In brief his thrift was altogether admirable, and the mechanical devices by which he made the most of every opportunity, suggested a fertilely inventive mind on the part of a man whose general demeanor was stolid to the verge of stupidity. When I was taking supper at his house one night by special invitation, I asked him why he had named all his sons John. For reply he said:
"John is a very good name," and that was all the explanation I ever got out of him.
XIX
One pupil I had at Riker's Ridge, was Johnny G. His people had some money and Johnny had always dressed better than the rest of us could afford to do, when several years before, he and I had been classmates in the second or third grade of the Grammar School in Madison. Johnny had never got out of that grade, and even when I was in my second year in college, he gave no promise of ever making a scholastic step forward. But he had relatives on Riker's Ridge, and when he heard that I was to be the teacher there he promised his people that he would really make an effort if they would let him live with his relatives there and become my pupil. It was so arranged, and Johnny came to me, with all his dazzling waistcoats and trousers with the latest style of pockets, and all the rest of the upholstery with which he delighted to decorate his person.
I think he really did make an effort to master the rudimentary school studies, and I conscientiously endeavored to help him, not only in school but of evenings. For a time there seemed to be a reasonable promise of success in lifting Johnny to that level of scholastic attainment which would permit him to return to Madison and enter the High School. But presently all this was brought to naught. Johnny was seized by a literary ambition that completely absorbed what mind he had, and made his school studies seem to him impertinent intrusions upon the attention of one absorbed in higher things.
He told me all about it one afternoon as I walked homeward with him, intent upon finding out why he had suddenly ceased to get his lessons.
"I'm going to write a song," he told me, "and it's going to make me famous. I'm writing it now, and I tell you it's fine."
"Tell me about it, Johnny," I replied. "What is its theme? And how much of it have you written?"
"I don't know what it's to be about," he answered, "if that's what you mean by its theme. But it's going to be great, and I'm going to make the tune to it myself."
"Very well," I replied encouragingly. "Would you mind reciting to me so much of it as you've written? I'd like to hear it."
"Why, of course. I tell you it's going to be great, but I haven't got much of it done yet—only one line, in fact."
A Buttermilk Poet
Observing a certain discouragement in his tone I responded:
"Oh, well, even one line is a good deal, if it's good. Many a poem's fortune has been made by a single line. Tell me what it is."
"Well, the line runs: 'With a pitcher of buttermilk under her arm.' Don't you see how it sort o' sings? 'With a pitcher of buttermilk under her arm'—why, it's great, I tell you. Confound the school books! What's the use of drudging when a fellow has got it in him to write poetry like that? 'With a pit-cher of but-termilk un-der her arm'—don't it sing? 'With a pit-cher of but-termilk un-der her arm.' 'With a pit-cher of but-termilk—un-der her arm.' Whoopee, but it's great!"
I lost sight of Johnny soon after that, and I have never heard what became of that buttermilk pitcher, or the fascinating rhythm in which it presented itself. But in later years I have come into contact with many literary ambitions that were scarcely better based than this. Indeed, if I were minded to be cynical—as I am not—I might mention a few magazine poets whose pitchers of buttermilk seem to me—but all that is foreign to the purpose of this book.
Before quitting this chapter and the period and region to which it relates, I wish to record that Charley Grebe mastered the mathematics he needed, and entered hopefully upon his apprenticeship to a ship carpenter. I hope he rose to the top in the trade, but I know nothing about it.
XX
Not many months after my school-teaching experience came to an end, circumstances decreed that my life should be changed in the most radical way possible in this country. I quitted the rapidly developing, cosmopolitan, kaleidoscopic West, and became a dweller upon the old family plantation in Virginia, where my race had been bred and nurtured ever since 1635 when the first man of my name to cross the seas established himself there and possessed himself of lavishly abundant acres which subsequent divisions among his descendants had converted into two adjoining plantations—the ancestral homes of all the Egglestons, so far, at least, as I knew them or knew of them.
I suppose I was an imaginative youth at seventeen, and I had read enough of poetry, romance, and still more romantic history, to develop that side of my nature somewhat unduly. At any rate it was strongly dominant, and the contrast between the seething, sordid, aggressive, and ceaselessly eager life of the West, in which I had been bred and the picturesquely placid, well-bred, self-possessed, and leisurely life into which the transfer ushered me, impressed me as nothing else has ever done. It was like escaping from the turmoil of battle to the green pastures, and still waters of the Twenty-third Psalm. It was like passing from the clamor of a stock exchange into the repose of a library.
I have written much about that restful, refined, picturesque old Virginia life in essays and romances, but I must write something more of it in this place at risk of offending that one of my critics who not long ago discovered that I had created it all out of my own imagination for the entertainment of New England readers. He was not born, I have reason to believe, until long after that old life had passed into history, but his conviction that it never existed, that it was a priori impossible, was strong enough to bear down the testimony of any eye-witness's recollection.
Creative Incredulity
It has often been a matter of chastening wonder and instruction to me to observe how much more critics and historians can learn from the intuitions of their "inner consciousness" than was ever known to the unfortunates who have had only facts of personal observation and familiar knowledge to guide them. It was only the other day that a distinguished historian of the modern introspective, self-illuminating school upset the traditions of many centuries by assuring us that the romantic story of Antony and Cleopatra is a baseless myth; that there never was any love affair between the Roman who has been supposed to have "madly flung a world away" for worship of a woman, and the "Sorceress of the Nile"—the "star-eyed Egyptian" who has been accused of tempting him to his destruction; that Cleopatra merely hired of Antony the services of certain legions that she needed for her defense, and paid him for them in the current money of the time and country.
Thus does the incredulous but infallible intuition of the present correct the recorded memory of the past. I have no doubt that some day the country will learn from that sort of superior consciousness that in the Virginia campaign of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania and Cold Harbor, where men are now believed to have fought and marched so heroically with empty bellies and often with unshod feet, there were in fact no such discomforts incident to the discussion; that Grant and Lee like the courteous commanders they were, suspended the argument of arms at the dinner hour each day in order that their men might don evening clothes and patent leather shoes and sit down to banquets of eleven courses, with pousse cafés and cigars at the end. Nevertheless, I shall write of the old Virginia life as I remember it, and let the record stand at that until such time as it shall be shown by skilled historical criticism that the story of the Civil War is a sun myth and that