In a loose cloak, with a stout stick, Miss Johnston tramps the Virginia hills. It is recreation, perhaps, but her mind is always at work. When her body is at work also she sits at a mahogany desk in the study, a cluttered desk, with an apple within reach of her free hand. Panes of leaded glass about the room protect books of every description—history, philosophy, science, most of the literature of suffrage and feminism—a battalion, a regiment of volumes. In one corner two large globes, one terrestrial, the other astronomical; elsewhere a microscope; on the walls and mantel shelf copies of favorite pictures and photographs of many friends. The beautiful old chest that used to house a grandmother’s linen is full of old magazines and newspapers, ammunition for the author.
Sooner or later someone will undertake the interesting task of going through Virginia and identifying the sites of Miss Johnston’s stories. A beginning was made by Alice M. Tyler, writing in the Book News Monthly of March, 1911.
“Prisoners of Hope, To Have and to Hold and Audrey are full of allusions to people, places and events that must cause the least impressionable nature to thrill with patriotic and State pride. Visitors to Jamestown have a newborn desire to pause beside the ruins of a dwelling house where a young daughter of the Jacquelines greeted her guests before going abroad to keep her birthday fête upon the greensward in Audrey’s day. At Williamsburg is pointed out a crumbling edifice that in its day represented the earliest theater in the United States, the one in which Audrey played to the gentry who came from the surrounding country with their wives and daughters, eager to witness the antics of the player folk. In the same Old World capital is Bruton Church, representing the scene of another episode in Audrey’s life.
“Higher up James River by some miles is Westover, the home of Audrey’s fair rival, Evelyn Byrd, whose pink brocade ball gown, a treasured heirloom, recalls to mind the governor’s palace in Williamsburg and the official function at which Audrey beheld the radiant Evelyn in the full flush of her loveliness.
“Lewis Rand is of a later date. In its pages the country of the upper James and Richmond come equally into play. The June moon still streams into the ballroom at beautiful Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, as it did when Rand, the untutored, practiced his steps in it, and was admitted to confidential companionship and wardship by its owner. The grasses still wave in the yard of old Saint John’s Church, Richmond, where Lewis Rand’s wife and her sister worshiped and saw grouped about them the quality of the town in what was then its most aristocratic quarter. The site of the coffee-house on Main Street, where politicians of Rand’s party assembled to hear the news and discuss the issues of the times, can still be readily identified. But the tide of prosperity has for years flowed away from Leigh Street section, where the town home of the Rands was said to have been situated, in the midst of neighborly souls who sent in hot dishes for supper on the arrival of Mistress Rand and her husband from their country residence near the State University, in Charlottesville.”
There is something to be done also in the way of pedigrees. Miss Unity Dandridge, niece of Col. Churchill in Lewis Rand, was the mother of Fauquier Cary in The Long Roll. The Churchills, the Carys and others should be charted for us; places, estates, such as Fontenoy, Three Oaks, Greenwood, Silver Hill, should be put beyond peradventure. A decent Baedeker of Virginia will concern itself with all these things.
It is unnecessary and might be tedious to consider at length each of Miss Johnston’s books. Until the publication of Hagar in 1913 all her work had been historical and had consisted, with the exception of The Goddess of Reason, of novels whose scenes lay wholly or mostly in Virginia. Her treatment was in the main chronological, the only departure from this being her first two books. Prisoners of Hope (1898) was a story of colonial Virginia beginning about 1663; To Have and To Hold (1900) is a romance of the Jamestown settlement starting in 1621. Then came Audrey (1902) dealing with Virginia in the time of Col. William Byrd and Lewis Rand (1908) which pictured the Virginia of Jefferson. The Long Roll (1911) and Cease Firing (1912) gave us the State during the Civil War. There was another romance, Sir Mortimer, between Audrey and Lewis Rand, and before The Goddess of Reason, which was perhaps as near a failure as Miss Johnston could come. Very likely, as suggested by Meredith Nicholson in an article in the Book News Monthly of March, 1911, Miss Johnston’s preoccupation with the poetic drama of the French Revolution which was to become The Goddess of Reason was to blame. The Goddess of Reason gave her dramatic genius full play; Julia Marlowe’s acting showed it to be something better than a closet drama. In its breadth and splendor this work showed Miss Johnston at her full power, the power which was to give us The Long Roll and Cease Firing within the next five years.
Although in The Witch, her next novel after Hagar, our writer went back to Colonial times it was to interpret the present in the light of the past and to show with some of the psychological keenness of Lewis Rand and the dramatic action of her earlier books a panorama of prejudice and persecution “spiritually overcome by gallant faith and joy of living.” The Fortunes of Garin (1915) was pure romance and adventure set in Southern France of the time of the Crusades and colored as richly as a tapestry. Garin, of a poor but noble family, ready for a fight or a frolic, fights gloriously in the Holy Land and comes back to France to fight as gloriously in a civil war. In time he finds that the princess in whose defense and behalf he has been battling is the girl whom he rescued from peril years before. Of The Wanderers (1917) we have already spoken. Foes (1918) is a story of boyhood friendship transformed into lasting hate. The setting is Scotland, before and after the Stuart rebellion crushed at Culloden. The unusual and picturesque story is superbly told in most poetic prose.
How Miss Johnston gets her effects may be illustrated, in closing, by two examples from The Long Roll. Illustrated, we say, not shown in the sense of enabling any one else to get them. Unless you have her dramatic and imaginative genius you will never be able to take raw material of your own and work a similar magic! Here is Steve Dagg, the coward:
“Steve again saw from afar the approach of the nightmare. It stood large on the opposite bank of Abraham’s Creek, and he must go to meet it. He was wedged between comrades—Sergeant Coffin was looking straight at him with his melancholy, bad-tempered eyes—he could not fall out, drop behind! The backs of his hands began to grow cold and his unwashed forehead was damp beneath matted, red-brown elf locks. From considerable experience he knew that presently sick stomach would set in.... Seized with panic he bit a cartridge and loaded. The air was rocking; moreover, with the heavier waves came a sharp zzzz-ip! zzzzzz-ip! Heaven and earth blurred together, blended by the giant brush of eddying smoke. Steve tasted powder, smelled powder. On the other side of the fence, from a battery lower down the slope to the guns beyond him two men were running—running very swiftly, with bent heads. They ran like people in a pelting rain and between them they carried a large bag or bundle, slung in an oilcloth. They were tall and hardy men, and they moved with a curious air of determination. ‘Carrying powder! Gawd! before I’d be sech a fool——’ A shell came, and burst—burst between the two men. There was an explosion, ear-splitting, heart-rending. A part of the fence was wrecked; a small cedar tree torn into kindling. Steve put down his musket, laid his forehead upon the rail before him, and vomited.”