Dorothy South

George Carry Eggleston

Dorothy South / A Love Story of Virginia Just Before the War

I

TWO ENCOUNTERS

I T was a perfect day of the kind that Mr. Lowell has celebrated in song – “a day in June.” It was, moreover, a day glorified even beyond Mr. Lowell’s imagining, by the incomparable climate of south side Virginia.

A young man of perhaps seven and twenty, came walking with vigor down the narrow roadway, swinging a stick which he had paused by the wayside to cut. The road ran at this point through a luxuriantly growing woodland, with borders of tangled undergrowth and flowers on either side, and with an orchestra of bird performers all around. The road was a public highway, though it would never have been taken for such in any part of the world except in a south side county of Virginia in the late fifties. It was a narrow track, bearing few traces of any heavier traffic than that of the family carriages in which the gentle, high-born dames and maidens of the time and country were accustomed to make their social rounds.

There was a gate across the carriage track – a gate constructed in accordance with the requirement of the Virginia law that every gate set up across a public highway should be “easily opened by a man on horseback.”

Near the gate the young man slackened his vigorous pace and sat down upon a recently fallen tree. He remembered enough of his boyhood’s experience in Virginia to choose a green log instead of a dry one for his seat. He had had personal encounters with chigoes years ago, and wanted no more of them. He sat down not because he was tired, for he was not in the least so, but simply because, finding himself in the midst of a refreshingly and inspiringly beautiful scene, he desired to enjoy it for a space. Besides, he was in no hurry. Nobody was expecting him, and he knew that dinner would not be served whither he was going until the hour of four – and it was now only a little past nine.

The young man was fair to look upon. A trifle above the medium height, his person was symmetrical and his finely formed head was carried with an ease and grace that suggested the reserve strength of a young bull. His features were about equally marked by vigor and refinement. His was the countenance of a man well bred, who, to his inheritance of good breeding had added education and such culture as books, and earnest thinking, and a favorable association with men of intellect are apt to bring to one worthy to receive the gift.

He seemed to know the spot wherein he lingered. Indeed he had asked no questions as to his way when less than an hour ago he had alighted from the pottering train at the village known as the Court House. He had said to the old station agent, “I will send for my baggage later.” Then he had set off at a brisk walk down one of the many roads that converged at this centre of county life and affairs. The old station master, looking after him, had muttered: “He seems to think he knows his way. Mebbe he does, but anyhow he’s a stranger in these parts.”

And indeed that would have been the instant conclusion of any one who should have looked at him as he sat there by the roadside enjoying the sweet freshness of the morning, and the exquisite abandon with which exuberant nature seemed to mock at the little track made through the tangled woodlands by intrusive man. The youth’s garb betrayed him instantly. In a country where black broadcloth was then the universal wear of gentlemen, our young gentleman was clad in loosely fitting but perfectly shaped white flannels, the trousers slightly turned up to avoid the soil of travel, the short sack coat thrown open, and the full bosomed shirt front of bishop’s lawn or some other such sheer stuff, being completely without a covering of vest. Obviously the young pedestrian did not belong to that part of the world which he seemed to be so greatly enjoying.

That is what Dick thought, when Dick rode up to the gate. Dick was a negro boy of fourteen summers or about that. His face was a bright, intelligent one, and he looked a good deal of the coming athlete as he sat barebacked upon the large roan that served him for steed. Dick wore a shirt and trousers, and nothing else, except a dilapidated straw hat which imperfectly covered his closely cropped wool. His feet were bare, but the young man made mental note of the fact that they bore the appearance of feet accustomed to be washed at least once in every twenty four hours.

“Does your mammy make you wash your feet every night, or do you do it of your own accord?” The question was the young man’s rather informal beginning of a conversation.

“Mammy makes me,” answered the boy, with a look of resentment in his face. “Mammy’s crazy about washin’. She makes me git inter a bar’l o’ suds ev’ry night an’ scrub myself like I was a floor. That’s cause she’s de head washerwoman at Wyanoke. She’s got washin’ on de brain.”

“So you’re one of the Wyanoke people, are you? Whom do you belong to now?”

“I don’t jes’ rightly know, Mahstah” – Dick sounded his a’s like “aw” in “claw.” “I don’t jes’ rightly know, Mahstah. Ole Mas’r he’s done daid, an’ de folks sez a young Yankee mahstah is a comin’ to take position.”

“To take possession, you mean, don’t you?”

“I dunno. Somefin o’ dat sort.”

“Why do you call him a Yankee master?”

“O ’cause he libs at de Norf somewhar. I reckon mebbe he ain’t quite so bad as dat. Dey say he was born in Ferginny, but I reckon he’s done lib in de Norf among the Yankees so long dat he’s done forgit his manners an’ his raisin.”

“What’s your name?” asked the young man, seemingly interested in Dick.

“My name’s Dick, Sah.”

“Dicksah – or Dick?”

“Jes’ Dick, so,” answered the boy.

“Oh! Well, that’s a very good name. It’s short and easy to say.”

“Too easy!” said the boy.

“ ‘Too easy?’ How do you mean?” queried the young man.

“Oh, nuffin’, only it’s allus ‘Dick, do dis!’ ‘Dick do dat.’ ‘Dick go dar,’ ’Dick come heah,’ an’ ‘Dick, Dick, Dick’ all de day long.”

“Then they work you pretty hard do they? You don’t look emaciated.”

“Maishy what, Mahstah?”

“Oh, never mind that. It’s a Chinese word that I was just saying to myself. Do they work you too hard? What do you do?”

“Oh, I don’t do nuffin’ much. Only when I lays down in de sun an’ jes’ begins to git quiet like, Miss Polly she calls me to pick some peas in de gyahden, er Miss Dorothy she says, ‘Dick, come heah an’ help me range dese flowers,’ or Mammy, she says, ‘Dick, you lazy bones, come heah an’ put some wood under my wash biler.’ ”

“But what is your regular work?”

“Reg’lar wuk?” asked the boy, his eyes growing saucer-like in astonishment, “I ain’t got no reg’lar wuk. I feeds de chickens, sometimes, and fin’s hens’ nests an’ min’s chillun, an’ dribes de tukkeys into de tobacco lots to eat de grasshoppers an’ I goes aftah de mail. Dat’s what I’se a doin’ now. Leastways I’se a comin’ back wid de mail wot I done been an’ gone after.”

“Is that all?”

“Dat’s nuff, ain’t it, Mahstah?”

“I don’t know. I wonder what your new master will think when he comes.”

“Golly, so do I. Anyhow, he’s a Yankee, an’ he won’t know how much wuk a nigga ought to do. I’ll be his pussonal servant, I reckon. Leastways dat’s what Miss Dorothy say she tink.”

“Who is your Miss Dorothy?” the young man asked with badly simulated indifference, for this was a member of the Wyanoke family of whom Dr. Arthur Brent had never before heard.

“Miss Dorothy? Why, she’s jes’ Miss Dorothy, so.”

“But what’s her other name?”

“I dunno. I reckon she ain’t got no other name. Leastways I dunno.”

“Is Wyanoke a fine plantation?”

“Fine, Mahstah? It’s de very finest dey is. It’s all out o-doors and I reckon dey’s a thousand cullud people on it.”

“Oh, hardly that,” answered the young man – “say eight or nine hundred – or perhaps one hundred would be nearer the mark.”

“No, Sir! De Brents is quality folks, Mahstah. Dey’s got more’n a thousan’ niggas, an’ two or three thousan’ horses, an’ as fer cows an’ hawgs you jes’ cawn’t count ’em! Dey eats dinner offen chaney plates every day an’ de forks at Wyanoke is all gold.”

“How many carriages do they keep, Dick?”

“Sebenteen, besides de barouche an’ de carryall.”

“Well, now you’d better be moving on. Your Miss Polly and your Miss Dorothy may be waiting for their letters.”

As the boy rode away, Dr. Arthur Brent resumed his brisk walk. He no longer concerned himself with the landscape, or the woods, or the wild flowers, or the beauty of the June morning, or anything else. He was thinking, and not to much purpose.

“Who the deuce,” he muttered, “can this Miss Dorothy be? Of course I remember dear old Aunt Polly. She has always lived at Wyanoke. But who is Dorothy? As my uncle wasn’t married of course he had no daughter. And besides, if he had, she would be his heir, and I should never have inherited the property at all. I wonder if I have inherited a family, with the land? Psha! Dick invented Miss Dorothy, of course. Why didn’t I think of that? I remember my last stay of a year at Wyanoke, and everything about the place. There was no Dorothy there then, and pretty certainly there is none now. Dick invented her, just as he invented the gold forks, and the thousand negroes, and all those multitudinous horses, carriages, cows and hogs. That black rascal has a creative genius – a trifle ill regulated perhaps, but richly productive. It failed him for the moment when I demanded a second name for Dorothy. But if I had persisted in that line of inquiry he would pretty certainly have endowed the girl with a string of surnames as completely fictitious as the woman herself is. I’ll have some fun out of that boy. He has distinct psychological possibilities.”

Continuing his walk in leisurely fashion like one whose mind is busy with reflection, Dr. Arthur Brent came at last to a great gate at the side of the road – a gate supported by two large pillars of hewn stone, and flanked by a smaller gate intended for the use of foot farers like himself.

“That’s the entrance gate to the plantation,” he reflected. “I had thought it half a mile farther on. Memory has been playing me its usual trick of exaggerating everything remembered from boyhood. I was only fifteen or sixteen when I was last at Wyanoke, and the road seems shorter now than it did then. But this is surely the gate.”

Passing through the wicket, he presently found himself in a forest of young hickory trees. He remembered these as having been scarcely higher than the head of a man on horseback at the time of his last visit. They had been planted by his uncle to beautify the front entrance to the plantation, and, with careful foresting they had abundantly fulfilled that purpose. Growing rather thickly, they had risen to a height of nearly fifty feet, and their boles had swelled to a thickness of eight or ten inches, while all undergrowth of every kind had been carefully suppressed. The tract of land thus timbered by cultivation to replace the original pine forest, embraced perhaps seventy-five or a hundred acres, and the effect of it in a country where forest growths were usually permitted to lead riotous lives of their own, was impressive.

As the young man turned one of the curves of the winding carriage road, four great hounds caught sight of him and instantly set upon him. At that moment a young girl, perched upon a tall chestnut mare galloped into view. Thrusting two fingers of her right hand into her mouth, she whistled shrilly between them, thrice repeating the searching sound. Instantly the huge hounds cowered and slunk away to the side of the girl’s horse. Their evident purpose was to go to heel at once, but their mistress had no mind for that.

“Here!” she cried. “Sit up on your haunches and take your punishment.”

The dogs obediently took the position of humble suppliants, and the girl dealt to each, a sharp cut with the flexible whip she carried slung to her pommel. “Now go to heel, you naughty fellows!” she commanded, and with a stately inclination of her body she swept past the young man, not deigning even to glance in his direction.

“By Jove!” exclaimed Dr. Brent, “that was done as a young queen might have managed it. She saved my life, punished her hounds to secure their future obedience, and barely recognizing my existence – doing even that for her own sake, not mine – galloped away as if this superb day belonged to her! And she isn’t a day over fifteen either.” In that Dr. Brent was mistaken. The girl had passed her sixteenth birthday, three months ago. “I doubt if she is half as long as that graceful riding habit she is wearing.” Then after a moment he said, still talking to himself, “I’ll wager something handsome that that girl is as shy as a fawn. They always are shy when they behave in that queenly, commanding way. The shyer they are the more they affect a stately demeanor.”

Dr. Arthur Brent was a man of a scientific habit of mind. To him everything and everybody was apt to assume somewhat the character of a “specimen.” He observed minutely and generalized boldly, even when his “subject” happened to be a young woman or, as in this case, a slip of a girl. All facts were interesting to him, whether facts of nature or facts of human nature. He was just now as earnest in his speculations concerning the girl he had so oddly encountered, as if she had been a new chemical reaction.

Seating himself by the roadside he tried to recall all the facts concerning her that his hasty glance had enabled him to observe.

“If I were an untrained observer,” he reflected, “I should argue from her stately dignity and the reserve with which she treated me – she being only an unsophisticated young girl who has not lived long enough to ‘adopt’ a manner with malice aforethought – I should argue from her manner that she is a girl highly bred, the daughter of some blue blooded Virginia family, trained from infancy by grand dames, her aunts and that sort of thing, in the fine art of ‘deportment.’ But as I am not an untrained observer, I recall the fact that stage queens do that sort of thing superbly, even when their mothers are washerwomen, and they themselves prefer corned beef and cabbage to truffled game. Still as there are no specimens of that kind down here in Virginia, I am forced to the conclusion that this young Diana is simply the highly bred and carefully dame-nurtured daughter of one of the great plantation owners hereabouts, whose manner has acquired an extra stateliness from her embarrassment and shyness. Girls of fifteen or sixteen don’t know exactly where they stand. They are neither little girls nor young women. They have outgrown the license of the one state without having as yet acquired the liberty of action that belongs to the other.” Thus the youth’s thoughts wandered on. “That girl is a rigid disciplinarian,” he reflected. “How sternly she required those hounds to sit on their haunches and take the punishment due to their sins! I’ll be bound she has herself been set in a corner for many a childish naughtiness. Yet she is not cruel. She struck each dog only a single blow – just punishment enough to secure better manners in future. An ill tempered woman would have lashed them more severely. And a woman less self-controlled would have struck out with her whip without making the dogs sit up and realize the enormity of their offence. A less well-bred girl would have said something to me in apology for her hounds’ misbehavior. This one was sufficiently sensible to see that unless I were a fool – in which case I should have been unworthy of attention – her disciplining of the dogs was apology enough without supplementary speech. I must find out who she is and make her acquaintance.”

Then a sudden thought struck him; “By Jove!” he exclaimed aloud, “I wonder if her name is Dorothy!”

Then the young man walked on.

II

WYANOKE

H ALF an hour later Arthur Brent entered the house grounds of Wyanoke – the home of his ancestors for generations past and his own birthplace. The grounds about the mansion were not very large – two acres in extent perhaps – set with giant locust trees that had grown for a century or more in their comfortable surrounding of closely clipped and luxuriant green sward. Only three trees other than the stately locusts, adorned the house grounds. One of these was a huge elm, four feet thick in its stem, with great limbs, branching out in every direction and covering, altogether, a space of nearly a quarter acre of ground, but so high from the earth that the carpet of green sward grew in full luxuriance to the very roots of the stupendous tree. How long that aboriginal monarch had been luxuriating there, the memory of man could make no report. The Wyanoke plantation book, with its curiously minute record of everything that pertained to the family domain, set forth the fact that the “new mansion house” – the one still in use, – was built in the year 1711, and that its southeasterly corner stood “two hundred and thirty nine feet due northwest of the Great Elm which adorns the lawn.” A little later than the time of Arthur Brent’s return, that young man of a scientific mental habit made a survey to determine whether or not the Great Elm of 1859 was certainly the same that had been named “the Great Elm” in 1711. Finding it so he reckoned that the tree must be many hundreds – perhaps even a thousand years of age. For the elm is one of the very slowest growing of trees, and Arthur Brent’s measurements showed that the diameter of this one had increased not more than six inches during the century and a half since it had been accepted as a conspicuous landmark for descriptive use in the plantation book.

The other trees that asked of the huge locusts a license to live upon that lawn, were two quick-growing Asiatic mulberries, planted in comparatively recent times to afford shade to the front porch.

The house was built of wood, heavily framed, large roomed and gambrel roofed. Near it stood the detached kitchen in the edge of the apple orchard, and farther away the quarters of the house servants.

As Arthur Brent strolled up the walk that led to the broad front doors of the mansion his mind was filled with a sense of peace. That was the dominant note of the house and all of its surroundings. The great, self-confident locust trees that had stood still in their places while generations of Brents had come and gone, seemed to counsel rest as the true philosophy of life. The house itself seemed to invite repose. Even the stately peacock that strolled in leisurely laziness beneath the great elm seemed, in his very being, a protest against all haste, all worry, all ambition of action and change.

“I do not know,” thought the young man, as he contemplated the immeasurably restful scene, “what the name Wyanoke signifies in the Indian tongue from which it was borrowed. But surely it ought to mean rest, contentment, calm.”

That thought, and the inspiration of it, were destined to play their part as determinative influences in the life of the young man whose mind was thus impressed. There lay before him, though he was unconscious of the fact, a life struggle between stern conviction and sweet inclination, between duty and impulse, between intensity of mind and lassitude of soul. There were other factors to complicate the problem, but these were its chief terms, and it is the purpose of this chronicle to show in what fashion the matter was wrought out.

Advancing to the porch, Arthur rapped thrice with the stick that he carried. That was because he had passed the major part of his life elsewhere than in Virginia. If such had not been the case he would have interpreted the meaning of the broad open doors aright, and would have walked in without any knocking at all.

As it was, Johnny, the “head dining room servant,” as he was called in Virginia – the butler, as he would have been called elsewhere – heard the unaccustomed sound of knocking, and went to the door to discover what it might mean. To him Arthur handed a visiting card, and said simply: “Your Miss Polly.”

The comely and intelligent serving man was puzzled by the card. He had not the slightest notion of its use or purpose. In his bewilderment he decided that the only thing to be done with it was to take it to his “Miss Polly,” which, of course, was precisely what Arthur Brent desired him to do. There was probably not another visiting card in all that country side – for the Virginians of that time used few formalities, and very simple ones in their social intercourse. They went to visit their friends, not to “call” upon them. Pasteboard politeness was a factor wholly unknown in their lives.

Miss Polly happened to be at that moment in the garden directing old Michael, – the most obstinately obstructive and wilful of gardeners, – to do something to the peas that he was resolutely determined not to do, and to leave something undone to the tomatoes which he was bent upon doing. On receipt of the card, she left Michael to his own devices, and almost hurried to the house. “Almost hurried,” I say, for Miss Polly was much too stately and dignified a person to quicken a footstep upon any occasion.

She was “Miss Polly” to the negro servants. To everybody else she was “Cousin Polly,” or “Aunt Polly,” and she had been that from the period described by the old law writers as “the time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.” How old she was, nobody knew. She looked elderly in a comfortable, vigorous way. Gray hair was at that time mistakenly regarded as a reproach to women – a sign of advancing age which must be concealed at all costs. Therefore Aunt Polly’s white locks were kept closely shaven, and covered with a richly brown wig. For the rest, she was a plump person of large proportions, though not in the least corpulent. Her dignity was such as became her age and her lineage – which latter was of the very best. She knew her own value, and respected, without aggressively asserting it. She had never been married – unquestionably for reasons of her own – but her single state had brought with it no trace or tinge of bitterness, no suggestion of discontent. She was, and had always been, a woman in perfect health of mind and body, and the fact was apparent to all who came into her comfortable presence.

She had a small but sufficient income of her own, but, being an “unattached female” – as the phrase went at a time when people were too polite to name a woman an “old maid,” – she had lived since early womanhood at Wyanoke; and since the late bachelor owner of the estate, Arthur Brent’s uncle, had come into the inheritance, she had been mistress of the mansion, ruling there with an iron rod of perfect cleanliness and scrupulous neatness, according to housekeeping standards from which she would abate no jot or tittle upon any conceivable account. Fortunately for her servitors, there were about seven of them to every one that was reasonably necessary.

She was a woman of high intelligence and of a pronounced wit, – a wit that sometimes took humorous liberties with the proprieties, to the embarrassment of sensitive young people. She was well read and well informed, but she never did believe that the world was round, her argument being that if such were the case she would be standing on her head half the time. She also refused to believe in railroads. She was confident that “the Yankees” had built railroads through Virginia, with a far seeing purpose of overrunning and conquering that state and possessing themselves of its plantations. Finally, she regarded Virginia as the only state or country in the world in which a person of taste and discretion could consent to be born. Her attitude toward all dwellers beyond the borders of Virginia, closely resembled that of the Greeks toward those whom they self assertively classed as “the barbarians.” How far she really cherished these views, or how far it was merely her humor to assert them, nobody ever found out. To all this she added the sweetest temper and the most unselfish devotion to those about her, that it is possible to imagine. She was very distantly akin to Arthur, if indeed she was akin to him at all. But in his childhood he had learned to call her “Aunt Polly,” and during that year of his boyhood which he had spent at Wyanoke, he had known her by no other title. So when she came through the rear doors to meet him in the great hall which ran through the house from front to rear, he advanced eagerly and lovingly to greet her as “Aunt Polly.”