Читать книгу Recollections of a Varied Life - George Cary Eggleston - Страница 25

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The first thing that impressed me in that old life, when I was thrust into it, was its repose, the absence of stress or strain or anxious anticipation, the appreciation of to-morrow as the equal of to-day for the doing of things and the getting of things done. My trunks had missed connection somewhere on the journey, and I thought of telegraphing about the matter. My uncle, the master of the plantation and head of the family, discouraged that, and suggested that I should go fishing in a neighboring creek instead. The telegraph office was six miles away. He had never sent a telegram in his life. He had no doubt the trunks would come along to-morrow or next day, and the fish in the creek were just then biting in encouraging fashion.

That was my first lesson, and it impressed me strongly. Where I had come from nobody would have thought of resting under the uncertainty or calmly contemplating the unwarranted delay. Here nobody thought of doing anything else, and as the trunks did in fact come the next day without any telegraphing or hurry or worry, I learned that it was just as well to go fishing as to go fussing.

The Virginian Way

The restful leisureliness of the life in Virginia was borne in upon me on every hand, I suppose my nerves had really been upon a strain during all the seventeen years that I had lived, and the relief I found in my new surroundings doubtless had much to do with my appreciation of it all. I had been used to see hurry in everything and everybody; here there was no such thing as hurry. Nobody had a "business engagement" that need interfere with anything else he was minded to do. "Business," indeed, was regarded as something to be attended to on the next court day, when all men having affairs to arrange with each other were sure to meet at the Court-House—as the county seat village was usually called. Till then it could wait. Nobody was going to move away. Everybody was "able to owe his debts." Why bother, then, to make a journey for the settlement of a matter of business which could wait as well as not for next court day to come round? It was so much pleasanter to stay at home, to entertain one's friends, to ride over the plantation, inspecting and directing crop work, to take a gun and go after squirrels or birds or turkeys, to play backgammon or chess or dominoes in the porch, to read the new books that everybody was talking about, or the old ones that Virginians loved more—in brief, there was no occasion for hurry, and the Virginians wasted none of their vital force in that way.

The very houses suggested repose. They had sat still upon their foundations for generations past, and would go on doing so for generations to come. The lawns were the growth of long years, with no touch of recent gardeners' work about them. The trees about the house grounds had been in undisputed possession there long before the grandfathers of the present generation were born. There was nowhere any suggestion of newness, or rawness, of change actual or likely to come. There were no new people—except the babies—and nobody ever dreamed of changing his residence.