The Memoirs of a Failure: with an Account of the Man and His Manuscript

by Daniel Wright Kittredge

As I sat in his bed room I had a chance, as I thought, to take a glimpse of its furnishings, but there were none. The walls were perfectly bare with the exception of one picture, hung so that he could see it from his pillow. It was the portrait of a young girl upon a horse, habited in the style of twenty years ago.

I went to see him again, but I was not admitted by his servant. Before the end of the week Dunlevy had left the University, and never returned.

Nobody missed him particularly, because he had had practically little to do with any of us. There were some stories told concerning his disappearance. One was to the effect that an old mental trouble had come over him again, and that he had retired to his ancestral plantation in Albemarle County, over in the James River country. Though it was admitted that perhaps this old trouble was brought about by overwork, as I have said, still, certain students used to look wise and say nothing whenever it was given as a reason for his breakdown.

As to what his incubus was or the cause of it, I could not well make out. Two students who came from the same part of the state also sat at our table, and they said that they used to hear their older brothers and sisters talk about Dunlevy and tell how he was much like the rest of them up to the time when he was quite a young man; that he was such a wit and so entertaining, and what a fine dancer he was, and how he used to be asked to break the colts which were to be ridden by the young ladies of the neighborhood. And that he was one of the shrewdest young poker players that ever drew cards from a pack. Then, of course, there was a love affair. Was there ever a young southerner without love affairs? But here, it appears was the unusual with Dunlevy; for he had just one love affair.

He had courted the girl season after season ever since he was fourteen years old, so their tale went. She lived down the river near his home on a big plantation in Goochland County. One of these students said that he remembered hearing his father say that he had often seen Dunlevy as a boy in knee breeches and tan legs drop down on a packet boat when she was going through the locks; and then how Mr. Dunlevy, senior, would have to send down to Goochland to get him home again. That was in the last days of the old James River canal when traffic with Richmond went by packet. But to go on with what I heard about his unusual case. They said that this couple, young as they were, seemed perfectly devoted to each other and grew more and more attached and tender in their affection up to the time when Dunlevy became a full grown youth.

I am writing this at a distance of nearly a decade since I heard the account and naturally most of the details have escaped me. But as I remember, they said it was one Easter vacation when young Dunlevy felt his blood rise with the sap and determined to see the world by spending a fortnight in metropolitan New York. Probably he took a little undue prestige unto himself, for not many young southerners could afford a metropolitan junket in those poverty stricken days of the Reconstruction period. He made the journey, staying a month instead of a fortnight. Up to this point his case is conventional enough.

When he came back he went on a day’s visit to Goochland. The young girl and he went into the parlor together and the door was closed. No one ever knew a word of what took place between them; whatever he told her and whatever she responded must have been serious, for when their meeting was over, Dunlevy opened the door and walked straight out of the house without a spoken word to her mother and father, and he never saw her again from that day to this. But she remained true to him, and no other man’s hand ever touched her. Dunlevy’s life changed; his face changed; his disposition changed; he was literally not the same man. Something had befallen him.

Such was the account that I gathered about him from what the two students told in our dining hall at the University of Virginia. We each of us wondered what had happened to him and put our individual construction upon the bare facts as I have related them. Oddly enough, I remember that a third-year medical student who sat with us remarked with a Carolina accent that he “reckoned” he could tell what was the matter with him. To which Crowther rejoined:

“Well, I always said the man was a damned fool, and now we know it. Pass the pickles.”

And so the conversation turned to other topics; and I heard no more of Dunlevy. Thus do men dispose of one who has lived amongst them.