Recollections of a Varied Life Part 6

In my judgment, that is the conclusive objection to co-education, except perhaps among the youngest children. It robs the relations of the s.e.xes 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 s.e.x, 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 finis.h.i.+ng, at Le Febre's or Dr. Hoge's, or some other good school for young women.

Both the young men and the young women read voluminously--the young men in part, perhaps, to equip themselves for conversational intercourse with the young women. They both read polite literature, but they read history also with a diligence that equipped them with independent convictions of their own, with regard to such matters as the conduct of Charlotte Corday, the characters of Mirabeau, Danton, and Robespierre, the ungentlemanly treatment given by John Knox to Mary, Queen of Scots, and all that sort of thing. Indeed, among the Virginia women, young and old, the romantic episodes of history, ancient, mediaeval, and modern, completely took the place, as subjects of conversation, of those gossipy personalities that make up the staple of conversation among women generally.

Let me not be misunderstood. These women did not a.s.sume to be "learned ladies." It was only that they knew their history and loved it and were fond of talking about it, quite as some other women are fond of talking about the interesting scandal in the domestic relations of the reigning matinee hero.

The intercourse between men and women thus educated was always easy, gracious, and friendly, but it was always deferential, chivalric, and imbued with that recognition of s.e.x which, without loss of dignity on either side, holds man to be the generously willing protector, and woman the proudly loyal recipient of a protection to which her s.e.x ent.i.tles her, and in return for which she gladly yields a submission that has nothing of surrender in it.

There was a fascination to me in all this, that I find it impossible to describe and exceedingly difficult even to suggest.

I may add that I think the young women of that time in Virginia were altogether the best educated young women I have ever encountered in any time or country. And, best of all, they were thoroughly, uncompromisingly feminine.

Of the men I need only say that they were masculine, and fit mates for such women. I do not at all think they were personally superior to men of other parts of the country in those things that pertain to character and conduct, but at least they had the advantage of living in a community where public opinion was all-dominant, and where that resistless force insisted upon truth, integrity, and personal courage as qualities that every man must possess if he expected to live in that community at all. It was _n.o.blesse oblige_, and it inexorably controlled the conduct of all men who hoped for recognition as gentlemen.

The sentiment took quixotic forms at times, perhaps, but no jesting over these manifestations can obscure the fact that it compelled men to good behavior in every relation of life and made life sweeter, wholesomer, and more fruitful of good than it otherwise would have been.

[Sidenote: The Voices of Virginia Women]

I must add a word with respect to that most fascinating of all things, the Virginia girl's voice. This was music of so entrancing a sort that I have known young men from other parts of the country to fall in love with a voice before they had seen its possessor and to remain in love with the owner of it in spite of her distinct lack of beauty when revealed in person.

Those girls all dropped the "g"s at the end of their participles; they habitually used double negatives, and, quite defiantly of dictionaries, used Virginian locutions not sanctioned by authority. If challenged on the subject their reply would have been that which John Esten Cooke gave to an editor who wanted to strike a phrase out of one of his Virginia romances, on the ground that it was not good English. "It's good Virginian," he answered, "and for my purpose that is more important."

But all such defects of speech--due not to ignorance but to a charming wilfulness--were forgotten in the music of the voices that gave them utterance.

There are no such voices now, even in Virginia, I regret to say.

Not of their own fault, but because of contact with strangely altered conditions, the altogether charming Virginia girls I sometimes meet nowadays, have voices and intonations not unlike those of women in other parts of the country, except that they preserve enough of the old lack of emphasis upon the stronger syllables to render their speech often difficult to understand. There is compensation for that in the gentle, laughing readiness with which they repeat utterances not understood on their first hearing.

XXIV

It was during the roseate years of the old Virginia life not long before the war that I had my first and only serious experience of what is variously and loosely called the "occult" and the "supernatural."

It is only in answer to solicitation that I tell the story here as it has been only in response to like solicitation that I have orally told it before.

In order that I may not be misunderstood, in order that I may not be unjustly suspected of a credulity that does not belong to me, I wish to say at the outset that I am by nature and by lifelong habit of mind a skeptic. I believe in the natural order, in cause and effect, in the material basis of psychological phenomena. I have no patience with the mystical or the mysterious. I do not believe in the miraculous, the supernatural, the occult--call it what you will.

And yet the experience I am about to relate is literally true, and the story of it a slavishly faithful record of facts. I make no attempt to reconcile those facts with my beliefs or unbeliefs. I venture upon no effort at explanation. I have set forth above my intellectual att.i.tude toward all such matters; I shall set forth the facts of this experience with equal candor. If the reader finds the facts irreconcilable with my intellectual convictions, I must leave him to judge as he may between the two, without aid of mine. The facts are these:

I was one of a house party, staying at one of the most hospitable of Virginia mansions. I was by courtesy of Virginia clannishness "cousin" to the mistress of the house, and when no house party was in entertainment I was an intimate there, accustomed to go and come at will and to reckon myself a member of the family by brevet.

[Sidenote: The Story of the West Wing]

At the time now considered, the house was unusually full, when a letter came announcing the immediate coming of still other guests. In my close intimacy with the mistress of the plantation I became aware of her perplexity. She didn't know where and how to bestow the presently coming guests. I suggested that I and some others should take ourselves away, a suggestion which her hospitable soul rejected, the more particularly in my case, perhaps, because I was actively planning certain entertainments in which she was deeply interested. Suddenly it occurred to me that during my long intimacy in the house I had never known anybody to occupy the room or rooms which const.i.tuted the second story of the west wing of the building. I asked why not bring that part of the s.p.a.cious mansion into use in this emergency, thinking that its idleness during all the period of my intimacy there had been due only to the lack of need in a house so large.

"Cousin Mary," with a startled look of inquiry upon her face, glanced at her husband, who sat with us alone on a piazza.

"You may as well tell him the facts," he said in reply to the look.

"He won't talk."

Then she told me the history of the room, explaining that she objected to any talk about it because she dreaded the suspicion of superst.i.tion.

Briefly the story was that several generations earlier, an old man almost blind, had died there; that during his last illness he had had his lawyer prepare his will there; that he was too feeble, when the lawyer finished, even to sign the doc.u.ment; that he placed it under his pillow; that during the night his daughter abstracted and copied it, changing only one clause in such fas.h.i.+on as to defeat the long cherished purpose of the dying man; that she placed her new draft under the pillow where the old one had been and that in the morning the nearly blind old man executed that instead of the other.

"Now I'm not superst.i.tious, you know," said Cousin Mary very earnestly, "but it is a fact that from that day to this there has been something the matter with that room. During the time of my great uncle, who brought me up, you know, and from whom I inherited the plantation, many persons tried to sleep in it but none ever stayed there more than an hour or two. They always fled in terror from the chamber, until at last my uncle forbade any further attempt to occupy the room lest this should come to be called a haunted house. Since I became mistress here three persons have tried the thing, all of them with the same result."

"It's stuff and nonsense," I interposed, "but what yarns did they tell?"

"They one and all related the same singular experience," she answered, "though neither of them knew what the experience of the others had been."

"What was it?" I asked with resolute incredulity.

"Why, each of them went to the room in full confidence that nothing would happen. Each went to bed and to sleep. After a while he waked to find the whole room pervaded by a dim, yellowish gray or grayish yellow light. Some of them used one combination of words and some the other, but all agreed that the light had no apparent source, that it was all-pervasive, that it was very dim at first, but that it steadily increased until they fled in panic from its nameless terror. For ten years we permitted no repet.i.tion of the experiment, but a year ago my brother--he's an army officer, you know--insisted upon sleeping in the room. He remained there longer than anybody else ever had done, but between two and three o'clock in the morning he came down the stairs with barely enough strength to cling to the bal.u.s.trades, and in such an ague fit as I never saw any one else endure in all my life. He had served in the Florida swamps and was subject to agues, but for several months before that he had been free from them. I suppose the terror attacked his weakest point and brought the chills on again."

[Sidenote: A Challenge to the Ghosts]

"Did he have the same experience the rest had had?" I asked.

"Yes, except that he had stayed longer than any of them and suffered more."

"Cousin Mary," I said, "I am going to sleep in that room to-night, with your permission."

"You can't have it," she answered. "I've seen too much of the terror to permit a further trifling with it."

"Then I'll sleep there without your permission," I answered. "I'll break in if necessary, and I'll prove by a demonstration that n.o.body can question, what nonsense all these imaginings have been."

Cousin Mary was determined, but so was I, and at last she consented to let me make the attempt. She and I decided to keep the matter to ourselves, but of course it leaked out and spread among all the guests in the house. I suppose the negro servants who were sent to make up the bed and supply bath water told. At any rate my coming adventure was the sole topic of conversation at the supper table that night.

I seized upon the occasion to give a warning.

"I have borrowed a six-shooter from our host," I announced, "and if I see anything to shoot at to-night I shall shoot without challenging. So I strongly advise you fellows not to attempt any practical jokes."

The response convinced me that nothing of the kind was contemplated, but to make sure, our host, who perhaps feared tragedy, exacted and secured from each member of the company, old and young, male and female, a pledge of honor that there should be no interference with my experiment, no trespa.s.s upon my privacy.

"With that pledge secured," I said, perhaps a trifle boastfully, "I shall stay in that room all night no matter what efforts the spooks may make to drive me out."

It was about midnight, or nearly that, when I entered the room. It was raining heavily without, and the wind was rattling the stout shutters of the eight great windows of the room.

I went to each of those windows and minutely examined it. They were hung with heavy curtains of deep red, I remember, for I observed every detail. Four of them were in the north and four in the south wall of the wing. The eastern wall of the room was pierced only by the broad doorway which opened at the head of the great stairs. The door was stoutly built of oak, and provided with a heavy lock of iron with bra.s.s k.n.o.bs.

The western side of the room held a great open fireplace, from which a paneled oaken wainscot extended entirely across the room and up to the ceiling. Behind the wainscot on either side was a s.p.a.cious closet which I carefully explored with two lighted bedroom candles to show me that the closets were entirely empty.

Having completed my explorations I disrobed, double-locked the door, and went to bed, first placing the six-shooter handily under my pillow. I do not think I was excited even in the smallest degree. My pulses were calm, my imagination no more active than a young man's must be, and my brain distinctly sleepy. The great, four-poster bed was inexpressibly comfortable, and the splash and patter of the rain as it beat upon the window blinds was as soothing as a lullaby. I forgot all about the experiment in which I was engaged, all about ghosts and their ways, and went to sleep.

[Sidenote: The Yellow-Gray Light]