Recollections of a Varied Life. George Cary Eggleston
The Charm of Leisureliness
All these things helped, when I first came into relations with them, to impress my young mind with the poise, the picturesqueness, the restful leisureliness of the Virginian life, and the utter absence from it of strenuousness, and still more of sordidness. For the first time in my life I was living with people who thought of money only on those annual or other occasions when they were settling their affairs and paying their debts by giving notes for their sum; people who regarded time not as something to be economized and diligently utilized for the sake of its money value, but as a means of grace, if I may so speak without irreverence; as an opportunity of enjoyment, for themselves and for others; as a thing to be spent with the utmost lavishness in the doing of things agreeable, in the reading of books that pleased, in the riding of horses that put the rider upon his metal to match their tameless spirit, in the cultivation of flowers, in the improvement of trees by grafting and budding, and even in the idler pleasures of tossing grace hoops, or hotly maintaining an indoor contest at battledore and shuttlecock when it rained heavily. These and a score of other pastimes seemed good in the eyes of the Virginian men and women. The men went shooting or fox hunting or hare coursing, or fishing, each in its season. The women embroidered and knitted nubias, and made fancy work, and they walked long miles when not riding with escorts, and dug much in the ground in propagation of the flowers they loved. They kept house, too, with a vigilance born of the fact that in keeping house they were also keeping plantation. For they must not only supervise the daily dispensation of foodstuffs to all the negroes, but they must visit and personally care for the sick, the aged, the infirm, and the infantile among the black people. They must put up fruits and jams and pickles and ketchups and jellies and shrubs and cordials enough to stock a warehouse, in anticipation of the plantation needs. They must personally cut out and direct the making of all the clothing to be worn by the blacks on the plantation, for the reason that the colored maids, seamstresses and dressmakers who were proud to fashion the gowns of their young mistresses, simply would not "work for de field hands,"—meaning the negroes of the plantation.
Yet with it all these women were never hurried, never scant of time in which to do anything that might give pleasure to another. I never knew one of them to plead preoccupation as a reason for not going riding or walking, or rendering some music, or joining in a game, or doing anything else that others wanted her to do.
The reason for all this was simple enough. The young women who kept house—and it was usually the young women who did so—were up and at it before the dawn. By the time that the eight-thirty or nine o'clock breakfast was served, all their necessary work was done for the day; often it was done in time to let them take a ride before breakfast if the young man suggesting it happened to be an agreeable fellow. After all was done upon which that day's conduct of the house and the plantation depended, the gentlewomen concerned adopted the views of their masculine mentors and exemplars. They accepted to-morrow as a good enough stalking horse for to-day, and, having laid out their work well in advance, they exacted of their servitors that the morrow's morning should begin with a demonstration of to-day's work well done.
So they, too, had leisure, just as the meal hours had. I had been brought up on five or six o'clock breakfasts, eleven-thirty or twelve o'clock dinners, and early suppers. Here the breakfast hour was eight thirty at the earliest and nine usually; "snack" was served about one to those who chose to come to it, dinner at three or four, with no hurry about it, and supper came at nine—the hour at which most people in the West habitually went to bed.
The thing suited me, personally, for I had great ambitions as a student and habitually dug at my mathematics, Latin, and Greek until two in the morning. I was always up by daylight, and after a plunge into the cold water provided for me in a molasses barrel out under the eaves, I usually took a ride in company with the most agreeable young woman who happened to be staying in the house at the time.
Sometimes I had two to escort, but that was rare. Usually there was another young man in the house, and usually, under such circumstances, I saw to it that he did not lie long abed. And even when there was no such recourse, the "other girl" was apt to conjure up some excuse for not wishing to ride that morning.
XXIII
The Courtesy of the Virginians
Indeed, one of the things that most deeply impressed me among the Virginians was the delicacy and alert thoughtfulness of their courtesy. The people of the West were not ill-mannered boors by any means, but gentle, kindly folk. But they were not versed in those little momentary courtesies of life which create a roseate atmosphere of active good will. In all that pertained to courtesy in the larger and more formal affairs of social life, the people of the West were even more scrupulously attentive to the requirements of good social usage than these easy-going Virginians were, with their well-defined social status and their habit of taking themselves and each other for granted. But in the little things of life, in their alertness to say the right word or do the trifling thing that might give pleasure, and their still greater alertness to avoid the word or act that might offend or incommode, the Virginians presented to my mind a new and altogether pleasing example of courtesy.
In later years I have found something like this agreeably impressed upon me when I go for a time from New York to Boston. Courtesy could not be finer or more considerate among people of gentle breeding who know each other than it is in New York. But in their considerate treatment of strangers, casually encountered in public places, the Boston people give a finer, gentler, more delicate flavor to their courtesy, and it is a delightful thing to encounter.
In Virginia this quality of courtesy was especially marked in the intercourse of men and women with each other. The attitude of both was distinctly chivalrous. To the woman—be she a child of two, a maiden of twenty, or a gentlewoman so well advanced in years that her age was unmentionable—the man assumed an attitude of gentle consideration, of deference due to sex, of willingness to render any service at any cost, and of a gently protective guardianship that stopped at nothing in the discharge of its duty. To the man, be he old or young, the woman yielded that glad obedience that she deemed due to her protector and champion.
I had never seen anything like this before. In the West I had gone to school with all the young women I knew. I had competed with them upon brutally equal terms, in examinations and in struggles for class honors, and the like. They and we boys had been perfectly good friends and comrades, of course, and we liked each other in that half-masculine way. But the association was destructive of romance, of fineness, of delicate attractiveness. There was no glamor left in the relations of young men and young women, no sentiment except such as might exist among young men themselves. The girls were only boys of another sort. Our attitude toward them was comradely but not chivalric. It was impossible to feel the roseate glow of romance in association with a young woman who had studied in the same classes with one, who had stood as a challenge in the matter of examination marks, and who met one at any hour of the day on equal terms, with a cheery "good-morning" or "good-evening" that had no more of sentiment in it than the clatter of a cotton mill.
Sex and Education
In my judgment, that is the conclusive objection to co-education, except perhaps among the youngest children. It robs the relations of the sexes of sentiment, of softness, of delicacy. It makes of girls an inferior sort of boys, and of boys an inferior sort of girls. It cannot completely negative sex, but it can and does sufficiently negative it to rob life of one of its tenderest charms.
In Virginia for the first time I encountered something different. There the boys were sent to old field schools where in rough and tumble fashion, they learned Latin and robust manliness, Greek and a certain graciousness of demeanor toward others, the absence of which would have involved them in numberless fights on the playgrounds. The girls were tenderly dame-nurtured at home, with a gentlewoman for governess, with tutors to supplement the instruction of the governess, and with a year or two, perhaps, for finishing, at Le Febre's or Dr. Hoge's, or some other good school for young women.
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