XV The Country Girls at a City School — Velvet Hats and Clay’s Defeat
Our father took us to Richmond the first of October. A stage ran between Cumberland Court House and the city, going down one day and coming up the next, taking in Powhatan wayside stations and one or more in Chesterfield.
We rarely used the public conveyance. This important journey was made in our own carriage. A rack at the back contained two trunks. Other luggage had gone down by the stage. We had dinner at a half-way house of entertainment, leaving home at 9 o’clock A.M., and coming in sight of the town at five in the afternoon.
That night I was lulled to sleep for the first time by what was to be forevermore associated in my thoughts with the fair City of Seven Hills—the song of the river-rapids. It is a song—never a moan. Men have come and men may go; the pleasant places endeared by history, tradition, and memory may be, and have been, laid waste; the holy and beautiful houses in which our fathers worshipped have been burned with fire, the bridges spanning the rolling river have been broken down, and others have arisen in their place; but one thing has remained as unchanged as the heavens reflected in the broad breast of the stream—that is the sweet and solemn anthem, dear to the heart of one who has lived long within the sound of it, as the song of the surf to the homesick exile who asked in the Vale of Tempë, “Where is the sea!”
We were duly entered in the school conducted by Mrs. Nottingham and her four daughters in an irregularly built frame-house—painted “colonial yellow”—which stood at the corner of Fifth and Franklin Streets. It was pulled down long ago to make room for a stately brick residence, built and occupied by my brother Horace.
The school was Presbyterian, through and through. Mr. Hoge had a Bible-class there every Monday morning; the Nottingham family, including boarders, attended Sunday and week-day services in the chapel, a block farther down Fifth Street. The eloquent curate of the Old First was rising fast into prominence in city and church. His chapel was crowded to the doors on Sunday afternoons when there was no service in the mother-church, and filled in the forenoon with the colony which, it was settled, should form itself into a corporate and independent body within a few months.
It spoke well for the drill we had had from our late tutor, and said something for the obedient spirit in which we had followed the line of study indicated by him, that Mea and I were, after the preliminary examination, classed with girls older than ourselves, and who had been regular attendants upon boarding and day schools of note. If we were surprised at this, having anticipated a different result from the comparison of a desultory home-education in the country, with the “finish” of city methods, we were the more amazed at the manners of our present associates. They were, without exception, the offspring of refined and well-to-do parents. The daughters of distinguished clergymen, of eminent jurists, of governors and congressmen, of wealthy merchants and rich James River planters, were our classmates in school sessions and our companions when lessons were over. It was our initial experience in the arrogant democracy of the “Institution.”
Be it day-school, boarding-school, or college, the story of this experience is the same the world over. The frank brutality of question and comment; the violent and reasonless partisanships; the irrational intimacies, and the short lives of these; the combinations against lawful authority; the deceptions and evasions to screen offenders from the consequences of indolence or disobedience—were but a few of the revelations made to the two country girls in the trial-months of that winter.
I had my first shock in the course of an examination upon ancient history conducted by the second and gentlest of the Nottingham sisters—Miss Sarah. I was unaffectedly diffident in the presence of girls who were so much more fashionably attired than we in our brown merino frocks made by “Miss Judy,” and trimmed with velvet of a darker shade, that I felt more ill at ease than my innate pride would let me show. But I kept my eyes upon the kind face of the catechist, and answered in my turn distinctly, if low, trying with all my might to think of nothing but the subject in hand. I observed that Mea did the same. I was always sure of her scholarship, and I tingled with pride at her composure and the refined intonations that rendered replies invariably correct. Honestly, I had thought far more of her than of myself, when, after a question from Miss Sarah revealed the fact that I had read Plutarch’s Lives, a tall girl next to me dug her elbow into my ribs:
“Law, child! you think yourself so smart!”
She was the daughter of one of the eminent professional men I have alluded to, and three years my senior. I knew her father by reputation, and had been immensely impressed with a sense of the honor of being seated beside her in the class.
“Miss Blank!” said Miss Sarah, as stern as she could ever be. “I am surprised!”
The girl giggled. So did a dozen others. My cheeks flamed hotly, and my temper followed suit. I made up my mind, then and there, never to like that “creature.” I have seen the like misbehavior in college girls who took the highest honors.
Prof. Brander Matthews, of Columbia University, once said to a class in English literature, of which my son was a member:
“I could go through all of my classes and pick out, with unerring certainty, the young men who belong to what may be called ‘reading families.’ Nothing in the college curriculum ever takes the place in education of a refined early environment and intellectual atmosphere.”
I am inclined to adapt the wise utterance to the cultivation of what we class, awkwardly, under the head of “manners.” The child, who is taught, by precept and hourly example in home-life, that politeness is a religious duty, and sharp speech vulgar, and who is trained to practise with the members of his family the “small, sweet courtesies of life” that make the society man and woman elegant and popular, will suffer many things at the tongues of school and college mates, yet will not his “manners” depart from him—when he is older!
As home-bred girls, we had to undergo a system of moral and mental acclimation during that session. I do not regret the ordeal. Quiet, confidential talks with Cousin Mary, whose tact was as fine as her breeding, helped me to sustain philosophically what would have made me miserable but for her tender and judicious ministrations.
“It is always right to do the right thing,” was a maxim she wrought into my consciousness by many repetitions. “The danger of association with rude and coarse people is that we may fall into their ways to protect ourselves. It may be good for you to rough it for a while, so long as it does not roughen you.”
Little by little we got used to the “roughing.” School-work we thoroughly enjoyed, and our teachers appreciated this. From each of them we met with kind and helpful treatment as soon as the routine of study was fully established.
Our French master supplied the crucial test of philosophy and diligence. He was a “character” in his way, and he fostered the reputation. In all my days I have never known a man who could, at pleasure, be such a savage and so fine a gentleman. He was six-feet-something in height, superbly proportioned and heavily mustachioed. Few men curtained the upper lip then. He had received a university education in France; had been a rich man in New York, marrying there the daughter of Samuel Ogden, a well-known citizen, the father of Anna Cora Mowatt, the actress, who afterward became Mrs. Ritchie.
Isidore Guillet lost wife and fortune in the same year, and, after a vain effort to recoup his finances at the North, removed to Richmond with his three sons, and became a fashionable French teacher. He was fierce in class, and suave outside of the recitation-room. Our late and now-more-than-ever-lamented tutor had laid a fair foundation for us in the French language. We were “up” in the verbs to an extent that excited the rude applause of our classmates. We read French as fluently as English, and were tolerably conversant with such French classics as were current in young ladies’ seminaries. These things were less than vanity when M. Guillet and Manesca took the field. We were required to copy daily seven or eight foolscap pages-full of that detestable “System.” Beginning with “Avez vous le clou?” and running the gamut of “le bon clou,” “le mauvais clou,” and “le bon clou de votre père,” “le mauvais clou de votre grandmère,” up to the maddening discords of “l’interrogatif et le negatif”—we were rushed breathlessly along the lines ordained by the merciless “System” and more merciless master, until it was a marvel that nerves and health were not wrecked. I said just now that the lion roared him soft in general society. Throughout a series of Spanish lessons given to us two girls through the medium of French, he was the mildest-mannered monster I ever beheld. One day he went out of his way to account for the unlikeness to the language-master of the class. The explanation was a refined version of Mr. Bagnet’s code—“Discipline must be maintained.” To the pair of girls who read and recited to him in their private sitting-room, he was the finished gentleman in demeanor, and in talk delightfully instructive. His family in Paris had known the present generation of Lafayettes. Lamartine—at that epoch of French Revolutionary history, the popular idol—was his personal friend. He brought and read to us letters from the author-statesman, thrilling with interest, and kept us advised, through his family correspondence, of the stirring changes going on in his native land. All this was in the uncovenanted conversational exercise that succeeded the Spanish lesson. The latter over, he would toss aside the books used in it with an airy “Eh, bien donc! pour la conversation!” and plunge into the matter uppermost in his mind, chatting brilliantly and gayly in the most elegant French imaginable, bringing into our commonplace, provincial lives the flavor and sparkle of the Parisian salon.
To return to our first winter in a city school: The session began on October 5th. We had ceased to be homesick, and were learning to sustain, with seeming good-humor, criticisms of our “countrified ways and old-fashioned talk,” when our mother came to town for her fall shopping. She arrived on the first of November, my father tarrying behind to vote on the fourth. We had a glorious Saturday. It was our very first real shopping expedition, and it has had no equal in our subsequent experiences. There was a lecture on Saturday morning. Mr. Richard Sterling, the brother-in-law of our late tutor, and the head-master of a classical school for boys, lectured to us weekly upon Natural Philosophy. We were out by eleven o’clock, and on emerging from the house, we found our mother awaiting us without.
The day was divine, and we had worn our best walking-dresses, in anticipation of the shopping frolic. Three of the girls had commented upon our smart attire, one remarking that we “really looked like folks.” The vocabulary of school-girls usually harmonizes with their deportment. The tall girl I have spoken of as “Miss Blank,” added to her patronizing notice of the country girls, the encouraging assurance that “if we only had bonnets less than a century old, we would be quite presentable.”
We held our peace, hugging to our souls the knowledge that we were that day to try on two velvet bonnets—real velvet—the like of which had never graced our heads before. We could afford to smile superior to contempt and to patronage—the lowest device of the mean mind, the favorite tool of the consciously underbred.
I forgot heat and bitterness, and misanthropy died a natural death in the milliner’s shop. The new hat was a dream of beauty and becomingness in my unlearned eyes. It was a soft plum-color, and had a tiny marabou feather on the side. I had never worn a feather. Mea’s was dark-blue and of uncut velvet. It, too, was adorned with a white feather. I could have touched the tender blue heavens with one finger when it was decided that we might wear the new bonnets home, and have the old ones sent up instead.
“You know I never like to have new clothes worn for the first time to church,” our mother remarked, aside, to us.
We walked up-town, meeting my father at the foot of Capitol Street. He was in a prodigious hurry, forging along at a rate that made it difficult for me to overtake him when my mother told me to “run after him, and we would all go home together.”
He drew out his watch when I told my errand breathlessly. His eyes were bright with excitement; as he hurried back to offer his arm to his wife, he said:
“I must be on Broad Street when the Northern train comes in. We have just time if you don’t mind walking briskly.”
Mind it! I could have run every step of the way if that would bring the news to us more quickly. My heart smote me remorsefully. For in the engrossing event of the new bonnet I had forgotten, for the time, that decisive news of the election would certainly be received by the mail-train which ran into Richmond at two o’clock. It must be remembered that the period of which I write antedated the electric telegraph. We had but one through mail daily. Election news had been pouring in heavily, but slowly. We were not quite sure, even yet, how our own State had gone. The returns from New York and Pennsylvania would establish the fact of the great Whig victory beyond a doubt. We said “the Clay victory,” and were confident that it was an accomplished, established fact. True, my father and Uncle Carus had spoken rather gravely than apprehensively last night of the unprecedentedly large Irish vote that had been polled.
We were at the corner of Broad and Tenth Streets, and still at racing speed, when the train drew slowly into the station. The track lay in the centre of Broad Street, and the terminus was flush with the sidewalk. I was on one side of my father; my mother had his other arm. Mea, never a rapid walker, was some paces in the rear. I felt my father’s step falter and slacken suddenly. Looking into his face, I saw it darken and harden. The mobile mouth was a straight, tense line. I thought that a groan escaped him. Before I could exclaim, a man strode toward us from the train. He grasped my father’s arm and said something in his ear. I caught five words of one sentence:
“The Irish vote did it!”
At the same instant the ludicrous touch, never lacking from the supreme moments of life, was supplied to this by a boy walking down the street, his young face disfigured by the wrathful disappointment stamped upon the visages of most of the men thronging the sidewalk. Some ardent Democrat had nailed a vigorous poke-stalk against the fence, and the lad stopped to kick it viciously. Even my father smiled at the impotent fury of the action.
“That’s right, my boy!” he said, and struck the weed into the gutter with a blow of his cane.
“I wish other evils were as easily disposed of!” was all that escaped the tightly-closed lips for the next half-hour.
The gloom rested upon face and spirits for twenty-four hours. Richmond was a Whig city, and the very air seemed oppressed by what we reckoned as a National woe. It is not easy to appreciate in this century that the defeat of a Presidential candidate imported so much to the best men in the country.
“How did you know what had happened, father?” I ventured to ask that night when the silent meal was over. We had moved and spoken as if the beloved dead lay under our roof. I stole out to the long back porch as we arose from table, and stood there, leaning over the railing and listening to the dirge chanted by the river. The stars twinkled murkily through the city fogs; a sallow moon hung low in the west. It was a dolorous world. I wondered how soon the United States Government would collapse into anarchy. Could—would my father continue to live here under the rule of Polk? How I loathed the name and the party that had made it historic! So quietly had my father approached that I was made aware of his proximity by the scent of his cigar. I was vaguely conscious of a gleam of gratitude that he had this slight solace. His cigar meant much to him. I laid my hand on that resting on the railing. Such strong, capable hands as his were! His fingers were closed silently upon mine, and I gathered courage to put my question. The blow had fallen before we met the man who had hissed at “the Irish vote.”
“How did you know what had happened, father?”
No need to speak more definitely. Our minds had room for but one thought.
“It was arranged with the engineer and conductor that a flag should be made fast to the locomotive if there were good news. It was to be a large and handsome flag. Hundreds were on the lookout for it. As soon as I caught sight of the train I saw that the flag was not there.”
He smoked hard and fast. A choking in my throat held me silent. For, in a lightning flash of fancy, I had before me the glorious might-have-been that would have driven the waiting hundreds mad with joy. I pictured how proudly the “large, handsome flag” would have floated in the sunshine, and the wild enthusiasm of the crowds collected upon the sidewalks—the gladness that would have flooded our hearts and our home.
It was, perhaps, five minutes before I could manage my voice to say:
“How do you suppose Mr. Clay will bear it?”
I was a woman-child, and my whole soul went out in the longing to comfort the defeated demigod.
“Like the hero that he is, my daughter. This”—still not naming the disaster—“means more to the nation than to him.”
He raised his hat involuntarily, as I had seen him do that bright, happy May morning when we walked down to Jordan’s Creek to be amused by the Democratic barbecue.
He removed it entirely a week later, and bowed his bared head silently, when a fellow-Whig told him, with moist eyes, that the decisive tidings were brought to the hero as he stood in a social gathering of friends. Mr. Clay—so ran the tale I have never heard contradicted—was called out of the room by the messenger, returning in a few minutes to resume the conversation the summons had interrupted, with unruffled mien and the perfect courtesy that never failed him in public and in private. It was said then that he repeated on that evening, in reply to the expressed sorrow of his companions—if, indeed, it was not said then for the first time—the immortal utterance:
“I would rather be right than President!”
The inevitable dash of the ludicrous struck across the calamity in the form of my father’s disapproval of the velvet bonnet I would not have exchanged on Saturday for a ducal tiara. I had meant to reserve the appearance of it as a pleasant surprise, and to call his attention to it when I was dressed for church next day. I did not blame him for not noticing it in our rapid tramp up Capitol Street on Saturday. He had weightier matters on his mind. With the honest desire of diverting him from the train of ideas that had darkened his visage for twenty-four hours, I donned the precious head-piece ten minutes before it was time to set out for church, and danced into my mother’s room where he sat reading. Walking up to him, I swept a marvellous courtesy and bolted the query full at him:
“How do you like my new bonnet?”
He lowered the book and surveyed me with lack-lustre eyes.
“Not at all, I am sorry to say.”
I fairly staggered back, casting a look of anguished appeal at my mother. Being of my sex, she comprehended it.
“Why, father! we think it very pretty,” laying her hand on his shoulder. “And she never had a velvet bonnet before.”
I saw the significant tightening of the small fingers, and he must have felt it. But the dull eyes did not lighten, the corners of the mouth did not lift.
“As I said, I do not admire it. Nor do I think it becoming.”
I turned on my heel, as he might have done, and went to my room. When Mea and I joined our parents in the lower hall, the splendors of the new bonnets were extinguished by thick barege veils. We had not meant to wear them in November. They were indispensable for summer noons. After I had confided my tale of woe to my sister, we hastened to exhume the veils from our trunks and to bind them over our hats. We walked, slow and taciturn, behind our elders for five squares. Then my father turned and beckoned to us. He was actually smiling—a whimsical gleam that had in it something of shame, and much of humor.
“Take off those veils!” he said, positively, yet kindly. And, as we hesitated visibly: “I mean what I say! I want to take a good look at those bonnets.”
It was in a quiet corner of a secluded street, lined with what was once a favorite shade-tree in Richmond—the Otaheite mulberry. The night had been cold, and the last russet leaves were ankle-deep on the sidewalk. They rustled as I moved uneasily in loosening my veil.
I never passed the spot afterward without thinking of the absurd little episode in the history of those melancholy days.
“I see, now, that they are very pretty and very becoming,” my father pursued, as they were divested of the ugly mufflers. “I have been very cross for the past twenty-four hours. I suppose because I have been horribly upset by the National calamity. We will turn over a new and cleaner leaf.”
He was often stern, and oftener imperative. It was his nature to be strong in all that he set his hand or mind unto. I have yet to see another strong man who was so ready to acknowledge a fault, and who made such clean work of the act.