,
and all the rest, as nature’s poems, and this book seems to me a great
epic which dominates and includes, and interprets them all, just as
Homer and Milton and Virgil and Tasso and especially Shakespeare,
dominate all the little twitterings of all the other poets. Anyhow it
seems to me that a book which tells us how all things came about, is a
poem and a very great one. I said so to this woman, and next day I saw
it all printed in the newspaper for which she writes. I shouldn’t have
minded that as she didn’t tell my name, but I thought she seemed to
laugh and jeer at my thought. She said something witty about trying to
turn Darwin into dactyls and substitute dithyrambics for dogmatics in
the writings of Sir Isaac Newton. Somehow it all sounded bright and
witty as one read it in the newspaper. But is that the way in which a
serious thought ought to be treated? Do the newspapers, when they thus
flippantly deal with serious things, really minister to human
advancement? Do they not rather retard it by making jests of things that
are not jests? I have come to know a good many newspaper writers since I
have been here, and I am convinced that they have no real seriousness in
their work, no controlling conscience. ‘The newspaper’ said one of the
greatest of them to me not long ago, ‘is a mirror of today. It doesn’t
bother itself much with tomorrow or yesterday.’ I asked him why it
should not reflect today accurately, instead of distorting if with
smartness. ‘Oh,’ he answered, ‘we can’t stop to consider such things. We
must do that which will please and attract the reader, regardless of
everything else. Dulness is the only thing we must avoid as we shun the
pestilence, and erudition and profundity are always dull.’
“‘But doesn’t the newspaper assume to teach men and women?’ I asked.
‘And is it not in conscience bound to teach them the truth and not
falsehood?’
“‘Oh, yes, that’s the theory,’ he answered. ‘But how can we live up to
it? Take this matter of Darwinism, for example. We can’t afford to
employ great scientific men to discuss it seriously in our columns. And
if we did, only a few would read what they wrote about it. We have
bright fellows on our editorial staffs who know how to make it
interesting by playing with it, and for our purpose that is much better
than any amount of learning.’
“I have been thinking this thing over and I have stopped the reading of
newspapers. For I find that they deal in the same way with everything
else--except politics, perhaps, and, of course, I know nothing of
politics. I read a criticism of a concert the other day in which a
singer was--well, never mind the details. The man that wrote that
criticism didn’t hear the concert at all, as he confessed to me. He was
attending another theatre at the time. Yet he assumed to criticise a
singer to her detriment, utterly ignoring the fact that she has her
living to make by singing and that his criticism might seriously affect
her prospects. He laughed the matter off, and when I seemed disturbed
about it he said: ‘For your sake, Miss South, I’ll make amends. She
sings again tomorrow, and while I shall not be able to hear her, I’ll
give her such a laudation as shall warm the cockles of her heart and
make her manager mightily glad. You’ll forgive me, then, for censuring
her yesterday, I’m sure.’ I’m afraid I misbehaved myself then. I told
him I shouldn’t read his article, that I hated lies and shams and false
pretences, and that I didn’t consider his articles worth reading because
they had no truth or honesty behind them. It was dreadfully rude, I
know, and yet I’m not sorry for it. For it seemed to make an impression
on him. He told me that he only needed some such influence as mine to
give him a conscience in his work, and he actually asked me to marry
him! Think of the absurdity of it! I told him I wasn’t thinking of
marrying anybody--that I was barely seventeen, that--oh, well, I
dismissed the poor fellow as gently as I could.”
But while the proposal of marriage by the newspaper man, and several
other such solicitations which followed it, struck Dorothy at first as
absurdities, they wrought a marked change in her mental attitude. Two at
least of these proposals were inspired by higher considerations than
those of the plantation which Dorothy represented, and were pressed with
fervor and tenderness by men quite worthy to aspire to Dorothy’s hand.
These were men of substance and character, in whose minds the
fascination which the Virginia girl unwittingly exercised over everybody
with whom she came into contact--men and women alike--had quickly
ripened into a strong and enduring passion. Dorothy suffered much in
rejecting such suits as theirs, but she learned something of herself in
the process. She for the first time realized that she was a woman and
that she had actually entered upon that career of womanhood which had
before seemed so far away in the future that thoughts of it had never
before caused her to blush and tremble as they did now.
These things set her thinking, and in her thinking she half realized her
own state of mind. She began dimly to understand the change that had
come over her attitude and feeling towards Arthur Brent. She would not
let herself believe that she loved him as a woman loves but one man
while she lives; but she admitted to herself that she might come to
love him in that way if he should ever ask her to do so with the
tenderness and manifest sincerity which these others had shown. But of
that she permitted herself to entertain no hope and even no thought. His
letters to her, indeed, seemed to put that possibility out of the
question. For at this time Arthur held himself under severe restraint.
He was determined that he should not in any remotest way take advantage
of his position with respect to Dorothy, or use his influence over her
as a means of winning her. He knew now his own condition of mind and
soul in all its fulness. He was conscious now that the light of his life
lay in the hope of some day winning Dorothy’s love and making her all
and altogether his own. But he was more than ever determined, as he
formulated the thought in his own mind, to give Dorothy a chance, to
take no advantage of her, to leave her free to make choice for herself.
It was his fixed determination, should she come back heart whole from
this journey, to woo her with all the fervor of his soul; but the more
determined he became in this resolution, the more resolutely did he
guard his written words against the possibility that they might reveal
aught of this to her. “If she ever comes to love me as my wife,” he
resolved, “it shall be only after she has had full opportunity to make
another choice.”
Accordingly his letters to her continued to concern themselves with
intellectual and other external things. He wrote her half a ream of
comment upon Darwin’s book, taking up for discussion every marginal note
she had made concerning it. But that part of his letter was as coldly
intellectual as any of their horseback conversations had been. In all
the intimate parts of that and his other letters, he wrote only as one
might to a sympathetic friend, as he might have written to Edmonia, for
example. He even took half unconscious pains to emphasize the fatherly
character of his relations with her, lest they assume some other aspect
to her apprehension.
On her side Dorothy began now to write outside of herself, as it were.
She described to him all her new gowns and bonnets, laughing at the
confusion of mind in which a study of such details must involve him. In
her childlike loyalty she told him of the wooings that so distressed
her, but she did so quite as she might have written to him of the loves
of Juliet and Ophelia and the Lady of Lyons. For the rest she wrote
objectively now, in the main, and speculatively concerning certain of
those social problems in which she knew him to be profoundly interested,
and which she was somewhat studying now, because of the interest they
had for him.
The word “slumming” had not been invented at that time by the insolence
that does the thing it means. But Dorothy, chiefly under the guidance of
her friends among the newspaper men, went to see how the abjectly poor
of a great city lived, and she wrote long letters of comment to Arthur
in which she told him how great and distressing the revelation was, and
how she honored his desire to do something for the amelioration of these
people’s lives. “Your aspiration is indeed a noble one,” she wrote in
one of her letters; “the life you proposed to yourself, and from which
you were diverted by your inheritance of a plantation, is the very
greatest, the very noblest that any man could lead. I once thought you
were doing even better in the care you are taking of the negroes at
Wyanoke and Pocahontas, and in your efforts ultimately to set them free.
But that was when I did not know. I know now, in part at least, and I
understand your feeling in the matter as I never could have done had I
not seen for myself.
“People here sometimes say things to me that hurt. But I am ready with
my answer now. One woman--very intellectual, but a cat--asked me
yesterday how I could bear to hold negroes in slavery, and to buy fine
gowns with the proceeds of their toil. I told her frankly that I didn’t
like it, but that I couldn’t help it, and in reply to her singularly
ignorant inquiries as to why I didn’t end the wrong or at least my
participation in it, I explained some difficulties to her that she had
never taken the trouble to ask about. I told her how hard you were
working to discharge the debts of your estate in order that you might
send your negroes to the west to be free, and that you might yourself
return to New York to do what you could for the immeasurably worse
slaves here. She caught at my phrase and challenged it. I told her what
I meant, and as it happened to be in a company of highly intellectual
people, I suppose I ought not to have talked so much, but somehow they
seemed to want to hear. I said: