XXVIIPEOPLE I HAVE ENTERTAINED
I imagine all of us have read “People I Have Smiled With,” or, “People I Have Known,” but not many are writing about “People I Have Entertained.” Rocking away the remnant of a long and varied life, I find myself dreamingly entertaining guests who are long since departed to the “House of Many Mansions,” guests who came and stayed, and went, some of whom I had never seen before, and some I never heard from after, but there are guests and guests, as every housewife knows. Particularly country house guests come, whose city houses are not open to what a neighbor of mine calls “trunk visitors.” In the days of which I write, every house, especially every plantation house, had a conspicuous latch string outside the door. I amuse my grandchildren with tales of the varied assortment of visitors I had “befo’ de war,” just as I had conjured to rest their mothers and fathers when they clamored to be told again about the gentleman who brought his own sheets and coffeepot, or the lady who wanted to pray all the time. I feel I am telling these tales for the last time. They don’t point a moral, for no guest can do to-day, nor will hereafter, the things some of my guests did, let us think, in the innocence of their hearts.
The first visitor I recall when I was a bride in my new home, was a distinguished, eccentric, literary man, a bachelor, and a Creole, brim full of cranks and kinks, but a delightful conversationalist withal. Before he arrived I knew he was coming from a visit to an adjacent parish where his great heart had been touched by the witchery of a young girl. With his Sancho, the Don Quixote had been storming the citadel, and to continue the simile he struck a windmill, and so was put to flight. Now he was accepting my husband’s invitation to rest, and salve his wounds at our home. I was amazed when my housemaid told me he had not only brought his valet, but his own linen sheets and his coffee pot! I understood then why he was not an acceptable suitor. Linen sheets and the coffee pot would scare any prospective housewife. When I knew what a blunder he had committed, I confess to little sympathy in his discomfort. That old gentleman died full of honors and deeply lamented, in New Orleans, a few years ago.
Mrs. Breckinridge was our guest, while her husband was vice-president. The presidential candidates, almost forgotten now, were Buchanan and Breckinridge. She was active and eager to have her husband mount to the top of the ladder of preferment, and did no little engineering in his behalf that winter. Mrs. Breckinridge was charming, a delightful visitor, a relative by marriage to us, but so remote, that if she had not been so lovely and the vice-president so distinguished, the dim connection would never have been thought of. Her aspirations were not realized, and he was tail to another presidential kite, that could not be made to fly. We did not meet Mrs. Breckinridge after that long visit, and the last time I saw her husband he was a fleeing Confederate general in Havana, without incumbrance of any kind, so he was not our “trunk visitor.”
During the early fifties a planter from Bayou Lafourche bought a plantation on the Mississippi River, fully five miles from us, and on the opposite side of the river, as well. My husband, in his grandiloquent flamboyant manner, invited him to bring his family to our house to stay till theirlares et penateswere settled in their new home. The man, in the same grandiloquent, flamboyant style, accepted. When I asked how many there were in thefamily, my hospitable husband replied that he only heard mention of a wife. In due time a little Lafourche packet, with ever so much turning and backing, blowing of whistle and ringing of bells, as if to announce a surprise (which it certainly did), ran out a plank at our levee, and a whole procession walked that plank and filed up the path to the house. I looked from an upper window, and counted the guests as they marched up, in twos and threes: A man and his wife, her aged mother and brother, four boys, ranging from three to ten years, and a darky with the baby in arms!
One guest room had been made ready, but three additional chambers were at once put in commission. By the time wraps had been removed and fresh fires made all over the house—it was mid-winter—I was ten times more breathless than my unexpected crowd. Every day for over a week the man and his wife were conveyed to their new home in our carriage, and there they stayed from morn to dewy eve. The aged grandmother was left in my special care. She was unable to cope with the untrained boys, as, indeed, all of us were. The uncle had rheumatism or something that confined him to his bed most of the time. So the boys were left to their own devices, to gallop in and out of doors, from the muddy garden to the Brussels carpets, allhours of the day. The baby squalled, and the nurse spanked it, and I didn’t care.
One stormy day the boys found occupation indoors that was very diverting. They extracted every button from a tufted, upholstered chair in the library, the one their grandmother most affected, and with hairpin and nail, scratched hieroglyphics all over a newly-painted mantel, till it looked like it had been taken from some buried city of Egypt. Thank goodness! Visits don’t last forever. In the course of time the family moved into the new home, and gave a house-warming ball within the next week—vive la bagatelle!
Reading with great interest a newly published book, “The Circuit Rider’s Wife,” brings vividly to mind a visitor we once had. She was one of the sweetest and loveliest of women. She was a Methodist, the only one in a wide acquaintance I ever met, who claimed to have “the gift of sanctification.” I do not believe one possesses the power within oneself to resist sin, nor do I mean to inject religious views and doctrines in these remarks about “People I Have Entertained,” but I do say, if there ever was a really sanctified woman it was this Mrs. Abe Smith of Mississippi. She was our guest one short, happy, glorified week. She read her Bible chapter to us every morning, and prayed with andfor us all day long, if we wanted, and we generally did, for surely she had the gift of prayer. I never listened to such uplifting prayers as dear Mrs. Smith could utter; her very voice was an inspiration. She was highly connected and highly cultivated and had a vocal training that comprised very intricate music, but with “The Coming of the Lord” she confined her voice entirely to psalms and hymns. Her mission was to pray and sing, but no doubt when the harvest was waiting, in some meeting house, she could exhort with an eloquence equal to the most earnest itinerant in the pulpit. We had one strange glorification and sanctification, but it was interrupted by the coming of a Methodist preacher, who claimed to having sought, in vain, the gift of sanctification. The last few days of lovely Sister Smith’s visit were spent in the library with closed doors, wrestling with the halting soul of Brother Camp.
These were the expiring days of the old “Peace which passeth understanding.” After that came the war, which sorely tried the heart of the glorified woman, and she proved faithful to her gift of sanctification even unto the bitter end....
One November day I entered my library with an open letter of introduction in my hand, to say to the young man, placidly warming himself at the fire, that the letter was not meant for my husband, whowas not at home, but for his brother. He replied he understood the brother was not in Louisiana, and he took the liberty of transferring the introductory epistle to the next of kin. He was a young doctor, threatened with lung trouble, who had come South to spend some time in somebody’s sugar house. I frankly told him that our sugar house was not by any means a suitable place for an invalid, but (I glanced out of the door and saw his vehicle had departed and his trunk was on the porch) I would be pleased to have him remain my guest until my husband returned to see what could be devised to further the invalid’s plan. Northern and Western people, who never had been in a sugar house and inhaled the warm fumes of boiling cane juice, night and day, and incidentally submitted to the discomforts of an open building, not intended for sleeping quarters, thought that the treatment, as they chose to call it, was a cure for tuberculosis. My guest found himself quite comfortable, and remained in our home five months. Nothing more was said about sugar house treatment. By spring, like a butterfly, he emerged into the sunlight, strong and well and ready to fly to pastures new, which he did. We did not even hear from that doctor again. He was a physician in good practice in Galveston during the war, and toldGen. Magruder he thought he had met us years before!
Every planter in my day entertained strangers who came and went, like a dream. Some were grateful for their entertainment, some did not so much as write “bread and butter” notes, after their departure.
Queer, inquisitive folks lighted upon us now and then. I recall a party of Philadelphians who arrived at the adjacent town with a note of introduction to the president of the bank. They said they wanted to visit a plantation and see the working thereof. That hospitable husband of mine happened to be passing; he was called in and introduced to the party, and he invited them for the whole of the next day. They came, they saw, I don’t know if they thought they conquered. We thought so, for they were on a tour of observation. They were delightfully informal and interesting people. We accompanied them to the canefield—the negroes happened to be at work quite near the house—into some of the cabins, the infirmary, where they were surprised to find not one inmate, into the nursery where the babies were sleeping in cribs, and the older children eating mush and molasses. They had to taste the food, had to talk to the granny about her babies, had to ask after her health. Meeting a negroman, walking as brisk as anybody, with a hoe over his shoulder, they had to inquire as to his condition, and must have been surprised to hear what an awful misery he had in his back. They had to see where the plantation sewing, and the cooking, were done. I began to think before it was all over we were superintendents of some penal institution and were enduring a visit from the committee of inspection. However, they were very attractive, naïve visitors, surprised at everything. After luncheon, waited upon by a negro boy on a broad grin—it was all so very funny to him—they took their departure, and my husband and I had a merry laugh over the incidents of the day. It was rather an interesting interlude in our quiet life, and remoteness from the abolition storm that was hovering over the land.
All the people I entertained were not queer. We had a house full always of gay, young people, young girls from the North that were my schoolmates in New Haven, girls who were my play-mates, and the friends of my young ladyhood in New Orleans, fresh, bright, happy girls, who rode horseback, sang and danced and made merry all through the house. All are gone now. Only the sweet memory of them comes to me in my solitary day-dreams.