Dorothy South: A Love Story of Virginia Just Before the War

by George Cary Eggleston

He peremptorily declined. “I know nothing of the military art,” he wrote to the committee that had laid the proposal before him. “There are scores of men in the community better fit than I am for military command. Especially there is your fellow citizen, John Meaux, trained at West Point and eminently fit for a much higher command than any that you can offer him. Put him, I earnestly adjure you, into the line of promotion. Elect him to the highest military office within your gift, and let me serve as a private under him, in either of your companies, if no opportunity offers for me to render a larger service and a more valuable one than that. There is scarcely a man among you who couldn’t handle a military force more effectively than I could. Let your most capable men be your commanders, big and little. I believe firmly in the dictum ‘the tools to him who can use them.’ For myself I see a more fruitful opportunity of service than any that military command could bring to me. I have a certain skill which, I think, is going to be sorely needed in this war. It is my firm belief that the struggle upon which we are entering is destined to last through long years of suffering and sore want. We are mainly dependent upon importation not only for the most pressingly necessary of our medicines but for that absolute necessity of life, salt. If war shall shut us in, as it is extremely likely to do, we must find means which we do not now possess of producing these and other things for ourselves, including the materials for that prime requisite of war—gunpowder. It so happens that I have skill in such manufactures as these, and I purpose to turn it to account whenever the necessity shall come upon us. In the meantime, as a surgeon and, upon occasion, as a private soldier I may perhaps be able to do more for Virginia and for the South than I could ever hope to do by assuming those functions of military command for which I have neither natural fitness nor the fitness of training.”

All this was deemed very absurd at the time. The war, it was thought, could not last more than sixty days—an opinion which Mr. Secretary of State Seward, on the other side of the line, confidently shared, though his anticipations of the end of it were quite different from those entertained at the South. Why a young man of spirit, such as Arthur Brent was, should refuse to enter upon the brief but glorious struggle in the capacity of a major with the prospect of coming out of it a brigadier-general, his neighbors could not understand. Nor could any of them, with one exception, understand his anticipations of a long war, or his conviction that, end as it might, the war would make an early end of slavery, overturning the South’s industrial system and bringing sore poverty upon the people. The one exception was Robert Copeland, the thrifty young man who had lost caste by “making too many hogsheads of tobacco to the hand.” He shared Arthur’s views, and he acted upon them in ways that Arthur would have scorned to do. He sent all his negroes to Richmond to be sold by auction to the traders to the far South. He converted his plantation, with all its live stock and other appurtenances into money, and with the proceeds of these his sellings he hurried to New York and purchased diamonds. These he bestowed in a belt which he buckled about his person and wore throughout the war, upon the principle that whatever value there might or might not be in other things when the war should be over, diamonds always command their price throughout the civilized world. When after this was done he sought to enlist in one of the companies forming in his neighborhood, he was rejected by unanimous vote, because he had sold negroes, while the men of the company held rigidly to a social standard of conduct which he had flagrantly defied. He went to Richmond. He raised a company of ruffians, which included many “jailbirds” and the like. He made himself its captain, and went into the field as the leader of a “fighting battery.” He distinguished himself for daring, and came out of the war, four years later, a brigadier-general. As such he was excluded from the benefits of the early amnesty proclamation. But he cared little about that. He went to New York, sold his diamonds for fifty per cent more than their cost, and accepted high office in the army of the Khedive of Egypt. He thus continued active in that profession of arms in which he had found his best opportunity to exercise his peculiar gift of “getting out of men all there is in them”—which was the phrase chosen by himself to describe his own special capabilities.[C]

XXXIII
“AT PARIS IT WAS”

DURING all this year of wandering on the part of Dorothy Edmonia did her duty as a correspondent with conspicuous fidelity. To her letters far more than to Dorothy’s own, Arthur was indebted for exact information as to Dorothy’s doings and Dorothy’s surroundings and Dorothy’s self. For Dorothy’s reticence concerning herself grew upon her as the months went on. She wrote freely and with as much apparent candor and fulness as ever, but she managed never to reveal herself in the old familiar fashion. Not that there was anything of estrangement in her words or tone, for there was nothing of the kind. It was only that she manifested a certain shyness and reserve concerning her own thought and feeling when these became intimate,—a reserve like that which every woman instinctively practises concerning details of the toilet. A woman may frankly admit to a man that she finds comfort in the use of a little powder, but she does not want him to see the powder box and puff. She may mention her shoe-strings quite without hesitation, but if one of them comes unfastened, she will climb two flights of stairs rather than let him see her readjust it.

In somewhat that way Dorothy at this time wrote to Arthur. If she read a book or saw a picture that pleased her, she would write to him, telling him quite all her external thought concerning it; but if it inspired any emotion of a certain sort in her, she had nothing whatever to say concerning that. In one particular, too, she deliberately abstained from telling him even of her pursuits and ambitions. He was left to hear of that from Edmonia, who wrote:

“Apparently we are destined to remain here in Paris during the rest of our stay abroad. For Dorothy has a new craze which she will in no wise relinquish or abate. For that, you, sir, are responsible, for you planted the seed that are now producing this luxuriant growth of quite unfeminine character. You taught Dorothy the rudiments of chemistry and physics. You awakened in her a taste for such studies which has grown into an uncontrollable passion.

“She has become the special pupil of one of the greatest chemists in France, and she almost literally lives in his laboratory, at least during the daylight hours. She goes to operas about twice a week, and she takes violin lessons from a woman before breakfast; but during the rest of the time she does nothing but slop at a laboratory sink. Her master in this department is madly in love—not with her, though he calls her, in the only English phrase he speaks without accent, ‘the apple of his eye,’—but with her enthusiasm in science. He describes it as a ‘grand passion’ and positively raves in ejaculatory French and badly broken English, over the extraordinary rapidity with which she learns, the astonishing grasp she has of principles, and the readiness with which she applies principles to practice. ‘Positively’ he exclaimed to me the other day, ‘she is no longer a student—she is a chemist,—almost a great chemist. If I had to select one to take absolute control of a laboratory for the nice production of the most difficult compounds, I would this day choose not any man in all France, but Mademoiselle by herself.’ Then he paid you a compliment. He added; ‘and she tells me she has studied under a master for only a few months! It is marvellous! It is incredible, except that we must believe Mademoiselle, who is the soul of honor and truth. Ah—that is what gives her her love of science—for science loves nothing but truth. But her first master must be a wonder, a born teacher, an enthusiast, a real master who inspires his pupil with a passion like his own.’

“I confirmed Dorothy’s statement that she had received only a few months’ tuition in a little plantation laboratory, but—at the risk of making you disagreeably conceited, I will tell you this—I fully confirmed the judgment he had formed of Dorothy’s master.

“ ‘Ah, you know him then?’ the enthusiastic Frenchman broke out; ‘and you will tell me his name, which Mademoiselle refused to speak in answer to my inquiry? And you will give me a letter which may excuse me for the deep presumption when I write to him? I must write to him. I must know a master who has no other such in all France. His name Mademoiselle Bannister, his name, I pray you.’