LADY BALTIMORE
By Owen Wister
To
S. Weir Mitchell
With the Affection and Memories of All My Life
To the Reader
You know the great text in Burns, I am sure, where he wishes he could see himself as others see him. Well, here lies the hitch in many a work of art: if its maker—poet, painter, or novelist—could but have become its audience too, for a single day, before he launched it irrevocably upon the uncertain ocean of publicity, how much better his boat would often sail! How many little touches to the rigging he would give, how many little drops of oil to the engines here and there, the need of which he had never suspected, but for that trial trip! That’s where the ship-builders and dramatists have the advantage over us others: they can dock their productions and tinker at them. Even to the musician comes this useful chance, and Schumann can reform the proclamation which opens his B-flat Symphony.
Still, to publish a story in weekly numbers previously to its appearance as a book does sometimes give to the watchful author an opportunity to learn, before it is too late, where he has failed in clearness; and it brings him also, through the mails, some few questions that are pleasant and proper to answer when his story sets forth united upon its journey of adventure among gentle readers.
How came my hero by his name?
If you will open a book more valuable than any I dare hope to write, and more entertaining too, The Life of Paul Jones, by Mr. Buell, you will find the real ancestor of this imaginary boy, and fall in love with John Mayrant the First, as did his immortal captain of the Bon Homme Richard. He came from South Carolina; and believing his seed and name were perished there to-day, I gave him a descendant. I have learned that the name, until recently, was in existence; I trust it will not seem taken in vain in these pages.
Whence came such a person as Augustus?
Our happier cities produce many Augustuses, and may they long continue to do so! If Augustus displeases any one, so much the worse for that one, not for Augustus. To be sure, he doesn’t admire over heartily the parvenus of steel or oil, whose too sudden money takes them to the divorce court; he calls them the ‘yellow rich’; do you object to that? Nor does he think that those Americans who prefer their pockets to their patriotism, are good citizens. He says of such people that ‘eternal vigilance cannot watch liberty and the ticker at the same time.’ Do you object to that? Why, the young man would be perfect, did he but attend his primaries and vote more regularly,—and who wants a perfect young man?
What would John Mayrant have done if Hortense had not challenged him as she did?
I have never known, and I fear we might have had a tragedy.
Would the old ladies really have spoken to Augustus about the love difficulties of John Mayrant?
I must plead guilty. The old ladies of Kings Port, like American gentlefolk everywhere, keep family matters sacredly inside the family circle. But you see, had they not told Augustus, how in the world could I have told—however, I plead guilty.
Certain passages have been interpreted most surprisingly to signify a feeling against the colored race, that is by no means mine. My only wish regarding these people, to whom we owe an immeasurable responsibility, is to see the best that is in them prevail. Discord over this seems on the wane, and sane views gaining. The issue sits on all our shoulders, but local variations call for a sliding scale of policy. So admirably dispassionate a novel as The Elder Brother, by Mr. Jervey, forwards the understanding of Northerners unfamiliar with the South, and also that friendliness between the two places, which is retarded chiefly by tactless newspapers.
Ah, tact should have been one of the cardinal virtues; and if I didn’t possess a spice of it myself, I should here thank by name certain two members of the St. Michael family of Kings Port for their patience with this comedy, before ever it saw the light. Tact bids us away from many pleasures; but it can never efface the memory of kindness.
CONTENTS
[ LADY BALTIMORE ]
[ I: ] A Word about My Aunt
[ II: ] I Vary My Lunch
[ III: ] Kings Port Talks
[ IV: ] THE GIRL BEHIND THE COUNTER—I
[ V: ] The Boy of the Cake
[ VI: ] In the Churchyard
[ VII: ] The Girl Behind the Counter—II
[ VIII: ] Midsummer-Night’s Dream
[ IX: ] Juno
[ X: ] High Walk and the Ladies
[ XI: ] Daddy Ben and His Seed
[ XII: ] From the Bedside
[ XIII: ] The Girl Behind the Counter—III
[ XIV: ] The Replacers
[ XV: ] What She Came to See
[ XVI: ] The Steel Wasp
[ XVII: ] Doing the Handsome Thing
[ XVIII: ] Again the Replacers
[ XIX: ] Udolpho
[ XX: ] What She Wanted Him For
[ XXI: ] Hortense’s Cigarette Goes Out
[ XXII: ] Behind the Times
[ XXIII: ] Poor Aunt Carola!
[ XXIV: ] Post Scriptum
LADY BALTIMORE
I: A Word about My Aunt
Like Adam, our first conspicuous ancestor, I must begin, and lay the blame upon a woman; I am glad to recognize that I differ from the father of my sex in no important particular, being as manlike as most of his sons. Therefore it is the woman, my Aunt Carola, who must bear the whole reproach of the folly which I shall forthwith confess to you, since she it was who put it into my head; and, as it was only to make Eve happy that her husband ever consented to eat the disastrous apple, so I, save to please my relative, had never aspired to become a Selected Salic Scion. I rejoice now that I did so, that I yielded to her temptation. Ours is a wide country, and most of us know but our own corner of it, while, thanks to my Aunt, I have been able to add another corner. This, among many other enlightenments of navel and education, do I owe her; she stands on the threshold of all that is to come; therefore I were lacking in deference did I pass her and her Scions by without due mention,—employing no English but such as fits a theme so stately. Although she never left the threshold, nor went to Kings Port with me, nor saw the boy, or the girl, or any part of what befell them, she knew quite well who the boy was. When I wrote her about him, she remembered one of his grandmothers whom she had visited during her own girlhood, long before the war, both in Kings Port and at the family plantation; and this old memory led her to express a kindly interest in him. How odd and far away that interest seems, now that it has been turned to cold displeasure!
Some other day, perhaps, I may try to tell you much more than I can tell you here about Aunt Carola and her Colonial Society—that apple which Eve, in the form of my Aunt, held out to me. Never had I expected to feel rise in me the appetite for this particular fruit, though I had known such hunger to exist in some of my neighbors. Once a worthy dame of my town, at whose dinner-table young men and maidens of fashion sit constantly, asked me with much sentiment if I was aware that she was descended from Boadicea. Why had she never (I asked her) revealed this to me before? And upon her informing me that she had learned it only that very day, I exclaimed that it was a great distance to have descended so suddenly. To this, after a look at me, she assented, adding that she had the good news from the office of The American Almanach de Gotha, Union Square, New York; and she recommended that publication to me. There was but a slight fee to pay, a matter of fifty dollars or upwards, and for this trifling sum you were furnished with your rightful coat-of-arms and with papers clearly tracing your family to the Druids, the Vestal Virgins, and all the best people in the world. Therefore I felicitated the Boadicean lady upon the illustrious progenitrix with whom the Almanach de Gotha had provided her for so small a consideration, and observed that for myself I supposed I should continue to rest content with the thought that in our enlightened Republic every American was himself a sovereign. But that, said the lady, after giving me another look, is so different from Boadicea! And to this I perfectly agreed. Later I had the pleasure to hear in a roundabout way that she had pronounced me one of the most agreeable young men in society, though sophisticated. I have not cherished this against her; my gift of humor puzzles many who can see only my refinement and my scrupulous attention to dress.
Yes, indeed, I counted myself proof against all Boadiceas. But you have noticed—have you not?—how, whenever a few people gather together and style themselves something, and choose a president, and eight or nine vice-presidents, and a secretary and a treasurer, and a committee on elections, and then let it be known that almost nobody else is qualified to belong to it, that there springs up immediately in hundreds and thousands of breasts a fiery craving to get into that body? You may try this experiment in science, law, medicine, art, letters, society, farming, I care not what, but you will set the same craving afire in doctors, academicians, and dog breeders all over the earth. Thus, when my Aunt—the president, herself, mind you!—said to me one day that she thought, if I proved my qualifications, my name might be favorably considered by the Selected Salic Scions—I say no more; I blush, though you cannot see me; when I am tempted, I seem to be human, after all.
At first, to be sure, I met Aunt Carola’s suggestion in the way that I am too ready to meet many of her remarks; for you must know she once, with sincere simplicity and good-will, told my Uncle Andrew (her husband; she is only my Aunt by marriage) that she had married beneath her; and she seemed unprepared for his reception of this candid statement: Uncle Andrew was unaffectedly merry over it. Ever since then all of us wait hopefully every day for what she may do or say next.
She is from old New York, oldest New York; the family manor is still habitable, near Cold Spring; she was, in her youth, handsome, I am assured by those whose word I have always trusted; her appearance even to-day causes people to turn and look; she is not tall in feet and inches—I have to stoop considerably when she commands from me the familiarity of a kiss; but in the quality which we call force, in moral stature, she must be full eight feet high. When rebuking me, she can pronounce a single word, my name, “Augustus!” in a tone that renders further remark needless; and you should see her eye when she says of certain newcomers in our society, “I don’t know them.” She can make her curtsy as appalling as a natural law; she knows also how to “take umbrage,” which is something that I never knew any one else to take outside of a book; she is a highly pronounced Christian, holding all Unitarians wicked and all Methodists vulgar; and once, when she was talking (as she does frequently) about King James and the English religion and the English Bible, and I reminded her that the Jews wrote it, she said with displeasure that she made no doubt King James had—“well, seen to it that all foreign matter was expunged”—I give you her own words. Unless you have moved in our best American society (and by this I do not at all mean the lower classes with dollars and no grandfathers, who live in palaces at Newport, and look forward to every-thing and back to nothing, but those Americans with grandfathers and no dollars, who live in boarding-houses, and look forward to nothing and back to everything)—unless you have known this haughty and improving milieu, you have never seen anything like my Aunt Carola. Of course, with Uncle Andrew’s money, she does not live in a boarding-house; and I shall finish this brief attempt to place her before you by adding that she can be very kind, very loyal, very public-spirited, and that I am truly attached to her.
“Upon your mother’s side of the family,” she said, “of course.”
“Me!” I did not have to feign amazement.
My Aunt was silent. “Me descended from a king?”
My Aunt nodded with an indulgent stateliness. “There seems to be the possibility of it.”
“Royal blood in my veins, Aunt?”
“I have said so, Augustus. Why make me repeat it?”
It was now, I fear, that I met Aunt Carola in that unfitting spirit, that volatile mood, which, as I have said already, her remarks often rouse in me.
“And from what sovereign may I hope that I—?”
“If you will consult a recent admirable compilation, entitled The American Almanach de Gotha, you will find that Henry the Seventh—”
“Aunt, I am so much relieved! For I think that I might have hesitated to trace it back had you said—well—Charles the Second, for example, or Elizabeth.”
At this point I should have been wise to notice my Aunt’s eye; but I did not, and I continued imprudently:—
“Though why hesitate? I have never heard that there was anybody present to marry Adam and Eve, and so why should we all make such a to-do about—”
“Augustus!”
She uttered my name in that quiet but prodigious tone to which I have alluded above.
It was I who was now silent.
“Augustus, if you purpose trifling, you may leave the room.”
“Oh, Aunt, I beg your pardon. I never meant—”
“I cannot understand what impels you to adopt such a manner to me, when I am trying to do something for you.”
I hastened to strengthen my apologies with a manner becoming the possible descendant of a king toward a lady of distinction, and my Aunt was pleased to pass over my recent lapse from respect. She now broached her favorite topic, which I need scarcely tell you is genealogy, beginning with her own.
“If your title to royal blood,” she said, “were as plain as mine (through Admiral Bombo, you know), you would not need any careful research.”
She told me a great deal of genealogy, which I spare you; it was not one family tree, it was a forest of them. It gradually appeared that a grandmother of my mother’s grandfather had been a Fanning, and there were sundry kinds of Fannings, right ones and wrong ones; the point for me was, what kind had mine been? No family record showed this. If it was Fanning of the Bon Homme Richard variety, or Fanning of the Alamance, then I was no king’s descendant.
“Worthy New England people, I understand,” said my Aunt with her nod of indulgent stateliness, referring to the Bon Homme Richard species, “but of entirely bourgeois extraction—Paul Jones himself, you know, was a mere gardener’s son—while the Alamance Fanning was one of those infamous regulators who opposed Governor Tryon. Not through any such cattle could you be one of us,” said my Aunt.
But a dim, distant, hitherto uncharted Henry Tudor Fanning had fought in some of the early Indian wars, and the last of his known blood was reported to have fallen while fighting bravely at the battle of Cowpens. In him my hope lay. Records of Tarleton, records of Marion’s men, these were what I must search, and for these I had best go to Kings Port. If I returned with Kinship proven, then I might be a Selected Salic Scion, a chosen vessel, a royal seed, one in the most exalted circle of men and women upon our coasts. The other qualifications were already mine: ancestors colonial and bellicose upon land and sea—
“—besides having acquired,” my Aunt was so good as to say, “sufficient personal presentability since your life in Paris, of which I had rather not know too much, Augustus. It is a pity,” she repeated, “that you will have so much research. With my family it was all so satisfactorily clear through Kill-devil Bombo—Admiral Bombo’s spirited, reckless son.”
You will readily conceive that I did not venture to betray my ignorance of these Bombos; I worked my eyebrows to express a silent and timeworn familiarity.
“Go to Kings Port. You need a holiday, at any rate. And I,” my Aunt handsomely finished, “will make the journey a present to you.”
This generosity made me at once, and sincerely, repentant for my flippancy concerning Charles the Second and Elizabeth. And so, partly from being tempted by this apple of Eve, and partly because recent overwork had tired me, but chiefly for her sake, and not to thwart at the outset her kindly-meant ambitions for me, I kissed the hand of my Aunt Carola and set forth to Kings Port.
“Come back one of us,” was her parting benediction.
II: I Vary My Lunch
Thus it was that I came to sojourn in the most appealing, the most lovely, the most wistful town in America; whose visible sadness and distinction seem also to speak audibly, speak in the sound of the quiet waves that ripple round her Southern front, speak in the church-bells on Sunday morning, and breathe not only in the soft salt air, but in the perfume of every gentle, old-fashioned rose that blooms behind the high garden walls of falling mellow-tinted plaster: Kings Port the retrospective, Kings Port the belated, who from her pensive porticoes looks over her two rivers to the marshes and the trees beyond, the live-oaks, veiled in gray moss, brooding with memories! Were she my city, how I should love her!
But though my city she cannot be, the enchanting image of her is mine to keep, to carry with me wheresoever I may go; for who, having seen her, could forget her? Therefore I thank Aunt Carola for this gift, and for what must always go with it in my mind, the quiet and strange romance which I saw happen, and came finally to share in. Why it is that my Aunt no longer wishes to know either the boy or the girl, or even to hear their names mentioned, you shall learn at the end, when I have finished with the wedding; for this happy story of love ends with a wedding, and begins in the Woman’s Exchange, which the ladies of Kings Port have established, and (I trust) lucratively conduct, in Royal Street.
Royal Street! There’s a relevance in this name, a fitness to my errand; but that is pure accident.
The Woman’s Exchange happened to be there, a decorous resort for those who became hungry, as I did, at the hour of noon each day. In my very pleasant boarding-house, where, to be sure, there was one dreadful boarder, a tall lady, whom I soon secretly called Juno—but let unpleasant things wait—in the very pleasant house where I boarded (I had left my hotel after one night) our breakfast was at eight, and our dinner not until three: sacred meal hours in Kings Port, as inviolable, I fancy, as the Declaration of Independence, but a gap quite beyond the stretch of my Northern vitals. Therefore, at twelve, it was my habit to leave my Fanning researches for a while, and lunch at the Exchange upon chocolate and sandwiches most delicate in savor. As, one day, I was luxuriously biting one of these, I heard his voice and what he was saying. Both the voice and the interesting order he was giving caused me, at my small table, in the dim back of the room, to stop and watch him where he stood in the light at the counter to the right of the entrance door. Young he was, very young, twenty-two or three at the most, and as he stood, with hat in hand, speaking to the pretty girl behind the counter, his head and side-face were of a romantic and high-strung look. It was a cake that he desired made, a cake for a wedding; and I directly found myself curious to know whose wedding. Even a dull wedding interests me more than other dull events, because it can arouse so much surmise and so much prophecy; but in this wedding I instantly, because of his strange and winning embarrassment, became quite absorbed. How came it he was ordering the cake for it? Blushing like the boy that he was entirely, he spoke in a most engaging voice: “No, not charged; and as you don’t know me, I had better pay for it now.”
Self-possession in his speech he almost had; but the blood in his cheeks and forehead was beyond his control.
A reply came from behind the counter: “We don’t expect payment until delivery.”
“But—a—but on that morning I shall be rather particularly engaged.” His tones sank almost away on these words.
“We should prefer to wait, then. You will leave your address. In half-pound boxes, I suppose?”
“Boxes? Oh, yes—I hadn’t thought—no—just a big, round one. Like this, you know!” His arms embraced a circular space of air. “With plenty of icing.”
I do not think that there was any smile on the other side of the counter; there was, at any rate, no hint of one in the voice. “And how many pounds?”
He was again staggered. “Why—a—I never ordered one before. I want plenty—and the very best, the very best. Each person would eat a pound, wouldn’t they? Or would two be nearer? I think I had better leave it all to you. About like this, you know.” Once more his arms embraced a circular space of air.
Before this I had never heard the young lady behind the counter enter into any conversation with a customer. She would talk at length about all sorts of Kings Port affairs with the older ladies connected with the Exchange, who were frequently to be found there; but with a customer, never. She always took my orders, and my money, and served me, with a silence and a propriety that have become, with ordinary shopkeepers, a lost art. They talk to one indeed! But this slim girl was a lady, and consequently did the right thing, marking and keeping a distance between herself and the public. To-day, however, she evidently felt it her official duty to guide the hapless young, man amid his errors. He now appeared to be committing a grave one.
“Are you quite sure you want that?” the girl was asking.
“Lady Baltimore? Yes, that is what I want.”
“Because,” she began to explain, then hesitated, and looked at him. Perhaps it was in his face; perhaps it was that she remembered at this point the serious difference between the price of Lady Baltimore (by my small bill-of-fare I was now made acquainted with its price) and the cost of that rich article which convention has prescribed as the cake for weddings; at any rate, swift, sudden delicacy of feeling prevented her explaining any more to him, for she saw how it was: his means were too humble for the approved kind of wedding cake! She was too young, too unskilled yet in the world’s ways, to rise above her embarrassment; and so she stood blushing at him behind the counter, while he stood blushing at her in front of it.
At length he succeeded in speaking. “That’s all, I believe. Good-morning.”
At his hastily departing back she, too, murmured: “Good-morning.”
Before I knew it I had screamed out loudly from my table: “But he hasn’t told you the day he wants it for!”
Before she knew it she had flown to the door—my cry had set her going, as if I had touched a spring—and there he was at the door himself, rushing back. He, too, had remembered. It was almost a collision, and nothing but their good Southern breeding, the way they took it, saved it from being like a rowdy farce.
“I know,” he said simply and immediately. “I am sorry to be so careless. It’s for the twenty-seventh.”
She was writing it down in the order-book. “Very well. That is Wednesday of next week. You have given us more time than we need.” She put complete, impersonal business into her tone; and this time he marched off in good order, leaving peace in the Woman’s Exchange.
No, not peace; quiet, merely; the girl at the counter now proceeded to grow indignant with me. We were alone together, we two; no young man, or any other business, occupied her or protected me. But if you suppose that she made war, or expressed rage by speaking, that is not it at all. From her counter in front to my table at the back she made her displeasure felt; she was inaudibly crushing; she did not do it even with her eye, she managed it—well, with her neck, somehow, and by the way she made her nose look in profile. Aunt Carola would have embraced her—and I should have liked to do so myself. She could not stand the idea of my having, after all these days of official reserve that she had placed between us, startled her into that rush to the door annihilated her dignity at a blow. So did I finish my sandwiches beneath her invisible but eloquent fire. What affair of mine was the cake? And what sort of impertinent, meddlesome person was I, shrieking out my suggestions to people with whom I had no acquaintance? These were the things that her nose and her neck said to me the whole length of the Exchange. I had nothing but my own weakness to thank; it was my interest in weddings that did it, made me forget my decorum, the public place, myself, everything, and plunge in. And I became more and more delighted over it as the girl continued to crush me. My day had been dull, my researches had not brought me a whit nearer royal blood; I looked at my little bill-of-fare, and then I stepped forward to the counter, adventurous, but polite.
“I should like a slice, if you please, of Lady Baltimore,” I said with extreme formality.
I thought she was going to burst; but after an interesting second she replied, “Certainly,” in her fit Regular Exchange tone; only, I thought it trembled a little.
I returned to the table and she brought me the cake, and I had my first felicitous meeting with Lady Baltimore. Oh, my goodness! Did you ever taste it? It’s all soft, and it’s in layers, and it has nuts—but I can’t write any more about it; my mouth waters too much.
Delighted surprise caused me once more to speak aloud, and with my mouth full. “But, dear me, this Is delicious!”
A choking ripple of laughter came from the counter. “It’s I who make them,” said the girl. “I thank you for the unintentional compliment.” Then she walked straight back to my table. “I can’t help it,” she said, laughing still, and her delightful, insolent nose well up; “how can I behave myself when a man goes on as you do?” A nice white curly dog followed her, and she stroked his ears.
“Your behavior is very agreeable to me,” I remarked.
“You’ll allow me to say that you’re not invited to criticise it. I was decidedly put out with you for making me ridiculous. But you have admired my cake with such enthusiasm that you are forgiven. And—may I hope that you are getting on famously with the battle of Cowpens?”
I stared. “I’m frankly very much astonished that you should know about that!”
“Oh, you’re just known all about in Kings Port.”
I wish that our miserable alphabet could in some way render the soft Southern accent which she gave to her words. But it cannot. I could easily misspell, if I chose; but how, even then, could I, for instance, make you hear her way of saying “about”? “Aboot” would magnify it; and besides, I decline to make ugly to the eye her quite special English, that was so charming to the ear.
“Kings Port just knows all about you,” she repeated with a sweet and mocking laugh.
“Do you mind telling me how?”
She explained at once. “This place is death to all incognitos.”
The explanation, however, did not, on the instant, enlighten me. “This? The Woman’s Exchange, you mean?”
“Why, to be sure! Have you not heard ladies talking together here?”
I blankly repealed her words. “Ladies talking?”
She nodded.
“Oh!” I cried. “How dull of me! Ladies talking! Of course!”
She continued. “It was therefore widely known that you were consulting our South Carolina archives at the library—and then that notebook you bring marked you out the very first day. Why, two hours after your first lunch we just knew all about you!”
“Dear me!” said I.
“Kings Port is ever ready to discuss strangers,” she further explained. “The Exchange has been going on five years, and the resident families have discussed each other so thoroughly here that everything is known; therefore a stranger is a perfect boon.” Her gayety for a moment interrupted her, before she continued, always mocking and always sweet: “Kings Port cannot boast intelligence offices for servants; but if you want to know the character and occupation of your friends, come to the Exchange!” How I wish I could give you the raciness, the contagion, of her laughter! Who would have dreamed that behind her primness all this frolic lay in ambush? “Why,” she said, “I’m only a plantation girl; it’s my first week here, and I know every wicked deed everybody as done since 1812!”
She went back to her counter. It had been very merry; and as I was settling the small debt for my lunch I asked: “Since this is the proper place for information, will you kindly tell me whose wedding that cake is for?”
She was astonished. “You don’t know? And I thought you were quite a clever Ya—I beg your pardon—Northerner.
“Please tell me, since I know you’re quite a clever Reb—I beg your pardon—Southerner.”
“Why, it’s his own! Couldn’t you see that from his bashfulness?”
“Ordering his own wedding cake?” Amazement held me. But the door opened, one of the elderly ladies entered, the girl behind the counter stiffened to primness in a flash, and I went out into Royal Street as the curly dog’s tail wagged his greeting to the newcomer.
III: Kings Port Talks
Of course I had at once left the letters of introduction which Aunt Carola had given me; but in my ignorance of Kings Port hours I had found everybody at dinner when I made my first round of calls between half-past three and five—an experience particularly regrettable, since I had hurried my own dinner on purpose, not then aware that the hours at my boarding-house were the custom of the whole town. (These hours even since my visit to Kings Port, are beginning to change. But such backsliding is much condemned.) Upon an afternoon some days later, having seen in the extra looking-glass, which I had been obliged to provide for myself, that the part in my back hair was perfect, I set forth again, better informed.
As I rang the first doorbell, another visitor came up the steps, a beautiful old lady in widow’s dress, a cardcase in her hand.
“Have you rung, sir?” said she, in a manner at once gentle and voluminous.
“Yes, madam.”
Nevertheless she pulled it again. “It doesn’t always ring,” she explained, “unless one is accustomed to it, which you are not.”
She addressed me with authority, exactly like Aunt Carola, and with even greater precision in her good English and good enunciation. Unlike the girl at the Exchange, she had no accent; her language was simply the perfection of educated utterance; it also was racy with the free censoriousness which civilized people of consequence are apt to exercise the world over. “I was sorry to miss your visit,” she began (she knew me, you see, perfectly); “you will please to come again soon, and console me for my disappointment. I am Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and my house is in Le Maire Street (Pronounced in Kings Port, Lammarree) as you have been so civil as to find out. And how does your Aunt Carola do in these contemptible times? You can tell her from me that vulgarization is descending, even upon Kings Port.”
“I cannot imagine that!” I exclaimed.
“You cannot imagine it because you don’t know anything about it, young gentleman! The manners of some of our own young people will soon be as dishevelled as those in New York. Have you seen our town yet, or is it all books with you? You should not leave without a look at what is still left of us. I shall be happy if you will sit in my pew on Sunday morning. Your Northern shells did their best in the bombardment—did you say that you rang? I think you had better pull it again; all the way out; yes, like that—in the bombardment, but we have our old church still, in spite of you. Do you see the crack in that wall? The earthquake did it. You’re spared earthquakes in the North, as you seem to be spared pretty much everything disastrous—except the prosperity that’s going to ruin you all. We’re better off with our poverty than you. Just ring the bell once more, and then we’ll go. I fancy Julia—I fancy Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael—has run out to stare at the Northern steam yacht in the harbor. It would be just like her. This house is historic itself. Shabby enough now, to be sure! The great-aunt of my cousin, John Mayrant (who is going to be married next Wednesday, to such a brute of a girl, poor boy!), lived here in 1840, and made an answer to the Earl of Mainridge that put him in his place. She was our famous Kings Port wit, and at the reception which her father (my mother’s uncle) gave the English visitor, he conducted himself as so many Englishmen seem to think they can in this country. Miss Beaufain (pronounced in Kings Port, Bowfayne), as she was then, asked the Earl how he liked America; and he replied, very well, except for the people, who were so vulgar. ‘What can you expect?’ said Miss Beaufain; ‘we’re descended from the English.’ Mrs. St. Michael is out, and the servant has gone home. Slide this card under the door, with your own, and come away.”
She took me with her, moving through the quiet South Place with a leisurely grace and dignity at which my spirit rejoiced; she was so beautiful, and so easy, and afraid of nothing and nobody! (This must be modified. I came later to suspect that they all stood in some dread of their own immediate families.)
In the North, everybody is afraid of something: afraid of the legislature, afraid of the trusts, afraid of the strikes, afraid of what the papers will say, of what the neighbors will say, of what the cook will say; and most of all, and worst of all, afraid to be different from the general pattern, afraid to take a step or speak a syllable that shall cause them to be thought unlike the monotonous millions of their fellow-citizens; the land of the free living in ceaseless fear! Well, I was already afraid of Mrs. Gregory St. Michael. As we walked and she talked, I made one or two attempts at conversation, and speedily found that no such thing was the lady’s intention: I was there to listen; and truly I could wish nothing more agreeable, in spite of my desire to hear further about next Wednesday’s wedding and the brute of a girl. But to this subject Mrs. St. Michael did not return. We crossed Worship Street and Chancel Street, and were nearing the East Place where a cannon was being shown me, a cannon with a history and an inscription concerning the “war for Southern independence, which I presume your prejudice calls the Rebellion,” said my guide. “There’s Mrs. St. Michael now, coming round the corner. Well, Julia, could you read the yacht’s name with your naked eye? And what’s the name of the gambler who owns it? He’s a gambler, or he couldn’t own a yacht—unless his wife’s a gambler’s daughter.”
“How well you’re feeling to-day, Maria!” said the other lady, with a gentle smile.
“Certainly. I have been talking for twenty minutes.” I was now presented to Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, also old, also charming, in widow’s dress no less in the bloom of age than Mrs. Gregory, but whiter and very diminutive. She shyly welcomed me to Kings Port. “Take him home with you, Julia. We pulled your bell three times, and it’s too damp for you to be out. Don’t forget,” Mrs. Gregory said to me, “that you haven’t told me a word about your Aunt Carola, and that I shall expect you to come and do it.” She went slowly away from us, up the East Place, tall, graceful, sweeping into the distance like a ship. No haste about her dignified movement, no swinging of elbows, nothing of the present hour!
“What a beautiful girl she must have been!” I murmured aloud, unconsciously.
“No, she was not a beauty in her youth,” said my new guide in her shy voice, “but always fluent, always a wit. Kings Port has at times thought her tongue too downright. We think that wit runs in her family, for young John Mayrant has it; and her first-cousin-once-removed put the Earl of Mainridge in his place at her father’s ball in 1840. Miss Beaufain (as she was then) asked the Earl how he liked America; and he replied, very well, except for the people, who were so vulgar. ‘What can you expect?’ said Miss Beaufain; ‘we’re descended from the English.’ I am very sorry for Maria—for Mrs. St. Michael—just at present. Her young cousin, John Mayrant, is making an alliance deeply vexatious to her. Do you happen to know Miss Hortense Rieppe?”
I had never heard of her.
“No? She has been North lately. I thought you might have met her. Her father takes her North, I believe, whenever any one will invite them. They have sometimes managed to make it extend through an unbroken year. Newport, I am credibly informed, greatly admires her. We in Kings Port have never (except John Mayrant, apparently) seen anything in her beauty, which Northerners find so exceptional.”
“What is her type?” I inquired.
“I consider that she looks like a steel wasp. And she has the assurance to call herself a Kings Port girl. Her father calls himself a general, and it is repeated that he ran away at the battle of Chattanooga. I hope you will come to see me another day, when you can spare time from the battle of Cowpens. I am Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, the other lady is Mrs. Gregory St. Michael. I wonder if you will keep us all straight?” And smiling, the little lady, whose shy manner and voice I had found to veil as much spirit as her predecessor’s, dismissed me and went up her steps, letting herself into her own house.
The boy in question, the boy of the cake, John Mayrant, was coming out of the gate at which I next rang. The appearance of his boyish figure and well-carried head struck me anew, as it had at first; from his whole person one got at once a strangely romantic impression. He looked at me, made as if he would speak, but passed on. Probably he had been hearing as much about me as I had been hearing about him. At this house the black servant had not gone home for the night, and if the mistress had been out to take a look at the steam yacht, she had returned.
“My sister,” she said, presenting me to a supremely fine-looking old lady, more chiselled, more august, than even herself. I did not catch this lady’s name, and she confined herself to a distant, though perhaps not unfriendly, greeting. She was sitting by a work-table, and she resumed some embroidery of exquisite appearance, while my hostess talked to me.
Both wore their hair in a simple fashion to suit their years, which must have been seventy or more; both were dressed with the dignity that such years call for; and I may mention here that so were all the ladies above a certain age in this town of admirable old-fashioned propriety. In New York, in Boston, in Philadelphia, ladies of seventy won’t be old ladies any more; they’re unwilling to wear their years avowedly, in quiet dignity by their firesides; they bare their bosoms and gallop egregiously to the ball-rooms of the young; and so we lose a particular graciousness that Kings Port retains, a perspective of generations. We happen all at once, with no background, in a swirl of haste and similarity.
One of the many things which came home to me during the conversation that now began (so many more things came home than I can tell you!) was that Mrs. Gregory St. Michael’s tongue was assuredly “downright” for Kings Port. This I had not at all taken in while she talked to me, and her friend’s reference to it had left me somewhat at a loss. That better precision and choice of words which I have mentioned, and the manner in which she announced her opinions, had put me in mind of several fine ladles whom I had known in other parts of the world; but hers was an individual manner, I was soon to find, and by no means the Kings Port convention. This convention permitted, indeed, condemnations of one’s neighbor no less sweeping, but it conveyed them in a phraseology far more restrained.
“I cannot regret your coming to Kings Port,” said my hostess, after we had talked for a little while, and I had complimented the balmy March weather and the wealth of blooming flowers; “but I fear that Fanning is not a name that you will find here. It belongs to North Carolina.”
I smiled and explained that North Carolina Fannings were useless to me. “And, if I may be so bold, how well you are acquainted with my errand!”
I cannot say that my hostess smiled, that would be too definite; but I can say that she did not permit herself to smile, and that she let me see this repression. “Yes,” she said, “we are acquainted with your errand, though not with its motive.”
I sat silent, thinking of the Exchange.
My hostess now gave me her own account of why all things were known to all people in this town. “The distances in your Northern cities are greater, and their population is much greater. There are but few of us in Kings Port.” In these last words she plainly told me that those “few” desired no others. She next added: “My nephew, John Mayrant, has spoken of you at some length.”
I bowed. “I had the pleasure to see and hear him order a wedding cake.”
“Yes. From Eliza La Heu (pronounced Layhew), my niece; he is my nephew, she is my niece on the other side. My niece is a beginner at the Exchange. We hope that she will fulfil her duties there in a worthy manner. She comes from a family which is schooled to meet responsibilities.”
I bowed again; again it seemed fitting. “I had not, until now, known the charming girl’s name,” I murmured.
My hostess now bowed slightly. “I am glad that you find her charming.”
“Indeed, yes!” I exclaimed.
“We, also, are pleased with her. She is of good family—for the up-country.”
Once again our alphabet fails me. The peculiar shade of kindness, of recognition, of patronage, which my agreeable hostess (and all Kings Port ladies, I soon noticed) imparted to the word “up-country” cannot be conveyed except by the human voice—and only a Kings Port voice at that. It is a much lighter damnation than what they make of the phrase “from Georgia,” which I was soon to hear uttered by the lips of the lady. “And so you know about his wedding cake?”
“My dear madam, I feel that I shall know about everything.”
Her gray eyes looked at me quietly for a moment. “That is possible. But although we may talk of ourselves to you, we scarcely expect you to talk of ourselves to us.”
Well, my pertness had brought me this quite properly! And I received it properly. “I should never dream—” I hastened to say; “even without your warning. I find I’m expected to have seen the young lady of his choice,” I now threw out. My accidental words proved as miraculous as the staff which once smote the rock. It was a stream, indeed, which now broke forth from her stony discretion. She began easily. “It is evident that you have not seen Miss Rieppe by the manner in which you allude to her—although of course, in comparison with my age, she is a young girl.” I think that this caused me to open my mouth.
“The disparity between her years and my nephew’s is variously stated,” continued the old lady. “But since John’s engagement we have all of us realized that love is truly blind.”
I did not open my mouth any more; but my mind’s mouth was wide open.
My hostess kept it so. “Since John Mayrant was fifteen he has had many loves; and for myself, knowing him and believing in him as I do, I feel confident that he will make no connection distasteful to the family when he really comes to marry.”
This time I gasped outright. “But—the cake!—next Wednesday!”
She made, with her small white hand, a slight and slighting gesture. “The cake is not baked yet, and we shall see what we shall see.” From this onward until the end a pinkness mounted in her pale, delicate cheeks, and deep, strong resentment burned beneath her discreetly expressed indiscretions. “The cake is not baked, and I, at least, am not solicitous. I tell my cousin, Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, that she must not forget it was merely his phosphates. That girl would never have looked at John Mayrant had it not been for the rumor of his phosphates. I suppose some one has explained to you her pretensions of birth. Away from Kings Port she may pass for a native of this place, but they come from Georgia. It cannot be said that she has met with encouragement from us; she, however, easily recovers from such things. The present generation of young people in Kings Port has little enough to remind us of what we stood for in manners and customs, but we are not accountable for her, nor for her father. I believe that he is called a general. His conduct at Chattanooga was conspicuous for personal prudence. Both of them are skillful in never knowing poor people—but the Northerners they consort with must really be at a loss how to bestow their money. Of course, such Northerners cannot realize the difference between Kings Port and Georgia, and consequently they make much of her. Her features do undoubtedly possess beauty. A Newport woman—the new kind—has even taken her to Worth! And yet, after all, she has remained for John. We heard a great deal of her men, too. She took care of that, of course. John Mayrant actually followed her to Newport.
“But,” I couldn’t help crying out, “I thought he was so poor!”
“The phosphates,” my hostess explained. “They had been discovered on his land. And none of her New York men had come forward. So John rushed back happy.” At this point a very singular look came over the face of my hostess, and she continued: “There have been many false reports (and false hopes in consequence) based upon the phosphate discoveries. It was I who had to break it to him—what further investigation had revealed. Poor John!”
“He has, then, nothing?” I inquired.
“His position in the Custom House, and a penny or two from his mother’s fortune.”
“But the cake?” I now once again reminded her.
My hostess lifted her delicate hand and let it fall. Her resentment at the would-be intruder by marriage still mounted. “Not even from that pair would I have believed such a thing possible!” she exclaimed; and she went into a long, low, contemplative laugh, looking not at me, but at the fire. Our silent companion continued to embroider. “That girl,” my hostess resumed, “and her discreditable father played on my nephew’s youth and chivalry to the tune of—well, you have heard the tune.”
“You mean—you mean—?” I couldn’t quite take it in.
“Yes. They rattled their poverty at him until he offered and they accepted.”
I must have stared grotesquely now. “That—that—the cake—and that sort of thing—at his expense?
“My dear sir, I shall be glad if you can find me anything that they have ever done at their own expense!”
I doubt if she would ever have permitted her speech such freedom had not the Rieppes been “from Georgia”; I am sure that it was anger—family anger, race anger—which had broken forth; and I think that her silent, severe sister scarcely approved of such breaking forth to me, a stranger. But indignation had worn her reticence thin, and I had happened to press upon the weak place. After my burst of exclamation I came back to it. “So you think Miss Rieppe will get out of it?”
“It is my nephew who will ‘get out of it,’ as you express it.”
I totally misunderstood her. “Oh!” I protested stupidly. “He doesn’t look like that. And it takes all meaning from the cake.”
“Do not say cake to me again!” said the lady, smiling at last. “And—will you allow me to tell you that I do not need to have my nephew, John Mayrant, explained to me by any one? I merely meant to say that he, and not she, is the person who will make the lucky escape. Of course, he is honorable—a great deal too much so for his own good. It is a misfortune, nowadays, to be born a gentleman in America. But, as I told you, I am not solicitous. What she is counting on—because she thinks she understands true Kings Port honor, and does not in the least—is his renouncing her on account of the phosphates—the bad news, I mean. They could live on what he has—not at all in her way, though—and besides, after once offering his genuine, ardent, foolish love—for it was genuine enough at the time—John would never—”
She stopped; but I took her up. “Did I understand you to say that his love was genuine at the lime?”
“Oh, he thinks it is now—insists it is now! That is just precisely what would make him—do you not see?—stick to his colors all the closer.”
“Goodness!” I murmured. “What a predicament!”
But my hostess nodded easily. “Oh, no. You will see. They will all see.”
I rose to take my leave; my visit, indeed, had been, for very interest, prolonged beyond the limits of formality—my hostess had attended quite thoroughly to my being entertained. And at this point the other, the more severe and elderly lady, made her contribution to my entertainment. She had kept silence, I now felt sure, because gossip was neither her habit nor to her liking. Possibly she may have also felt that her displeasure had been too manifest; at any rate, she spoke out of her silence in cold, yet rich, symmetrical tones.
“This, I understand, is your first visit to Kings Port?”
I told her that it was.
She laid down her exquisite embroidery. “It has been thought a place worth seeing. There is no town of such historic interest at the North.”
Standing by my chair, I assured her that I did not think there could be.
“I heard you allude to my half-sister-in-law, Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. It was at the house where she now lives that the famous Miss Beaufain (as she was then) put the Earl of Mainridge in his place, at the reception which her father gave the English visitor in 1840. The Earl conducted himself as so many Englishmen seem to think they can in this country; and on her asking him how he liked America, he replied, very well, except for the people, who were so vulgar.
“‘What can you expect?’ said Miss Beaufain; ‘we’re descended from the English.’”
“But I suppose you will tell me that your Northern beauties can easily outmatch such wit.”
I hastened to disclaim any such pretension; and having expressed my appreciation of the anecdote, I moved to the door as the stately lady resumed her embroidery.
My hostess had a last word for me. “Do not let the cake worry you.”
Outside the handsome old iron gate I looked at my watch and found that for this day I could spend no more time upon visiting.
IV: THE GIRL BEHIND THE COUNTER—I
I fear—no; to say one “fears” that one has stepped aside from the narrow path of duty, when one knows perfectly well that one has done so, is a ridiculous half-dodging of the truth; let me dismiss from my service such a cowardly circumlocution, and squarely say that I neglected the Cowpens during certain days which now followed. Nay, more; I totally deserted them. Although I feel quite sure that to discover one is a real king’s descendant must bring an exultation of no mean order to the heart, there’s no exultation whatever in failing to discover this, day after day. Mine is a nature which demands results, or at any rate signs of results coming sooner or later. Even the most abandoned fisherman requires a bite now and then; but my fishing for Fannings had not yet brought me one single nibble—and I gave up the sad sport for a while. The beautiful weather took me out of doors over the land, and also over the water, for I am a great lover of sailing; and I found a little cat-boat and a little negro, both of which suited me very well. I spent many delightful hours in their company among the deeps and shallows of these fair Southern waters.
And indoors, also, I made most agreeable use of my time, in spite of one disappointment when, on the day following my visit to the ladies, I returned full of expectancy to lunch at the Woman’s exchange, the girl behind the counter was not there. I found in her stead, it is true, a most polite lady, who provided me with chocolate and sandwiches that were just as good as their predecessors; but she was of advanced years, and little inclined to light conversation. Beyond telling me that Miss Eliza La Heu was indisposed, but not gravely so, and that she was not likely to be long away from her post of duty, this lady furnished me with scant information.
Now I desired a great deal of information. To learn of an imminent wedding where the bridegroom attends to the cake, and is suspected of diminished eagerness for the bride, who is a steel wasp—that is not enough to learn of such nuptials. Therefore I fear—I mean, I know—that it was not wholly for the sake of telling Mrs. Gregory St. Michael about Aunt Carola that I repaired again to Le Maire Street and rang Mrs. St. Michael’s door-bell.
She was at home, to be sure, but with her sat another visitor, the tall, severe lady who had embroidered and had not liked the freedom with which her sister had spoken to me about the wedding. There was not a bit of freedom to-day; the severe lady took care of that.
When, after some utterly unprofitable conversation, I managed to say in a casual voice, which I thought very well tuned for the purpose, “What part of Georgia did you say that General Rieppe came from?” the severe lady responded:—
“I do not think that I mentioned him at all.”
“Georgia?” said Mrs. Gregory St. Michael. “I never heard that they came from Georgia.”
And this revived my hopes. But the severe lady at once remarked to her:—
“I have received a most agreeable letter from my sister in Paris.”
This stopped Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and dashed my hopes to earth.
The severe lady continued to me:—
“My sister writes of witnessing a performance of the Lohengrin. Can you tell me if it is a composition of merit?”
I assured her that it was a composition of the highest merit.
“It is many years since I have heard an opera,” she pursued. “In my day the works of the Italians were much applauded. But I doubt if Mozart will be surpassed. I hope you admire the Nozze?”
You will not need me to tell you that I came out of Mrs. Gregory St. Michael’s house little wiser than I went in. My experience did not lead me to abandon all hope. I paid other visits to other ladies; but these answered my inquiries in much the same sort of way as had the lady who admired Mozart. They spoke delightfully of travel, books, people, and of the colonial renown of Kings Port and its leading families; but it is scarce an exaggeration to say that Mozart was as near the cake, the wedding, or the steel wasp as I came with any of them. By patience, however, and mostly at our boarding-house table, I gathered a certain knowledge, though small in amount.
If the health of John Mayrant’s mother, I learned, had allowed that lady to bring him up Herself, many follies might have been saved the youth. His aunt, Miss Eliza St. Michael, though a pattern of good intentions, was not always a pattern of wisdom. Moreover, how should a spinster bring up a boy fitly?
Of the Rieppes, father and daughter, I also learned a little more. They did not (most people believed) come from Georgia. Natchez and Mobile seemed to divide the responsibility of giving them to the world. It was quite certain the General had run away from Chattanooga. Nobody disputed this, or offered any other battle as the authentic one. Of late the Rieppes were seldom to be seen in Kings Port. Their house (if it had ever been their own property, which I heard hotly argued both ways) had been sold more than two years ago, and their recent brief sojourns in the town were generally beneath the roof of hospitable friends—people by the name of Cornerly, “whom we do not know,” as I was carefully informed by more than one member of the St. Michael family. The girl had disturbed a number of mothers whose sons were prone to slip out of the strict hereditary fold in directions where beauty or champagne was to be found; and the Cornerlys dined late, and had champagne. Miss Hortense had “splurged it” a good deal here, and the measure of her success with the male youth was the measure of her condemnation by their female elders.
Such were the facts which I gathered from women and from the few men whom I saw in Kings Port. This town seemed to me almost as empty of men as if the Pied Piper had passed through here and lured them magically away to some distant country. It was on the happy day that saw Miss Eliza La Heu again providing me with sandwiches and chocolate that my knowledge of the wedding and the bride and groom began really to take some steps forward.
It was not I who, at my sequestered lunch at the Woman’s Exchange, began the conversation the next time. That confection, “Lady Baltimore,” about which I was not to worry myself, had, as they say, “broken the ice” between the girl behind the counter and myself.
“He has put it off!” This, without any preliminaries, was her direct and stimulating news.
I never was more grateful for the solitude of the Exchange, where I had, before this, noted and blessed an absence of lunch customers as prevailing as the trade winds; the people I saw there came to talk, not to purchase. Well, I was certainly henceforth coming for both!
I eagerly plunged in with the obvious question:—
“Indefinitely?”
“Oh, no! Only Wednesday week.”
“But will it keep?”
My ignorance diverted her. “Lady Baltimore? Why, the idea!” And she laughed at me from the immense distance that the South is from the North.
“Then he’ll have to pay for two?”
“Oh, no! I wasn’t going to make it till Tuesday.
“I didn’t suppose that kind of thing would keep,” I muttered rather vaguely.
Her young spirits bubbled over. “Which kind of thing? The wedding—or the cake?”
This produced a moment of laughter on the part of us both; we giggled joyously together amid the silence and wares for sale, the painted cups, the embroidered souvenirs, the new food, and the old family “pieces.”
So this delightful girl was a verbal skirmisher! Now nothing is more to my liking than the verbal skirmish, and therefore I began one immediately. “I see you quite know,” was the first light shot that I hazarded.
Her retort to this was merely a very bland and inquiring stare.
I now aimed a trifle nearer the mark. “About him—her—it! Since you practically live in the Exchange, how can you exactly help yourself?”
Her laughter came back. “It’s all, you know, so much later than 1812.”
“Later! Why, a lot of it is to happen yet!”
She leaned over the counter. “Tell me what you know about it,” she said with caressing insinuation.
“Oh, well—but probably they mean to have your education progress chronologically.”
“I think I can pick it up anywhere. We had to at the plantation.”
It was from my table in the distant dim back of the room, where things stood lumpily under mosquito netting, that I told her my history. She made me go there to my lunch. She seemed to desire that our talk over the counter should not longer continue. And so, back there, over my chocolate and sandwiches, I brought out my gleaned and arranged knowledge which rang out across the distance, comically, like a lecture. She, at her counter, now and then busy with her ledger, received it with the attentive solemnity of a lecture. The ledger might have been notes that she was dutifully and improvingly taking. After I had finished she wrote on for a little while in silence. The curly white dog rose into sight, looked amiably and vaguely about, stretched himself, and sank to sleep again out of sight.
“That’s all?” she asked abruptly.
“So far,” I answered.
“And what do you think of such a young man?” she inquired.
“I know what I think of such a young woman.”
She was still pensive. “Yes, yes, but then that is so simple.”
I had a short laugh. “Oh, if you come to the simplicity!”
She nodded, seeming to be doing sums with her pencil.
“Men are always simple—when they’re in love.”
I assented. “And women—you’ll agree?—are always simple when they’re not!”
She finished her sums. “Well, I think he’s foolish!” she frankly stated. “Didn’t Aunt Josephine think so, too?”
“Aunt Josephine?”
“Miss Josephine St. Michael—my greet-aunt—the lady who embroidered. She brought me here from the plantation.”
“No, she wouldn’t talk about it. But don’t you think it is your turn now?”
“I’ve taken my turn!”
“Oh, not much. To say you think he’s foolish isn’t much. You’ve seen him since?”
“Seen him? Since when?”
“Here. Since the postponement. I take it he came himself about it.”
“Yes, he came. You don’t suppose we discussed the reasons, do you?”
“My dear young lady, I suppose nothing, except that you certainly must have seen how he looked (he can blush, you know, handsomely), and that you may have some knowledge or some guess—”
“Some guess why it’s not to be until Wednesday week? Of course he said why. Her poor, dear father, the General, isn’t very well.”
“That, indeed, must be an anxiety for Johnny,” I remarked.
This led her to indulge in some more merriment. “But he does,” she then said, “seem anxious about something.”
“Ah,” I exclaimed. “Then you admit it, too!”
She resorted again to the bland, inquiring stare.
“What he won’t admit,” I explained, “even to his intimate Aunt, because he’s so honorable.”
“He certainly is simple,” she commented, in soft and pensive tones.
“Isn’t there some one,” I asked, “who could—not too directly, of course—suggest that to him?”
“I think I prefer men to be simple,” she returned somewhat quickly.
“Especially when they’re in love,” I reminded her somewhat slowly.
“Do you want some Lady Baltimore to-day?” she inquired in the official Exchange tone.
I rose obediently. “You’re quite right, I should have gone back to the battle of Cowpens long ago, and I’ll just say this—since you asked me what I thought of him—that if he’s descended from that John Mayrant who fought the Serapes under Paul Jones—”
“He is!” she broke in eagerly.
“Then there’s not a name in South Carolina that I’d rather have for my own.”
I intended that thrust to strike home, but she turned it off most competently. “Oh, you mustn’t accept us because of our ancestors. That’s how we’ve been accepting ourselves, and only look where we are in the race!”
“Ah!” I said, as a parting attempt, “don’t pretend you’re not perfectly satisfied—all of you—as to where you are in the race!”
“We don’t pretend anything!” she flashed back.
V: The Boy of the Cake
One is unthankful, I suppose, to call a day so dreary when one has lunched under the circumstances that I have attempted to indicate; the bright spot ought to shine over the whole. But you haven’t an idea what a nightmare in the daytime Cowpens was beginning to be.
I had thumbed and scanned hundreds of ancient pages, some of them manuscript; I had sat by ancient shelves upon hard chairs, I had sneezed with the ancient dust, and I had not put my finger upon a trace of the right Fanning. I should have given it up, left unexplored the territory that remained staring at me through the backs of unread volumes, had it not been for my Aunt Carola. To her I owed constancy and diligence, and so I kept at it; and the hermit hours I spent at Court and Chancel streets grew worse as I knew better what rarely good company was ready to receive me. This Kings Port, this little city of oblivion, held, shut in with its lavender and pressed-rose memories, a handful of people who were like that great society of the world, the high society of distinguished men and women who exist no more, but who touched history with a light hand, and left their mark upon it in a host of memoirs and letters that we read to-day with a starved and home-sick longing in the midst of our sullen welter of democracy. With its silent houses and gardens, its silent streets, its silent vistas of the blue water in the sunshine, this beautiful, sad place was winning my heart and making it ache. Nowhere else in America such charm, such character, such true elegance as here—and nowhere else such an overwhelming sense of finality!—the doom of a civilization founded upon a crime. And yet, how much has the ballot done for that race? Or, at least, how much has the ballot done for the majority of that race? And what way was it to meet this problem with the sudden sweeping folly of the Fifteenth Amendment? To fling the “door of hope” wide open before those within had learned the first steps of how to walk sagely through it! Ah, if it comes to blame, who goes scatheless in this heritage of error? I could have shaped (we all could, you know) a better scheme for the universe, a plan where we should not flourish at each other’s expense, where the lion should be lying down with the lamb now, where good and evil should not be husband and wife, indissolubly married by a law of creation.
With such highly novel thoughts as these I descended the steps from my researches at the corner of Court and Chancel streets an hour earlier than my custom, because—well, I couldn’t, that day, stand Cowpens for another minute. Up at the corner of Court and Worship the people were going decently into church; it was a sweet, gentle late Friday in Lent. I had intended keeping out-of-doors, to smell the roses in the gardens, to bask in the soft remnant of sunshine, to loiter and peep in through the Kings Port garden gates, up the silent walks to the silent verandas. But the slow stream of people took me, instead, into church with the deeply veiled ladies of Kings Port, hushed in their perpetual mourning for not only, I think, those husbands and brothers and sons whom the war had turned to dust forty years ago, but also for the Cause, the lost Cause, that died with them. I sat there among these Christians suckled in a creed outworn, envying them their well-regulated faith; it, too, was part of the town’s repose and sweetness, together with the old-fashioned roses and the old-fashioned ladies. Men, also, were in the congregation—not many, to be sure, but all unanimously wearing that expression of remarkable virtue which seems always to visit, when he goes to church, the average good fellow who is no better than he should be. I became, myself, filled with this same decorous inconsistency, and was singing the hymn, when I caught sight of John Mayrant. What lady was he with? It was just this that most annoyingly I couldn’t make out, because the unlucky disposition of things hid it. I caught myself craning my neck and singing the hymn simultaneously and with no difficulty, because all my childhood was in that hymn; I couldn’t tell when I hadn’t known words and music by heart. Who was she? I tried for a clear view when we sat down, and also, let me confess, when we knelt down; I saw even less of her so; and my hope at the end of the service was dashed by her slow but entire disappearance amid the engulfing exits of the other ladies. I followed where I imagined she had gone, out by a side door, into the beautiful graveyard; but among the flowers and monuments she was not, nor was he; and next I saw, through the iron gate, John Mayrant in the street, walking with his intimate aunt and her more severe sister, and Miss La Heu. I somewhat superfluously hastened to the gate and greeted them, to which they responded with polite, masterly discouragement. He, however, after taking off his hat to them, turned back, and I watched them pursuing their leisurely, reticent course toward the South Place. Why should the old ladies strike me as looking like a tremendously proper pair of conspirators? I was wondering this as I turned back among the tombs, when I perceived John Mayrant coming along one of the churchyard paths. His approach was made at right angles with that of another personage, the respectful negro custodian of the place. This dignitary was evidently hoping to lead me among the monuments, recite to me their old histories, and benefit by my consequent gratitude; he had even got so far as smiling and removing his hat when John Mayrant stopped him. The young man hailed the negro by his first name with that particular and affectionate superiority which few Northerners can understand and none can acquire, and which resembles nothing so much as the way in which you speak to your old dog who has loved you and followed you, because you have cared for him.
“Not this time,” John Mayrant said. “I wish to show our relics to this gentleman myself—if he will permit me?” This last was a question put to me with a courteous formality, a formality which a few minutes more were to see smashed to smithereens.
I told him that I should consider myself undeservedly privileged.
“Some of these people are my people,” he said, beginning to move.
The old custodian stood smiling, familiar, respectful, disappointed. “Some of ‘em my people, too, Mas’ John,” he cannily observed.
I put a little silver in his hand. “Didn’t I see a box somewhere,” I said, “with something on it about the restoration of the church?”
“Something on it, but nothing in it!” exclaimed Mayrant; at which moderate pleasantry the custodian broke into extreme African merriment and ambled away. “You needn’t have done it,” protested the Southerner, and I naturally claimed my stranger’s right to pay my respects in this manner. Such was our introduction, agreeable and unusual.
A silence then unexpectedly ensued and the formality fell colder than ever upon us. The custodian’s departure had left us alone, looking at each other across all the unexpressed knowledge that each knew the other had. Mayrant had come impulsively back to me from his aunts, without stopping to think that we had never yet exchanged a word; both of us were now brought up short, and it was the cake that was speaking volubly in our self-conscious dumbness. It was only after this brief, deep gap of things unsaid that John Mayrant came to the surface again, and began a conversation of which, on both our parts, the first few steps were taken on the tiptoes of an archaic politeness; we trod convention like a polished French floor; you might have expected us, after such deliberate and graceful preliminaries, to dance a verbal minuet.
We, however, danced something quite different, and that conversation lasted during many days, and led us, like a road, up hill and down dale to a perfect acquaintance. No, not perfect, but delightful; to the end he never spoke to me of the matter most near him, and I but honor him the more for his reticence.
Of course his first remark had to be about Kings Port and me; had he understood rightly that this was my first visit?
My answer was equally traditional.
It was, next, correct that he should allude to the weather; and his reference was one of the two or three that it seems a stranger’s destiny always to hear in a place new to him: he apologized for the weather—so cold a season had not, in his memory, been experienced in Kings Port; it was to the highest point exceptional.
I exclaimed that it had been, to my Northern notions, delightfully mild for March. “Indeed,” I continued, “I have always said that if March could be cut out of our Northern climate, as the core is cut out of an apple, I should be quite satisfied with eleven months, instead of twelve. I think it might prolong one’s youth.”
The fire of that season lighted in his eyes, but he still stepped upon polished convention. He assured me that the Southern September hurricane was more deplorable than any Northern March could be. “Our zone should be called the Intemperate zone,” said he.
“But never in Kings Port,” I protested; “with your roses out-of-doors—and your ladies indoors!”
He bowed. “You pay us a high compliment.”
I smiled urbanely. “If the truth is a compliment!”
“Our young ladies are roses,” he now admitted with a delicate touch of pride.
“Don’t forget your old ones! I never shall.”
There was pleasure in his face at this tribute, which, he could see, came from the heart. But, thus pictured to him, the old ladies brought a further idea quite plainly into his expression; and he announced it. “Some of them are not without thorns.”
“What would you give,” I quickly replied, “for anybody—man or woman—who could not, on an occasion, make themselves sharply felt?”
To this he returned a full but somewhat absent-minded assent. He seemed to be reflecting that he himself didn’t care to be the “occasion” upon which an old lady rose should try her thorns; and I was inclined to suspect that his intimate aunt had been giving him a wigging.
Anyhow, I stood ready to keep it up, this interchange of lofty civilities. I, too, could wear the courtly red-heels of eighteenth-century procedure, and for just as long as his Southern up-bringing inclined him to wear them; I hadn’t known Aunt Carola for nothing! But we, as I have said, were not destined to dance any minuet.
We had been moving, very gradually, and without any attention to our surroundings, to and fro in the beautiful sweet churchyard. Flowers were everywhere, growing, budding, blooming; color and perfume were parts of the very air, and beneath these pretty and ancient tombs, graven with old dates and honorable names, slept the men and women who had given Kings Port her high place is; in our history. I have never, in this country, seen any churchyard comparable to this one; happy, serene dead, to sleep amid such blossoms and consecration! Good taste prevailed here; distinguished men lay beneath memorial stones that came no higher than your waist or shoulder; there was a total absence of obscure grocers reposing under gigantic obelisks; to earn a monument here you must win a battle, or do, at any rate, something more than adulterate sugar and oil. The particular monument by which young John Mayrant and I found ourselves standing, when we reached the point about the ladies and the thorns, had a look of importance and it caught his eye, bringing him back to where we were. Upon his pointing to it, and before we had spoken or I had seen the name, I inquired eagerly: “Not the lieutenant of the Bon Homme Richard?” and then saw that Mayrant was not the name upon it.
My knowledge of his gallant sea-fighting namesake visibly gratified him. “I wish it were,” he said; “but I am descended from this man, too. He was a statesman, and some of his brilliant powers were inherited by his children—but they have not come so far down as me. In 1840, his daughter, Miss Beaufain—”
I laid my hand right on his shoulder. “Don’t you do it, John Mayrant!” I cried. “Don’t you tell me that. Last night I caught myself saying that instead of my prayers.”
Well, it killed the minuet dead; he sat flat down on the low stone coping that bordered the path to which we had wandered back—and I sat flat down opposite him. The venerable custodian, passing along a neighboring path, turned his head and stared at our noise.
“Lawd, see those chillun goin’ on!” he muttered. “Mas’ John, don’t you get too scandalous, tellin’ strangers ‘bout the old famblies.”
Mayrant pointed to me. “He’s responsible, Daddy Ben. I’m being just as good as gold. Honest injun!”
The custodian marched slowly on his way, shaking his head. “Mas’ John he do go on,” he repeated. His office was not alone the care and the showing off of the graveyard, but another duty, too, as native and peculiar to the soil as the very cotton and the rice: this loyal servitor cherished the honor of the “old famblies,” and chide their young descendants whenever he considered that they needed it.
Mayrant now sat revived after his collapse of mirth, and he addressed me from his gravestone. “Yes, I ought to have foreseen it.”
“Foreseen—?” I didn’t at once catch the inference.
“All my aunts and cousins have been talking to you.”
“Oh, Miss Beaufain and the Earl of Mainridge! Well, but it’s quite worth—”
“Knowing by heart!” he broke in with new merriment.
I kept on. “Why not? They tell those things everywhere—where they’re so lucky as to possess them! It’s a flawless specimen.”
“Of 1840 repartee?” He spoke with increasing pauses. “Yes. We do at least possess that. And some wine of about the same date—and even considerably older.”
“All the better for age,” I exclaimed.
But the blue eyes of Mayrant were far away and full of shadow. “Poor Kings Port,” he said very slowly and quietly. Then he looked at me with the steady look and the smile that one sometimes has when giving voice to a sorrowful conviction against which one has tried to struggle. “Poor Kings Port,” he affectionately repeated. His hand tapped lightly two or three times upon the gravestone upon which he was seated. “Be honest and say that you think so, too,” he demanded, always with his smile.
But how was I to agree aloud with what his silent hand had expressed? Those inaudible taps on the stone spoke clearly enough; they said: “Here lies Kings Port, here lives Kings Port. Outside of this is our true death, on the vacant wharves, in the empty streets. All that we have left is the immortality which these historic names have won.” How could I tell him that I thought so, too? Nor was I as sure of it then as he was. And besides, this was a young man whose spirit was almost surely, in suffering; ill fortune both material and of the heart, I seemed to suspect, had made him wounded and bitter in these immediate days; and the very suppression he was exercising hurt him the more deeply. So I replied, honestly, as he had asked: “I hope you are mistaken.”
“That’s because you haven’t been here long enough,” he declared.
Over us, gently, from somewhere across the gardens and the walls, came a noiseless water breeze, to which the roses moved and nodded among the tombs. They gave him a fanciful thought. “Look at them! They belong to us, and they know it. They’re saying, ‘Yes; yes; yes,’ all day long. I don’t know why on earth I’m talking in this way to you!” he broke off with vivacity. “But you made me laugh so.”
VI: In the Churchyard
“Then it was a good laugh, indeed!” I cried heartily.
“Oh, don’t let’s go back to our fine manners!” he begged comically. “We’ve satisfied each other that we have them! I feel so lonely; and my aunt just now—well, never mind about that. But you really must excuse us about Miss Beaufain, and all that sort of thing. I see it, because I’m of the new generation, since the war, and—well, I’ve been to other places, too. But Aunt Eliza, and all of them, you know, can’t see it. And I wouldn’t have them, either! So I don’t ever attempt to explain to them that the world has to go on. They’d say, ‘We don’t see the necessity!’ When slavery stopped, they stopped, you see, just like a clock. Their hand points to 1865—it has never moved a minute since. And some day”—his voice grew suddenly tender—“they’ll go, one by one, to join the still older ones. And I shall miss them very much.”
For a moment I did not speak, but watched the roses nodding and moving. Then I said: “May I say that I shall miss them, too?”
He looked at me. “Miss our old Kings Port people?” He didn’t invite outsiders to do that!
“Don’t you see how it is?” I murmured. “It was the same thing once with us.”
“The same thing—in the North?” His tone still held me off.
“The same sort of dear old people—I mean charming, peppery, refined, courageous people; in Salem, in Boston, in New York, in every place that has been colonial, and has taken a hand in the game.” And, as certain beloved memories of men and women rose in my mind, I continued: “If you knew some of the Boston elder people as I have known them, you would warm with the same admiration that is filling me as I see your people of Kings Port.”
“But politics?” the young Southerner slowly suggested.
“Oh, hang slavery! Hang the war!” I exclaimed. “Of course, we had a family quarrel. But we were a family once, and a fine one, too! We knew each other, we visited each other, we wrote letters, sent presents, kept up relations; we, in short, coherently joined hands from one generation to another; the fibres of the sons tingled with the current from their fathers, back and back to the old beginnings, to Plymouth and Roanoke and Rip Van Winkle! It’s all gone, all done, all over. You have to be a small, well-knit country for that sort of exquisite personal unitedness. There’s nothing united about these States any more, except Standard Oil and discontent. We’re no longer a small people living and dying for a great idea; we’re a big people living and dying for money. And these ladies of yours—well, they have made me homesick for a national and a social past which I never saw, but which my old people knew. They’re like legends, still living, still warm and with us. In their quiet clean-cut faces I seem to see a reflection of the old serene candlelight we all once talked and danced in—sconces, tall mirrors, candles burning inside glass globes to keep them from the moths and the draft that, of a warm evening, blew in through handsome mahogany doors; the good bright silver; the portraits by Copley and Gilbert Stuart; a young girl at a square piano, singing Moore’s melodies—and Mr. Pinckney or Commodore Perry, perhaps, dropping in for a hot supper!”
John Mayrant was smiling and looking at the graves. “Yes, that’s it; that’s all it,” he mused. “You do understand.”
But I had to finish my flight. “Such quiet faces are gone now in the breathless, competing North: ground into oblivion between the clashing trades of the competing men and the clashing jewels and chandeliers of their competing wives—while yours have lingered on, spared by your very adversity. And that’s why I shall miss your old people when they follow mine—because they’re the last of their kind, the end of the chain, the bold original stock, the great race that made our glory grow and saw that it did grow through thick and thin: the good old native blood of independence.”
I spoke as a man can always speak when he means it; and my listener’s face showed that my words had gone where meant words always go—home to the heart. But he merely nodded at me. His nod, however, telling as it did of a quickly established accord between us, caused me to bring out to this new acquaintance still more of those thoughts which I condescend to expose to very few old ones.
“Haven’t you noticed,” I said, “or don’t you feel it, away down here in your untainted isolation, the change, the great change, that has come over the American people?”
He wasn’t sure.
“They’ve lost their grip on patriotism.”
He smiled. “We did that here in 1861.”
“Oh, no! You left the Union, but you loved what you considered was your country, and you love it still. That’s just my point, just my strange discovery in Kings Port. You retain the thing we’ve lost. Our big men fifty years ago thought of the country, and what they could make it; our big men to-day think of the country and what they can make out of it. Rather different, don’t you see? When I walk about in the North, I merely meet members of trusts or unions—according to the length of the individual’s purse; when I walk about in Kings Port, I meet Americans.—Of course,” I added, taking myself up, “that’s too sweeping a statement. The right sort of American isn’t extinct in the North by any means. But there’s such a commercial deluge of the wrong sort, that the others sometimes seem to me sadly like a drop in the bucket.”
“You certainly understand it all,” John Mayrant repeated. “It’s amazing to find you saying things that I have thought were my own private notions.”
I laughed. “Oh, I fancy there are more than two of us in the country.”
“Even the square piano and Mr. Pinckney,” he went on. “I didn’t suppose anybody had thought things like that, except myself.”
“Oh,” I again said lightly, “any American—any, that is, of the world—who has a colonial background for his family, has thought, probably, very much the same sort of things. Of course it would be all Greek or gibberish to the new people.”
He took me up with animation. “The new people! My goodness, sir, yes! Have you seen them? Have you seen Newport, for instance?” His diction now (and I was to learn it was always in him a sign of heightening intensity) grew more and more like the formal speech of his ancestors. “You have seen Newport?” he said.
“Yes; now and then.”
“But lately, sir? I knew we were behind the times down here, sir, but I had not imagined how much. Not by any means! Kings Port has a long road to go before she will consider marriage provincial and chastity obsolete.”
“Dear me, Mr. Mayrant! Well, I must tell you that it’s not all quite so—so advanced—as that, you know. That’s not the whole of Newport.”
He hastened to explain. “Certainly not, sir! I would not insult the honorable families whom I had the pleasure to meet there, and to whom my name was known because they had retained their good position since the days when my great-uncle had a house and drove four horses there himself. I noticed three kinds of Newport, sir.”
“Three?”
“Yes. Because I took letters; and some of the letters were to people who—who once had been, you know; it was sad to see the thing, sir, so plain against the glaring proximity of the other thing. And so you can divide Newport into those who leave to sell their old family pictures, those who have to buy their old family pictures, and the lucky few who need neither buy nor sell, who are neither goin’ down nor bobbing up, but who have kept their heads above the American tidal wave from the beginning and continue to do so. And I don’t believe that there are any nicer people in the world than those.”
“Nowhere!” I exclaimed. “When Near York does her best, what’s better?—If only those best set the pace!”
“If only!” he assented. “But it’s the others who get into the papers, who dine the drunken dukes, and make poor chambermaids envious a thousand miles inland!”
“There should be a high tariff on drunken dukes,” I said.
“You’ll never get it!” he declared. “It’s the Republican party whose daughters marry them.”
I rocked with enjoyment where I sat; he was so refreshing. And I agreed with him so well. “You’re every bit as good as Miss Beaufain,” I cried.
“Oh, no; oh, no! But I often think if we could only deport the negroes and Newport together to one of our distant islands, how happily our two chief problems would be solved!”
I still rocked. “Newport would, indeed, enjoy your plan for it. Do go on!” I entreated him But he had, for the moment, ceased; and I rose to stretch my legs and saunter among the old headstones and the wafted fragrance.
His aunt (or his cousin, or whichever of them it had been) was certainly right as to his inheriting a pleasant and pointed gift of speech; and a responsive audience helps us all. Such an audience I certainly was for young John Mayrant, yet beneath the animation that our talk had filled his eyes with lay (I seemed to see or feel) that other mood all the time, the mood which had caused the girl behind the counter to say to me that he was “anxious about something.” The unhappy youth, I was gradually to learn, was much more than that—he was in a tangle of anxieties. He talked to me as a sick man turns in bed from pain; the pain goes on, but the pillow for a while is cool.
Here there broke upon us a little interruption, so diverting, so utterly like the whole quaint tininess of Kings Port, that I should tell it to you, even if it did not bear directly upon the matter which was beginning so actively to concern me—the love difficulties of John Mayrant.
It was the letter-carrier.
We had come, from our secluded seats, round a corner, and so by the vestry door and down the walk beside the church, and as I read to myself the initials upon the stones wherewith the walk was paved, I drew near the half-open gateway upon Worship Street. The postman was descending the steps of the post-office opposite. He saw me through the gate and paused. He knew me, too! My face, easily marked out amid the resident faces he was familiar with, had at once caught his attention; very likely he, too, had by now learned that I was interested in the battle of Cowpens; but I did not ask him this. He crossed over and handed me a letter.
“No use,” he said most politely, “takin’ it away down to Mistress Trevise’s when you’re right here, sir. Northern mail eight hours late to-day,” he added, and bowing, was gone upon his route.
My home letter, from a man, an intimate running mate of mine, soon had my full attention, for on the second page it said:—
“I have just got back from accompanying her to Baltimore. One of us went as far as Washington with her on the train. We gave her a dinner yesterday at the March Hare by way of farewell. She tried our new toboggan fire-escape on a bet. Clean from the attic, my boy. I imagine our native girls will rejoice at her departure. However, nobody’s engaged to her, at least nobody here. How many may fancy themselves so elsewhere I can’t say. Her name is Hortense Rieppe.”
I suppose I must have been silent after finishing this letter.
“No bad news, I trust?” John Mayrant inquired.
I told him no; and presently we had resumed our seats in the quiet charm of the flowers.
I now spoke with an intention. “What a lot you seem to have seen and suffered of the advanced Newport!”
The intention wrought its due and immediate effect. “Yes. There was no choice. I had gone to Newport upon—upon an urgent matter, which took me among those people.”
He dwelt upon the pictures that came up in his mind. But he took me away again from the “urgent matter.”
“I saw,” he resumed more briskly, “fifteen or twenty—most amazing, sir!—young men, some of them not any older than I am, who had so many millions that they could easily—” he paused, casting about for some expression adequate—“could buy Kings Port and put it under a glass case in a museum—my aunts and all—and never know it!” He livened with disrespectful mirth over his own picture of his aunts, purchased by millionaire steel or coal for the purposes of public edification.
“And a very good thing if they could be,” I declared.
He wondered a moment. “My aunts? Under a glass case?”
“Yes, indeed—and with all deference be it said! They’d be more invaluable, more instructive, than the classics of a thousand libraries.”
He was prepared not to be pleased. “May I ask to whom and for what?”
“Why, you ought to see! You’ve just been saying it yourself. They would teach our bulging automobilists, our unlicked boy cubs, our alcoholic girls who shout to waiters for ‘high-balls’ on country club porches—they would teach these wallowing creatures, whose money has merely gilded their bristles, what American refinement once was. The manners we’ve lost, the decencies we’ve banished, the standards we’ve lowered, their light is still flickering in this passing generation of yours. It’s the last torch. That’s why I wish it could, somehow, pass on the sacred fire.”
He shook his head. “They don’t want the sacred fire. They want the high-balls—and they have money enough to be drunk straight through the next world!” He was thoughtful. “They are the classics,” he added.
I didn’t see that he had gone back to my word. “Roman Empire, you mean?”
“No, the others; the old people we’re bidding good-by to. Roman Republic! Simple lives, gallant deeds, and one great uniting inspiration. Liberty winning her spurs. They were moulded under that, and they are our true American classics. Nothing like them will happen again.”
“Perhaps,” I suggested, “our generation is uneasily living in a ‘bad quarter-of-an-hour’—good old childhood gone, good new manhood not yet come, and a state of chicken-pox between whiles.” And on this I made to him a much-used and consoling quotation about the old order changing.
“Who says that?” he inquired; and upon my telling him, “I hope so,” he said, “I hope so. But just now Uncle Sam ‘aspires to descend.’”
I laughed at his counter-quotation. “You know your classics, if you don’t know Tennyson.”
He, too, laughed. “Don’t tell Aunt Eliza!”
“Tell her what?”
“That I didn’t recognize Tennyson. My Aunt Eliza educated me—and she thinks Tennyson about the only poet worth reading since—well, since Byron and Sir Walter at the very latest!”
“Neither she nor Sir Walter come down to modern poetry—or to alcoholic girls.” His tone, on these last words, changed.
Again, as when he had said “an urgent matter,” I seemed to feel hovering above us what must be his ceaseless preoccupation; and I wondered if he had found, upon visiting Newport, Miss Hortense sitting and calling for “high-balls.”
I gave him a lead. “The worst of it is that a girl who would like to behave herself decently finds that propriety puts her out of the running. The men flock off to the other kind.”
He was following me with watching eyes.
“And you know,” I continued, “what an anxious Newport parent does on finding her girl on the brink of being a failure.”
“I can imagine,” he answered, “that she scolds her like the dickens.”
“Oh, nothing so ineffectual! She makes her keep up with the others, you know. Makes her do things she’d rather not do.”
“High-balls, you mean?”
“Anything, my friend; anything to keep up.”
He had a comic suggestion. “Driven to drink by her mother! Well, it’s, at any rate, a new cause for old effects.” He paused. It seemed strangely to bring to him some sort of relief. “That would explain a great deal,” he said.
Was he thus explaining to himself his lady-love, or rather certain Newport aspects of her which had, so to speak, jarred upon his Kings Port notions of what a lady might properly do? I sat on my gravestone with my wonder, and my now-dawning desire to help him (if improbably I could), to get him out of it, if he were really in it; and he sat on his gravestone opposite, with the path between us, and the little noiseless breeze rustling the white irises, and bearing hither and thither the soft perfume of the roses. His boy face, lean, high-strung, brooding, was full of suppressed contentions. I made myself, during our silence, state his possible problem: “He doesn’t love her any more, he won’t admit this to himself; he intends to go through with it, and he’s catching at any justification of what he has seen in her that has chilled him, so that he may, poor wretch! coax back his lost illusion.” Well, if that was it, what in the world could I, or anybody, do about it?
His next remark was transparent enough. “Do you approve of young ladies smoking?”
I met his question with another: “What reasons can be urged against it?”
He was quick. “Then you don’t mind it?” There was actual hope in the way he rushed at this.
I laughed. “I didn’t say I didn’t mind it.” (As a matter of fact I do mind it; but it seemed best not to say so to him.)
He fell off again. “I certainly saw very nice people doing it up there.”
I filled this out. “You’ll see very nice people doing it everywhere.”
“Not in Kings Port! At least, not my sort of people!” He stiffly proclaimed this.
I tried to draw him out. “But is there, after all, any valid objection to it?”
But he was off on a preceding speculation. “A mother or any parent,” he said, “might encourage the daughter to smoke, too. And the girl might take it up so as not to be thought peculiar where she was, and then she might drop it very gladly.”
I became specific. “Drop it, you mean, when she came to a place where doing it would be thought—well, in bad style?”
“Or for the better reason,” he answered, “that she didn’t really like it herself.”
“How much you don’t ‘really like it’ yourself!” I remarked.
This time he was slow. “Well—well—why need they? Are not their lips more innocent than ours? Is not the association somewhat—?”
“My dear fellow,” I interrupted, “the association is, I think you’ll have to agree, scarcely of my making!”
“That’s true enough,” he laughed. “And, as you say, very nice people do it everywhere. But not here. Have you ever noticed,” he now inquired with continued transparency, “how much harder they are on each other than we are on them?”
“Oh, yes! I’ve noticed that.” I surmised it was this sort of thing he had earlier choked himself off from telling me in his unfinished complaint about his aunt; but I was to learn later that on this occasion it was upon the poor boy himself and not on the smoking habits of Miss Rieppe, that his aunt had heavily descended. I also reflected that if cigarettes were the only thing he deprecated in the lady of his choice, the lost illusion might be coaxed back. The trouble was that deprecated something fairly distant from cigarettes. The cake was my quite sufficient trouble; it stuck in my throat worse than the probably magnified gossip I had heard; this, for the present, I could manage to swallow.
He came out now with a personal note. “I suppose you think I’m a ninny.”
“Never in the wildest dream!”
“Well, but too innocent for a man, anyhow.”
“That would be an insult,” I declared laughingly.
“For I’m not innocent in the least. You’ll find we’re all men here, just as much as any men in the North you could pick out. South Carolina has never lacked sporting blood, sir. But in Newport—well, sir, we gentlemen down here, when we wish a certain atmosphere and all that, have always been accustomed to seek the demi-monde.”
“So it was with us until the women changed it.”
“The women, sir?” He was innocent!
“The ‘ladies,’ as you Southerners so chivalrously continue to style them. The rich new fashionable ladies became so desperate in their competition for men’s allegiance that they—well, some of them would, in the point of conversation, greatly scandalize the smart demi-monde.”
He nodded. “Yes. I heard men say things in drawing-rooms to ladies that a gentleman here would have been taken out and shot for. And don’t you agree with me, sir, that good taste itself should be a sort of religion? I don’t mean to say anything sacrilegious, but it seems to me that even if one has ceased to believe some parts of the Bible, even if one does not always obey the Ten Commandments, one is bound, not as a believer but as a gentleman, to remember the difference between grossness and refinement, between excess and restraint—that one can have and keep just as the pagan Greeks did, a moral elegance.”
He astonished me, this ardent, ideal, troubled boy; so innocent regarding the glaring facts of our new prosperity, so finely penetrating as to some of the mysteries of the soul. But he was of old Huguenot blood, and of careful and gentle upbringing; and it was delightful to find such a young man left upon our American soil untainted by the present fashionable idolatries.
“I bow to your creed of ‘moral elegance,’” I cried. “It never dies. It has outlasted all the mobs and all the religions.”
“They seemed to think,” he continued, pursuing his Newport train of thought, “that to prove you were a dead game sport you must behave like—behave like—”
“Like a herd of swine,” I suggested.
He was merry. “Ah, if they only would—completely!”
“Completely what?”
“Behave so. Rush over a steep place into the sea.”
We sat in the quiet relish of his Scriptural idea, and the western crimson and the twilight began to come and mingle with the perfumes. John Mayrant’s face changed from its vivacity to a sort of pensive wistfulness, which, for all the dash and spirit in his delicate features, was somehow the final thing one got from the boy’s expression. It was as though the noble memories of his race looked out of his eyes, seeking new chances for distinction, and found instead a soil laid waste, an empty fatherland, a people benumbed past rousing. Had he not said, “Poor Kings Port!” as he tapped the gravestone? Moral elegance could scarcely permit a sigh more direct.
“I am glad that you believe it never dies,” he resumed. “And I am glad to find somebody to—talk to, you know. My friends here are everything friends and gentlemen should be, but they don’t—I suppose it’s because they have not had my special experiences.”
I sat waiting for the boy to go on with it. How plainly he was telling me of his “special experiences”! He and his creed were not merely in revolt against the herd of swine; there would be nothing special in that; I had met people before who were that; but he was tied by honor, and soon to be tied by the formidable nuptial knot, to a specimen devotee of the cult. He shouldn’t marry her if he really did not want to, and I could stop it! But how was I to begin spinning the first faint web of plan how I might stop it, unless he came right out with the whole thing? I didn’t believe he was the man to do that ever, even under the loosening inspiration of drink. In wine lies truth, no doubt; but within him, was not moral elegance the bottom truth that would, even in his cups, keep him a gentleman, and control all such revelations? He might smash the glasses, but he would not speak of his misgivings as to Hortense Rieppe.
He began again, “Nor do I believe that a really nice girl would continue to think as those few do, if she once got safe away from them. Why, my dear sir,” he stretched out his hand in emphasis, “you do not have to do anything untimely and extreme if you are in good earnest a dead game sport. The time comes, and you meet the occasion as the duck swims. There was one of them—the right kind.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Why—you’re leaning against her headstone!”
The little incongruity made us both laugh, but it was only for the instant. The tender mood of the evening, and all that we had said, sustained the quiet and almost grave undertone of our conference. My own quite unconscious act of rising from the grave and standing before him on the path to listen brought back to us our harmonious pensiveness.
“She was born in Kings Port, but educated in Europe. I don’t suppose until the time came that she ever did anything harder than speak French, or play the piano, or ride a horse. She had wealth and so had her husband. He was killed in the war, and so were two of her sons. The third was too young to go. Their fortune was swept away, but the plantation was there, and the negroes were proud to remain faithful to the family. She took hold of the plantation, she walked the rice-banks in high boots. She had an overseer, who, it was told her, would possibly take her life by poison or by violence. She nevertheless lived in that lonely spot with no protector except her pistol and some directions about antidotes. She dismissed him when she had proved he was cheating her; she made the planting pay as well as any man did after the war; she educated her last son, got him into the navy, and then, one evening, walking the river-banks too late, she caught the fever and died. You will understand she went with one step from cherished ease to single-handed battle with life, a delicately nurtured lady, with no preparation for her trials.”
“Except moral elegance,” I murmured.
“Ah, that was the point, sir! To see her you would never have guessed it! She kept her burdens from the sight of all. She wore tribulation as if it were a flower in her bosom. We children always looked forward to her coming, because she was so gay and delightful to us, telling us stories of the old times—old rides when the country was wild, old journeys with the family and servants to the Hot Springs before the steam cars were invented, old adventures, with the battle of New Orleans or a famous duel in them—the sort of stories that begin with (for you seem to know something of it yourself, sir) ‘Your grandfather, my dear John, the year that he was twenty, got himself into serious embarrassments through paying his attentions to two reigning beauties at once.’ She was full of stories which began in that sort of pleasant way.”
I said: “When a person like that dies, an impoverishment falls upon us; the texture of life seems thinner.”
“Oh, yes, indeed! I know what you mean—to lose the people one has always seen from the cradle. Well, she has gone away, she has taken her memories out of the world, the old times, the old stories. Nobody, except a little nutshell of people here, knows or cares anything about her any more; and soon even the nutshell will be empty.” He paused, and then, as if brushing aside his churchyard mood, he translated into his changed thought another classic quotation: “But we can’t dawdle over the ‘tears of things’; it’s Nature’s law. Only, when I think of the rice-banks and the boots and the pistol, I wonder if the Newport ladies, for all their high-balls, could do any better!”
The crimson had faded, the twilight was altogether come, but the little noiseless breeze was blowing still; and as we left the quiet tombs behind us, and gained Worship Street, I could not help looking back where slept that older Kings Port about which I had heard and had said so much. Over the graves I saw the roses, nodding and moving, as if in acquiescent revery.
VII: The Girl Behind the Counter—II
“Which of them is idealizing?” This was the question that I asked myself, next morning, in my boarding-house, as I dressed for breakfast; the next morning is—at least I have always found it so—an excellent time for searching questions; and to-day I had waked up no longer beneath the strong, gentle spell of the churchyard. A bright sun was shining over the eastern waters of the town, I could see from my upper veranda the thousand flashes of the waves; the steam yacht rode placidly and competently among them, while a coastwise steamer was sailing by her, out to sea, to Savannah, or New York; the general world was going on, and—which of them was idealizing? It mightn’t be so bad, after all. Hadn’t I, perhaps, over-sentimentalized to myself the case of John Mayrant? Hadn’t I imagined for him ever so much more anxiety than the boy actually felt? For people can idealize down just as readily as they can idealize up. Of Miss Hortense Rieppe I had now two partial portraits—one by the displeased aunts, the other by their chivalric nephew; in both she held between her experienced lips, a cigarette; there the similarity ceased. And then, there was the toboggan fire-escape. Well, I must meet the living original before I could decide whether (for me, at any rate) she was the “brute” as seen by the eyes of Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, or the “really nice girl” who was going to marry John Mayrant on Wednesday week. Just at this point my thoughts brought up hard again at the cake. No; I couldn’t swallow that any better this morning than yesterday afternoon! Allow the gentleman to pay for the feast! Better to have omitted all feast; nothing simpler, and it would have been at least dignified, even if arid. But then, there was the lady (a cousin or an aunt—I couldn’t remember which this morning) who had told me she wasn’t solicitous. What did she mean by that? And she had looked quite queer when she spoke about the phosphates. Oh, yes, to be sure, she was his intimate aunt! Where, by the way, was Miss Rieppe?
By the time I had eaten my breakfast and walked up Worship Street to the post-office I was full of it all again; my searching thoughts hadn’t simplified a single point. I always called for my mail at the post-office, because I got it sooner; it didn’t come to the boarding-house before I had departed on my quest for royal blood, whereas, this way, I simply got my letters at the corner of Court and Worship streets and walked diagonally across and down Court a few steps to my researches, which I could vary and alleviate by reading and answering news from home.
It was from Aunt Carola that I heard to-day. Only a little of what she said will interest you. There had been a delightful meeting of the Selected Salic Scions. The Baltimore Chapter had paid her Chapter a visit. Three ladies and one very highly connected young gentleman had come—an encouragingly full and enthusiastic meeting. They had lunched upon cocoa, sherry, and croquettes, after which all had been more than glad to listen to a paper read by a descendant of Edward the Third and the young gentleman, a descendant of Catherine of Aragon, had recited a beautiful original poem, entitled “My Queen Grandmother.” Aunt Carola regretted that I could not have had the pleasure and the benefit of this meeting, the young gentleman had turned out to be, also, a refined and tasteful musician, playing, upon the piano a favorite gavotte of Louis the Thirteenth “And while you are in Kings Port,” my aunt said; “I expect you to profit by associating with the survivors of our good American society—people such as one could once meet everywhere when I was young, but who have been destroyed by the invasion of the proletariat. You are in the last citadel of good-breeding. By the way, find out, if you can, if any of the Bombo connection are extant; as through them I should like, if possible, to establish a chapter of the Scions in South Carolina. Have you, met a Miss Rieppe, a decidedly striking young woman, who says she is from Kings Port, and who recently passed through here with a very common man dancing attendance on her? He owns the Hermana, and she is said to be engaged to him.”
This wasn’t as good as meeting Miss Rieppe myself; but the new angle at which I got her from my Aunt was distinctly a contribution toward the young woman’s likeness; I felt that I should know her at sight, if ever she came within seeing distance. And it would be entertaining to find that she was a Bombo; but that could wait; what couldn’t wait was the Hermana. I postponed the Fannings, hurried by the door where they waited for me, and, coming to the end of Court Street, turned to the right and sought among the wharves the nearest vista that could give me a view of the harbor. Between the silent walls of commerce desolated, and by the empty windows from which Prosperity once looked out, I threaded my way to a point upon the town’s eastern edge. Yes, that was the steam yacht’s name: the Hermana. I didn’t make it out myself, she lay a trifle too far from shore; but I could read from a little fluttering pennant that her owner was not on board; and from the second loafer whom I questioned I learned, besides her name, that she had come from New York here to meet her owner, whose name he did not know and whose arrival was still indefinite. This was not very much to find out; but it was so much more than I had found out about the Fannings that, although I now faithfully returned to my researches, and sat over open books until noon, I couldn’t tell you a word of what I read. Where was Miss Rieppe, and where was the owner of the Hermana? Also, precisely how ill was the hero of Chattanooga, her poor dear father?
At the Exchange I opened the door upon a conversation which, in consequence, broke off abruptly; but this much I came in for:—
“Nothing but the slightest bruise above his eye. The other one is in bed.”
It was the severe lady who said this; I mean that lady who, among all the severe ones I had met, seemed capable of the highest exercise of this quality, although she had not exercised it in my presence. She looked, in her veil and her black street dress, as aloof, and as coldly scornful of the present day, as she had seemed when sitting over her embroidery; but it was not of 1818, or even 1840, that she had been talking just now: it was this morning that somebody was bruised, somebody was in bed.
The handsome lady acknowledged my salutation completely, but not encouragingly, and then, on the threshold, exchanged these parting sentences with the girl behind the counter:—
“They will have to shake hands. He was not very willing, but he listened to me. Of course, the chastisement was right—but it does not affect my opinion of his keeping on with the position.”
“No, indeed, Aunt Josephine!” the girl agreed. “I wish he wouldn’t. Did you say it was his right eye?”
“His left.” Miss Josephine St. Michael inclined her head once more to me and went out of the Exchange. I retired to my usual table, and the girl read in my manner, quite correctly, the feelings which I had not supposed I had allowed to be evident. She said:—
“Aunt Josephine always makes strangers think she’s displeased with them.”
I replied like the young ass which I constantly tell myself I have ceased to be: “Oh, displeasure is as much notice as one is entitled to from Miss St. Michael.”
The girl laughed with her delightful sweet mockery.
“I declare, you’re huffed! Now don’t tell me you’re not. But you mustn’t be. When you know her, you’ll know that that awful manner means Aunt Josephine is just being shy. Why, even I’m not afraid of her George Washington glances any more!”
“Very well,” I laughed, “I’ll try to have your courage.” Over my chocolate and sandwiches I sat in curiosity discreditable, but natural. Who was in bed—who would have to shake hands? And why had they stopped talking when I came in? Of course, I found myself hoping that John Mayrant had put the owner of the Hermana in bed at the slight cost of a bruise above his left eye. I wondered if the cake was again countermanded, and I started upon that line. “I think I’ll have to-day, if you please, another slice of that Lady Baltimore.” And I made ready for another verbal skirmish.
“I’m so sorry! It’s a little stale to-day. You can have the last slice, if you wish.”
“Thank you, I will.” She brought it. “It’s not so very stale,” I said. “How long since it has been made?”
“Oh, it’s the same you’ve been having. You’re its only patron just now.”
“Well, no. There’s Mr. Mayrant.”
“Not for a week yet, you remember.”
So the wedding was on yet. Still, John might have smashed the owner of the Hermana.
“Have you seen him lately?” I asked.
There was something special in the way she looked. “Not to-day. Have you?”
“Never in the forenoon. He has his duties and I have mine.”
She made a little pause, and then, “What do you think of the President?”
“The President?” I was at a loss.
“But I’m afraid you would take his view—the Northern view,” she mused.
It gave me, suddenly, her meaning. “Oh, the President of the United States! How you do change the subject!”
Her eyes were upon me, burning with sectional indignation, but she seemed to be thinking too much to speak. Now, here was a topic that I had avoided, and she had plumped it at me. Very well; she should have my view.
“If you mean that a gentleman cannot invite any respectable member of any race he pleases to dine privately in his house—”
“His house!” She was glowing now with it. “I think he is—I think he is—to have one of them—and even if he likes it, not to remember—cannot speak about him!” she wound up “I should say unbecoming things.” She had walked out, during these words, from behind the counter and as she stood there in the middle of the long room you might have thought she was about to lead a cavalry charge. Then, admirably, she put it all under, and spoke on with perfect self-control. “Why can’t somebody explain it to him? If I knew him, I would go to him myself, and I would say, Mr. President, we need not discuss our different tastes as to dinner company. Nor need we discuss how much you benefit the colored race by an act which makes every member of it immediately think that he is fit to dine with any king in the world. But you are staying in a house which is partly our house, ours, the South’s, for we, too, pay taxes, you know. And since you also know our deep feeling—you may even call it a prejudice, if it so pleases you—do you not think that, so long as you are residing in that house, you should not gratuitously shock our deep feeling?” She swept a magnificent low curtsy at the air.
“By Jove, Miss La Heu!” I exclaimed, “you put it so that it’s rather hard to answer.”
“I’m glad it strikes you so.”
“But did it make them all think they were going to dine?”
“Hundreds of thousands. It was proof to them that they were as good as anybody—just as good, without reading or writing or anything. The very next day some of the laziest and dirtiest where we live had a new strut, like the monkey when you put a red flannel cap on him—only the monkey doesn’t push ladies off the sidewalk. And that state of mind, you know,” said Miss La Heu, softening down from wrath to her roguish laugh, “isn’t the right state of mind for racial progress! But I wasn’t thinking of this. You know he has appointed one of them to office here.”
A light entered my brain: John Mayrant had a position at the Custom House! John Mayrant was subordinate to the President’s appointee! She hadn’t changed the subject so violently, after all.
I came squarely at it. “And so you wish him to resign his position?”
But I was ahead of her this time.
“The Chief of Customs?” she wonderingly murmured.
I brought her up with me now. “Did Miss Josephine St. Michael say it was over his left eye?”
The girl instantly looked everything she thought. “I believe you were present!” This was her highly comprehensive exclamation, accompanied also by a blush as splendidly young as John Mayrant had been while he so stammeringly brought out his wishes concerning the cake. I at once decided to deceive her utterly, and therefore I spoke the exact truth: “No, I wasn’t present.”
They did their work, my true words; the false impression flowed out of them as smoothly as California claret from a French bottle.
“I wonder who told you?” my victim remarked. “But it doesn’t really matter. Everybody is bound to know it. You surely were the last person with him in the churchyard?”
“Gracious!” I admitted again with splendidly mendacious veracity. “How we do find each other out in Kings Port!”
It was not by any means the least of the delights which I took in the company of this charming girl that sometimes she was too much for me, and sometimes I was too much for her. It was, of course, just the accident of our ages; in a very few years she would catch up, would pass, would always be too much for me. Well, to-day it was happily my turn; I wasn’t going to finish lunch without knowing all she, at any rate, could tell me about the left eye and the man in bed.
“Forty years ago,” I now, with ingenuity, remarked, “I suppose it would have been pistols.”
She assented. “And I like that better—don’t you—for gentlemen?”
“Well, you mean that fists are—”
“Yes,” she finished for me.
“All the same,” I maintained, “don’t you think that there ought to be some correspondence, some proportion, between the gravity of the cause and the gravity of—”
“Let the coal-heavers take to their fists!” she scornfully cried. “People of our class can’t descend—”
“Well, but,” I interrupted, “then you give the coal-heavers the palm for discrimination.”
“How’s that?”
“Why, perfectly! Your coal-heaver kills for some offenses, while for lighter ones he—gets a bruise over the left eye.”
“You don’t meet it, you don’t meet it! What is an insult ever but an insult?”
“Oh, we in the North notice certain degrees—insolence, impudence, impertinence, liberties, rudeness—all different.”
She took up my phrase with a sudden odd quietness. “You in the North.”
“Why, yes. We have, alas! to expect and allow for rudeness sometimes, even in our chosen few, and for liberties in their chosen few; it’s only the hotel clerk and the head waiter from whom we usually get impudence; while insolence is the chronic condition of the Wall Street rich.”
“You in the North!” she repeated. “And so your Northern eyes can’t see it, after all!” At these words my intelligence sailed into a great blank, while she continued: “Frankly—and forgive me for saying it—I was hoping that you were one Northerner who would see it.”
“But see what?” I barked in my despair.
She did not help me. “If I had been a man, nothing could have insulted me more than that. And that’s what you don’t see,” she regretfully finished. “It seems so strange.”
I sat in the midst of my great blank, while her handsome eyes rested upon me. In them was that look of a certain inquiry and a certain remoteness with which one pauses, in a museum, before some specimen of the cave-dwelling man.
“You comprehend so much,” she meditated slowly, aloud; “you’ve been such an agreeable disappointment, because your point of view is so often the same as ours.” She was still surveying me with the specimen expression, when it suddenly left her. “Do you mean to sit there and tell me,” she broke out, “that you wouldn’t have resented it yourself?”
“O dear!” my mind lamentably said to itself, inside. Of what may have been the exterior that I presented to her, sitting over my slice of Lady Baltimore, I can form no impression.
“Put yourself in his place,” the girl continued.
“Ah,” I gasped, “that is always so easy to say and so hard to do.”
My remark proved not a happy one. She made a brief, cold pause over it, and then, as she wheeled round from me, back to the counter: “No Southerner would let pass such an affront.”
It was final. She regained her usual place, she resumed her ledger; the curly dog, who had come out to hear our conversation, went in again; I was disgraced. Not only with the profile of her short, belligerent nose, but with the chilly way in which she made her pencil move over the ledger, she told me plainly that my self-respect had failed to meet her tests. This was what my remarkable ingenuity had achieved for me. I swallowed the last crumbs of Lady Baltimore, and went forward to settle the account.
“I suppose I’m scarcely entitled to ask for a fresh one to-morrow,” I ventured. “I am so fond of this cake.”
Her officialness met me adequately. “Certainly the public is entitled to whatever we print upon our bill-of-fare.”
Now this was going to be too bad! Henceforth I was to rank merely as “the public,” no matter how much Lady Baltimore I should lunch upon! A happy thought seized me, and I spoke out instantly on the strength of it.
“Miss La Heu, I’ve a confession to make.”
But upon this beginning of mine the inauspicious door opened and young John Mayrant came in. It was all right about his left eye; anybody could see that bruise!
“Oh!” he exclaimed, hearty, but somewhat disconcerted. “To think of finding you here! You’re going? But I’ll see you later?”
“I hope so,” I said. “You know where I work.”
“Yes—yes. I’ll come. We’ve all sorts of things more to say, haven’t we? We—good-by!”
Did I hear, as I gained the street, something being said about the General, and the state of his health?
VIII: Midsummer-Night’s Dream
You may imagine in what state of wondering I went out of that place, and how little I could now do away with my curiosity. By the droll looks and head-turnings which followed me from strangers that passed me by in the street, I was made aware that I must be talking aloud to myself, and the words which I had evidently uttered were these: “But who in the world can he have smashed up?”
Of course, beneath the public stare and smile I kept the rest of my thoughts to myself; yet they so possessed and took me from my surroundings, that presently, while crossing Royal Street, I was nearly run down by an electric car. Nor did even this serve to disperse my preoccupation; my walk back to Court and Chancel streets is as if it had not been; I can remember nothing about it, and the first account that I took of external objects was to find myself sitting in my accustomed chair in the Library, with the accustomed row of books about the battle of Cowpens waiting on the table in front of me. How long we had thus been facing each other, the books and I, I’ve not a notion. And with such mysterious machinery are we human beings filled—machinery that is in motion all the while, whether we are aware of it or not—that now, with some part of my mind, and with my pencil assisting, I composed several stanzas to my kingly ancestor, the goal of my fruitless search; and yet during the whole process of my metrical exercise I was really thinking and wondering about John Mayrant, his battles and his loves.
ODE ON INTIMATIONS OF ROYALTY
I sing to thee, thou Great Unknown,
Who canst connect me with a throne
Through uncle, cousin, aunt, or sister,
But not, I trust, through bar sinister.
Chorus:
Gules! Gules! and a cuckoo peccant!
Such was the frivolous opening of my poem, which, as it progressed, grew even less edifying; I have quoted this fragment merely to show you how little reverence for the Selected Salic Scions was by this time left in my spirit, and not because the verses themselves are in the least meritorious; they should serve as a model for no serious-minded singer, and they afford a striking instance of that volatile mood, not to say that inclination to ribaldry, which will at seasons crop out in me, do what I will. It is my hope that age may help me to subdue this, although I have observed it in some very old men.
I did not send my poem to Aunt Carola, but I wrote her a letter, even there and then, couched in terms which I believe were altogether respectful. I deplored my lack of success in discovering the link that was missing between me and king’s blood; I intimated my conviction that further effort on my part would still be met with failure; and I renounced with fitting expressions of disappointment my candidateship for the Scions thanking Aunt Carola for her generosity, by which I must now no longer profit. I added that I should remain in Kings Port for the present, as I was finding the climate of decided benefit to my health, and the courtesy of the people an education in itself.
Whatever pain at missing the glory of becoming a Scion may have lingered with me after this was much assuaged in a few days by my reading an article in a New York paper, which gave an account of a meeting of my Aunt’s Society, held in that city. My attention was attracted to this article by the prominent heading given to it: THEY WORE THEIR CROWNS. This in very conspicuous Roman capitals, caused me to sit up. There must have been truth in some of it, because the food eaten by the Scions was mentioned as consisting of sandwiches, sherry and croquettes; yet I think that the statement that the members present addressed each other according to the royal families from which they severally traced descent, as, for example, Brother Guelph and Sister Plantagenet, can scarce have beers aught but an exaggeration; nevertheless, the article brought me undeniable consolation for my disappointment.
After finishing my letter to Aunt Carola I should have hastened out to post it and escape from Cowpens, had I not remembered that John Mayrant had more or less promised to meet me here. Now, there was but a slender chance that he boy would speak to me on the subject of his late encounter; this I must learn from other sources; but he might speak to me about something that would open a way for my hostile preparations against Miss Rieppe. So far he had not touched upon his impending marriage in any way, but this reserve concerning a fact generally known among the people whom I was seeing could hardly go on long without becoming ridiculous. If he should shun mention of it to-day, I would take this as a plain sign that he did not look forward to it with the enthusiasm which a lover ought to feel for his approaching bliss; and on such silence from him I would begin, if I could, to undermine his intention of keeping an engagement of the heart when the heart no longer entered into it.
While my thoughts continued to be busied over this lover and his concerns, I noticed the works of William Shakespeare close beside me upon a shelf; and although it was with no special purpose in mind that I took out one of the volumes and sat down with it to wait for John Mayrant, in a little while an inspiration came to me from its pages, so that I was more anxious than ever the boy should not fail to meet me here in the Library.
Was it the bruise on his forehead that had perturbed his manner just now when he entered the Exchange? No, this was not likely to be the reason, since he had been full as much embarrassed that first day of my seeing him there, when he had given his order for Lady Baltimore so lamely that the girl behind the counter had come to his aid. And what could it have been that he had begun to tell her to-day as I was leaving the place? Was the making of that cake again to be postponed on account of the General’s precarious health? And what had been the nature of the insult which young John Mayrant had punished and was now commanded to shake hands over? Could it in truth be the owner of the Hermana whom he had thrashed so well as to lay him up in bed? That incident had damaged two people at least, the unknown vanquished combatant in his bodily welfare, and me in my character as an upstanding man in the fierce feminine estimation of Miss La Heu; but this injury it was my intention to set right; my confession to the girl behind the counter was merely delayed. As I sat with Shakespeare open in my lap, I added to my store of reasoning one little new straw of argument in favor of my opinion that John Mayrant was no longer at ease or happy about his love affair. I had never before met any young man in whose manner nature was so finely tempered with good bringing-up; forwardness and shyness were alike absent from him, and his bearing had a sort of polished unconsciousness as far removed from raw diffidence as it was from raw conceit; it was altogether a rare and charming address in a youth of such true youthfulness, but it had failed him upon two occasions which I have already mentioned. Both times that he had come to the Exchange he had stumbled in his usually prompt speech, lost his habitual ease, and betrayed, in short, all the signs of being disconcerted. The matter seemed suddenly quite plain to me: it was the nature of his errands to the Exchange. The first time he had been ordering the cake for his own wedding, and to-day it was something about the wedding again. Evidently the high mettle of his delicacy and breeding made him painfully conscious of the view which others must take of the part that Miss Rieppe was playing in all this—a view from which it was out of his power to shield her; and it was this consciousness that destroyed his composure. From what I was soon to learn of his fine and unmoved disregard for unfavorable opinion when he felt his course to be the right one, I know that it was no thought at all of his own scarcely heroic role during these days, but only the perception that outsiders must detect in his affianced lady some of those very same qualities which had chilled his too precipitate passion for her, and left him alone, without romance, without family sympathy, without social acclamations, with nothing indeed save his high-strung notion of honor to help him bravely face the wedding march. How appalling must the wedding march sound to a waiting bridegroom who sees the bride, that he no longer looks at except with distaste and estrangement, coming nearer and nearer to him up the aisle! A funeral march would be gayer than that music, I should think! The thought came to me to break out bluntly and say to him: “Countermand the cake! She’s only playing with you while that yachtsman is making up his mind.” But there could be but one outcome of such advice to John Mayrant: two people, instead of one, would be in bed suffering from contusions. As I mused on the boy and his attractive and appealing character, I became more rejoiced than ever that he had thrashed somebody, I cared not very much who nor yet very much why, so long as such thrashing had been thorough, which seemed quite evidently and happily the case. He stood now in my eyes, in some way that is too obscure for me to be able to explain to you, saved from some reproach whose subtlety likewise eludes my powers of analysis.
It was already five minutes after three o’clock, my dinner hour, when he at length appeared in the Library; and possibly I put some reproach into my greeting: “Won’t you walk along with me to Mrs. Trevise’s?” (That was my boarding house.)
“I could not get away from the Custom House sooner,” he explained; and into his eyes there came for a moment that look of unrest and preoccupation which I had observed at times while we had discussed Newport and alcoholic girls. The two subjects seemed certainly far enough apart! But he immediately began upon a conversation briskly enough—so briskly that I suspected at once he had got his subject ready in advance; he didn’t want me to speak first, lest I turn the talk into channels embarrassing, such as bruised foreheads or wedding cake. Well, this should not prevent me from dropping in his cup the wholesome bitters which I had prepared.
“Well, sir! Well, sir!” such was his hearty preface. “I wonder if you’re feeling ashamed of yourself?”
“Never when I read Shakespeare,” I answered restoring the plume to its place.
He looked at the title. “Which one?”
“One of the unsuitable love affairs that was prevented in time.”
“Romeo and Juliet?”
“No; Bottom and Titania—and Romeo and Juliet were not prevented in time. They had their bliss once and to the full, and died before they caused each other anything but ecstasy. No weariness of routine, no tears of disenchantment; complete love, completely realized—and finis! It’s the happiest ending of all the plays.”
He looked at me hard. “Sometimes I believe you’re ironic!”
I smiled at him. “A sign of the highest civilization, then. But please to think of Juliet after ten years of Romeo and his pin-headed intelligence and his preordained infidelities. Do you imagine that her predecessor, Rosamond, would have had no successors? Juliet would have been compelled to divorce Romeo, if only for the children’s sake.
“The children!” cried John Mayrant. “Why, it’s for their sake deserted women abstain from divorce!”
“Juliet would see deeper than such mothers. She could not have her little sons and daughters grow up and comprehend their father’s absences, and see their mother’s submission to his returns for such discovery would scorch the marrow of any hearts they had.”
At this, as we came out of the Library, he made an astonishing rejoinder, and one which I cannot in the least account for: “South Carolina does not allow divorce.”
“Then I should think,” I said to him, “that all you people here would be doubly careful as to what manner of husbands and wives you chose for yourselves.”
Such a remark was sailing, you may say, almost within three points of the wind; and his own accidental allusion to Romeo had brought it about with an aptness and a celerity which were better for my purpose than anything I had privately developed from the text of Bottom and Titania; none the less, however, did I intend to press into my service that fond couple also as basis for a moral, in spite of the sharp turn which those last words of mine now caused him at once to give to our conversation. His quick reversion to the beginning of the talk seemed like a dodging of remarks that hit too near home for him to relish hearing pursued.
“Well, sir,” he resumed with the same initial briskness, “I was ashamed if you were not.”
“I still don’t make out what impropriety we have jointly committed.”
“What do you think of the views you expressed about our country?”
“Oh! When we sat on the gravestones.”
“What do you think about it to-day?”
I turned to him as we slowly walked toward Worship Street. “Did you say anything then that you would take back now?”
He pondered, wrinkling his forehead. “Well, but all the same, didn’t we give the present hour a pretty black eye?”
“The present hour deserves a black eye, and two of them!”
He surveyed me squarely. “I believe you’re a pessimist!”
“That is the first trashy thing I’ve heard you say.”
“Thank you! At least admit you’re scarcely an optimist.”
“Optimist! Pessimist! Why, you’re talking just like a newspaper!”
He laughed. “Oh, don’t compare a gentleman to a newspaper.”
“Then keep your vocabulary clean of bargain-counter words. A while ago the journalists had a furious run upon the adjective ‘un-American.’ Anybody or anything that displeased them was ‘un-American.’ They ran it into the ground, and in its place they have lately set up ‘pessimist,’ which certainly has a threatening appearance. They don’t know its meaning, and in their mouths it merely signifies that what a man says snakes them feel personally uncomfortable. The word has become a dusty rag of slang. The arrested burglar very likely calls the policeman a pessimist; and, speaking reverently and with no intention to shock you, the scribes and Pharisees would undoubtedly have called Christ a pessimist when He called them hypocrites, had they been acquainted with the word.”
Once more my remarks drew from the boy an unexpected rejoinder. We had turned into Worship Street, and, as we passed the churchyard, he stopped and laid his hand upon the railing of the pate.
“You don’t shock me,” he said; and then: “But you would shock my aunts.” He paused, gazing into the churchyard, before he continued more slowly: “And so should I—if they knew it—shock them.”
“If they knew what?” I asked.
His hand indicated a sculptured crucifix near by.
“Do you believe everything still?” he answered. “Can you?”
As he looked at me, I suppose that he read negation in my eyes.
“No more can I,” he murmured. Again he looked in among the tombstones and flowers, where the old custodian saw us and took off his hat. “Howdy, Daddy Ben!” John Mayrant returned pleasantly, and then resuming to me: “No more can I believe everything.” Then he gave a brief, comical laugh. “And I hope my aunts won’t find that out! They would think me gone to perdition indeed. But I always go to church here” (he pointed to the quiet building, which, for all its modest size and simplicity, had a stately and inexpressible charm), “because I like to kneel where my mother said her prayers, you know.” He flushed a little over this confidence into which he had fallen, but he continued: “I like the words of the service, too, and I don’t ask myself over-curiously what I do believe; but there’s a permanent something within us—a Greater Self—don’t you think?”
“A permanent something,” I assented, “which has created all the religions all over the earth from the beginning, and of which Christianity itself is merely one of the present temples.”
He made an exclamation at my word “present.”
“Do you think anything in this world is final?” I asked him.
“But—” he began, somewhat at a loss.
“Haven’t you found out yet that human nature is the one indestructible reality that we know?”
“But—” he began again.
“Don’t we have the ‘latest thing’ all the time, and never the ultimate thing, never, never? The latest thing in women’s hats is that huge-brimmed affair with the veil as voluminous as a double-bed mosquito netting. That hat will look improbable next spring. The latest thing in science is radium. Radium has exploded the conservation of energy theory—turned it into a last year’s hat. Answer me, if Christianity is the same as when it wore among its savage ornaments a devil with horns and a flaming Hell! Forever and forever the human race reaches out its hand and shapes some system, some creed, some government, and declares: ‘This is at length the final thing, the cure-all,’ and lo and behold, something flowing and eternal in the race itself presently splits the creed and the government to pieces! Truth is a very marvelous thing. We feel it; it can fill our eyes with tears, our hearts with joy, it can make us die for it; but once our human lips attempt to formulate and thus imprison it, it becomes a lie. You cannot shut truth up in any words.”
“But it shall prevail!” the boy exclaimed with a sort of passion.
“Everything prevails,” I answered him.
“I don’t like that,” he said.
“Neither do I,” I returned. “But Jacob got Esau’s inheritance by a mean trick.”
“Jacob was punished for it.”
“Did that help Esau much?”
“You are a pessimist!”
“Just because I see Jacob and Esau to-day, alive and kicking in Wall Street, Washington, Newport, everywhere?”
“You’re no optimist, anyhow!”
“I hope I’m blind in neither eye.”
“You don’t give us credit—”
“For what?”
“For what we’ve accomplished since Jacob.”
“Printing, steam, and electricity, for instance? They spread the Bible and the yellow journal with equal velocity.”
“I don’t mean science. Take our institutions.”
“Well, we’ve accomplished hospitals and the stock market—a pretty even set-off between God and the devil.”
He laughed. “You don’t take a high view of us!”
“Nor a low one. I don’t play ostrich with any of the staring permanences of human nature. We’re just as noble to-day as David was sometimes, and just as bestial to-day as David was sometimes, and we’ve every possibility inside us all the time, whether we paint our naked skins, or wear steel armor or starched shirts.”
“Well, I believe good is the guiding power in the world.”
“Oh, John Mayrant! Good and evil draw us on like a span of horses, sometimes like a tandem, taking turns in the lead. Order has melted into disorder, and disorder into new order—how many times?”
“But better each time.”
“How can you know, who never lived in any age but your own?”
“I know we have a higher ideal.”
“Have we? The Greek was taught to love his neighbor as himself. He gave his great teacher a cup of poison. We gave ours the cross.”
Again he looked away from me into the sweet old churchyard. “I can’t answer you, but I don’t believe it.”
This brought me to gayety. “That’s unanswerable, anyhow!”
He still stared at the graves. “Those people in there didn’t think all these uncomfortable things.”
“Ah! no! They belonged in the first volume of the history of our national soul, before the bloom was off us.”
“That’s an odd notion! And pray what volume are we in now?”
“Only the second.”
“Since when?”
“Since that momentous picnic, the Spanish War!”
“I don’t see how that took the bloom off us.”
“It didn’t. It merely waked Europe up to the facts.”
“Our battleships, you mean?”
“Our steel rails, our gold coffers, our roaring affluence.”
“And our very accurate shooting!” he insisted; for he was a Southerner, and man’s gallantry appealed to him more than man’s industry.
I laughed. “Yes, indeed! We may say that the Spanish War closed our first volume with a bang. And now in the second we bid good-by to the virgin wilderness, for it’s explored; to the Indian, for he’s conquered; to the pioneer, for he’s dead; we’ve finished our wild, romantic adolescence and we find ourselves a recognized world power of eighty million people, and of general commercial endlessness, and playtime over.”
I think, John Mayrant now asserted, “that it is going too far to say the bloom is off us.”
“Oh, you’ll find snow in the woods away into April and May. The freedom-loving American, the embattled farmer, is not yet extinct in the far recesses. But the great cities grow like a creeping paralysis over freedom, and the man from the country is walking into them all the time because the poor, restless fellow believes wealth awaits him on their pavements. And when he doesn’t go to them, they come to him. The Wall Street bucket-shop goes fishing in the woods with wires a thousand miles long; and so we exchange the solid trailblazing enterprise of Volume One for Volume Two’s electric unrest. In Volume One our wagon was hitched to the star of liberty. Capital and labor have cut the traces. The labor union forbids the workingman to labor as his own virile energy and skill prompt him. If he disobeys, he is expelled and called a ‘scab.’ Don’t let us call ourselves the land of the free while such things go on. We’re all thinking a deal too much about our pockets nowadays. Eternal vigilance cannot watch liberty and the ticker at the same time.
“Well,” said John Mayrant, “we’re not thinking about our pockets in Kings Port, because” (and here there came into his voice and face that sudden humor which made him so delightful)—“because we haven’t got any pockets to think of!”
This brought me down to cheerfulness from my flight among the cold clouds.
He continued: “Any more lamentations, Mr. Jeremiah?”
“Those who begin to call names, John Mayrant—but never mind! I could lament you sick if I chose to go on about our corporations and corruption that I see with my pessimistic eye; but the other eye sees the American man himself—the type that our eighty millions on the whole melt into and to which my heart warms each time I land again from more polished and colder shores—my optimistic eye sees that American dealing adequately with these political diseases. For stronger even than his kindness, his ability, and his dishonesty is his self-preservation. He’s going to stand up for the ‘open shop’ and sit down on the ‘trust’; and I assure you that I don’t in the least resemble the Evening Post.”
A look of inquiry was in John Mayrant’s features.
“The New York Evening Post,” I repeated with surprise. Still the inquiry of his face remained.
“Oh, fortunate youth!” I cried. “To have escaped the New York Evening Post!”
“Is it so heinous?”
“Well!... well!... how exactly describe it?... make you see it?... It’s partially tongue-tied, a sad victim of its own excesses. Habitual over-indulgence in blaming has given it a painful stutter when attempting praise; it’s the sprucely written sheet of the supercilious; it’s the after-dinner pill of the American who prefers Europe; it’s our Republic’s common scold, the Xantippe of journalism, the paper without a country.”
“The paper without a country! That’s very good!”
“Oh, no! I’ll tell you something much better, but it is not mine. A clever New Yorker said that what with The Sun—”
“I know that paper.”
“—what with The Sun making vice so attractive in the morning and the Post making virtue so odious in the evening, it was very hard for a man to be good in New York.”
“I fear I should subscribe to The Sun,” said John Mayrant. He took his hand from the church-gate railing, and we had turned to stroll down Worship Street when he was unexpectedly addressed.
For some minutes, while John Mayrant and I had been talking, I had grown aware, without taking any definite note of it, that the old custodian of the churchyard, Daddy Ben, had come slowly near us from the distant corner of his demesne, where he had been (to all appearances) engaged in some trifling activity among the flowers—perhaps picking off the faded blossoms. It now came home to me that the venerable negro had really been, in a surreptitious way, watching John Mayrant, and waiting for something—either for the right moment to utter what he now uttered, or his own delayed decision to utter it at all.
“Mas’ John!” he called quite softly. His tone was fairly padded with caution, and I saw that in the pause which followed, his eye shot a swift look at the bruise on Mayrant’s forehead, and another look, equally swift, at me.
“Well, Daddy Ben, what is it?”
The custodian shunted close to the gate which separated him from us. “Mas’ John, I speck de President he dun’ know de cullud people like we knows ‘um, else he nebber bin ‘pint dat ar boss in de Cussum House, no, sah.”
After this effort he wiped his forehead and breathed hard.
To my astonishment, the effort brought immediately a stern change over John Mayrant’s face; then he answered in the kindest tones, “Thank you, Daddy Ben.”
This answer interpreted for me the whole thing, which otherwise would have been obscure enough: the old man held it to be an indignity that his young “Mas’ John” should, by the President’s act, find himself the subordinate of a member of the black race, and he had just now, in his perspiring effort, expressed his sympathy! Why he had chosen this particular moment (after quite obvious debate with himself) I did not see until somewhat later.
He now left us standing at the gate; and it was not for some moments that John Mayrant spoke again, evidently closing, for our two selves, this delicate subject.
“I wish we had not got into that second volume of yours.”
“That’s not progressive.”
“I hate progress.”
“What’s the use? Better grow old gracefully!
“‘Qui no pas l’esprit de son age
De son age a tout le malheur.’”
“Well, I’m personally not growing old, just yet.”
“Neither is the United States.”
“Well, I don’t know. It’s too easy for sick or worthless people to survive nowadays. They are clotting up our square miles very fast. Philanthropists don’t seem to remember that you can beget children a great deal faster than you can educate them; and at this rate I believe universal suffrage will kill us off before our time.”
“Do not believe it! We are going to find out that universal suffrage is like the appendix—useful at an early stage of the race’s evolution but to-day merely a threat to life.”
He thought this over. “But a surgical operation is pretty serious, you know.”
“It’ll be done by absorption. Why, you’ve begun it yourselves, and so has Massachusetts. The appendix will be removed, black and white—and I shouldn’t much fear surgery. We’re not nearly civilized enough yet to have lost the power Of recuperation, and in spite of our express-train speed, I doubt if we shall travel from crudity to rottenness without a pause at maturity.”
“That is the old, old story,” he said.
“Yes; is there anything new under the sun?”
He was gloomy. “Nothing, I suppose.” Then the gloom lightened. “Nothing new under the sun—except the fashionable families of Newport!”
This again brought us from the clouds of speculation down to Worship Street, where we were walking toward South Place. It also unexpectedly furnished me with the means to lead back our talk so gently, without a jolt or a jerk, to my moral and the delicate topic of matrimony from which he had dodged away, that he never awoke to what was coming until it had come. He began pointing out, as we passed them, certain houses which were now, or had at some period been, the dwellings of his many relatives: “My cousin Julia So-and-so lives there,” he would say; or, “My great-uncle, known as Regent Tom, owned that before the War”; and once, “The Rev. Joseph Priedieu, my great-grandfather, built that house to marry his fifth wife in, but the grave claimed him first.”
So I asked him a riddle. “What is the difference between Kings Port and Newport?”
This he, of course, gave up.
“Here you are all connected by marriage, and there they are all connected by divorce.”
“That’s true!” he cried, “that’s very true. I met the most embarrassingly cater-cornered families.”
“Oh, they weren’t embarrassed!” I interjected.
“No, but I was,” said John.
“And you told me you weren’t innocent!” I exclaimed. “They are going to institute a divorce march,” I continued. “‘Lohengrin’ or ‘Midsummer-Night’s Dream’ played backward. They have not settled which it is to be taught in the nursery with the other kindergarten melodies.”
He was still unsuspectingly diverted; and we walked along until we turned in the direction of my boarding-house.
“Did you ever notice,” I now said, “what a perpetual allegory ‘Midsummer-Night’s Dream’ contains?”
“I thought it was just a fairy sort of thing.”
“Yes, but when a great poet sets his hand to a fairy sort of thing, you get—well, you get poor Titania.”
“She fell in love with a jackass,” he remarked. “Puck bewitched her.”
“Precisely. A lovely woman with her arms around a jackass. Does that never happen in Kings Port?”
He began smiling to himself. “I’m afraid Puck isn’t all dead yet.”
I was now in a position to begin dropping my bitters. “Shakespeare was probably too gallant to put it the other way, and make Oberon fall in love with a female jackass. But what an allegory!”
“Yes,” he muttered. “Yes.”
I followed with another drop. “Titania got out of it. It is not always solved so easily.”
“No,” he muttered. “No.” It was quite evident that the flavor of my bitters reached him.
He was walking slowly, with his head down, and frowning hard. We had now come to the steps of my boarding-house, and I dropped my last drop. “But a disenchanted woman has the best of it—before marriage, at least.”
He looked up quickly. “How?”
I evinced surprise. “Why, she can always break off honorably, and we never can, I suppose.”
For the third time this day he made me an astonishing rejoinder: “Would you like to take orders from a negro?”
It reduced me to stammering. “I have never—such a juncture has never—”
“Of course you wouldn’t. Even a Northerner!”
His face, as he said this, was a single glittering piece of fierceness. I was still so much taken aback that I said rather flatly: “But who has to?”
“I have to.” With this he abruptly turned on his heel and left me standing on the steps. For a moment I stared after him; and then, as I rang the bell, he was back again; and with that formality which at times overtook him he began: “I will ask you to excuse my hasty—”
“Oh, John Mayrant! What a notion!”
But he was by no means to be put off, and he proceeded with stiffer formality: “I feel that I have not acted politely just now, and I beg to assure you that I intended no slight.”
My first impulse was to lay a hand upon his shoulder and say to him: “My dear fellow, stuff and nonsense!” Thus I should have treated any Northern friend; but here was no Northerner. I am glad that I had the sense to feel that any careless, good-natured putting away of his deliberate and definitely tendered apology would seem to him a “slight” on my part. His punctilious value for certain observances between man and man reached me suddenly and deeply, and took me far from the familiarity which breeds contempt.
“Why, John Mayrant,” I said, “you could never offend me unless I thought that you wished to, and how should I possibly think that?”
“Thank you,” he replied very simply.
I rang the bell a second time. “If we can get into the house,” I suggested, “won’t you stop and dine with me?”
He was going to accept. “I shall be—” he had begun, in tones of gratification, when in one instant his face was stricken with complete dismay. “I had forgotten,” he said; and this time he was gone indeed, and in a hurry most apparent. It resembled a flight.
What was the matter now? You will naturally think that it was an appointment with his ladylove which he had forgotten; this was certainly my supposition as I turned again to the front door. There stood one of the waitresses, glaring with her white eyes half out of her black face at the already distant back of John Mayrant.
“Oh!” I thought; but, before I could think any more, the tall, dreadful boarder—the lady whom I secretly called Juno—swept up the steps, and by me into the house, with a dignity that one might term deafening.
The waitress now muttered, or rather sang, a series of pious apostrophes. “Oh, Lawd, de rampages and de ructions! Oh, Lawd, sinner is in my way, Daniel!” She was strongly, but I think pleasurably, excited; and she next turned to me with a most natural grin, and saying, “Chick’n’s mos’ gone, sah,” she went back to the dining room.
This admonition sent me upstairs to make as hasty a toilet as I could.
IX: Juno
Each recent remarkable occurrence had obliterated its predecessor, and it was with difficulty that I made a straight parting in my hair. Had it been Miss Rieppe that John so suddenly ran away to? It seemed now more as if the boy had been running away from somebody. The waitress had stared at him with extraordinary interest; she had seen his bruise; perhaps she knew how he had got it. Her excitement—had he smashed up his official superior at the custom house? That would be an impossible thing, I told myself instantly; as well might a nobleman cross swords with a peasant. Perhaps the stare of the waitress had reminded him of his bruise, and he might have felt disinclined to show himself with it in a company of gossiping strangers. Still, that would scarcely account for it—the dismay with which he had so suddenly left me. Was Juno the cause—she had come up behind me; he must have seen her and her portentous manner approaching—had the boy fled from her?
And then, his fierce outbreak about taking orders from a negro when I was moralizing over the misfortune of marrying a jackass! I got a sort of parting in my hair, and went down to the dining room.
Juno was there before me, with her bonnet, or rather her headdress, still on, and I heard her making apologies to Mrs. Trevise for being so late. Mrs. Trevise, of course, sat at the head of her table, and Juno sat at her right hand. I was very glad not to have a seat near Juno, because this lady was, as I have already hinted, an intolerable person to me. Either her Southern social position or her rent (she took the whole second floor, except Mrs. Trevise’s own rooms) was of importance to Mrs. Trevise; but I assure you that her ways kept our landlady’s cold, impervious tact watchful from the beginning to the end of almost every meal. Juno was one of those persons who possess so many and such strong feelings themselves that they think they have all the feelings there are; at least, they certainly consider no one’s feelings but their own. She possessed an inexhaustible store of anecdote, but it was exclusively about our Civil War; you would have supposed that nothing else had ever happened in the world. When conversation among the rest of us became general, she preserved a cold and acrid inattention; when the fancy took her to open her own mouth, it was always to begin some reminiscence, and the reminiscence always began: “In September, 1862, when the Northern vandals,” etc., etc., or “When the Northern vandals were repulsed by my husband’s cousin, General Braxton Bragg,” etc., etc. Now it was not that I was personally wounded by the term, because at the time of the vandals I was not even born, and also because I know that vandals cannot be kept out of any army. Deeply as I believed the March to the Sea to have been imperative, of “Sherman’s bummers” and their excesses I had a fair historic knowledge and a very poor opinion; and this I should have been glad to tell Juno, had she ever given me the chance; but her immodest sympathy for herself froze all sympathy for her. Why could she not preserve a well-bred silence upon her sufferings, as did the other old ladies I had met in Kings Port? Why did she drag them in, thrust them, poke them, shove them at you? Thus it was that for her insulting disregard of those whom her words might wound I detested Juno; and as she was a woman, and nearly old enough to be my grandmother, it was, of course, out of the question that I should retaliate. When she got very bad indeed, it was calm Mrs. Trevise’s last, but effective, resort to tinkle a little handbell and scold one of the waitresses whom its sound would then summon from the kitchen. This bell was tinkled not always by any means for my sake; other travellers from the North there were who came and went, pausing at Kings Port between Florida and their habitual abodes.
At present our company consisted of Juno; a middle-class Englishman employed in some business capacity in town; a pair of very young honeymooners from the “up-country”; a Louisiana poetess, who wore the long, cylindrical ringlets of 1830, and who was attending a convention the Daughters of Dixie; two or three males and females, best described as et ceteras; and myself. “I shall only take a mouthful for the sake of nourishment,” Juno was announcing, “and then I shall return to his bedside.”
“Is he very suffering?” inquired the poetess, in melodious accent.
“It was an infamous onslaught,” Juno replied.
The poetess threw up her eyes and crooned, “Noble, doughty champion!”
“You may say so indeed, madam,” said Juno.
“Raw beefsteak’s jolly good for your eye,” observed the Briton.
This suggestion did not appear to be heard by Juno.
“I had a row with a chap,” the Briton continued. He’s my best friend now. He made me put raw beefsteak—”
“I thank you,” interrupted Juno. “He requires no beefsteak, raw or cooked.”
The face of the Briton reddened. “Too groggy to eat, is he?”
Mrs. Trevise tinkled her bell. “Daphne! I have said to you twice to hand those yams.”
“I done handed ‘em twice, ma’am.”
“Hand them right away, Daphne, and don’t be so forgetful.” It was not easy to disturb the composure of Mrs. Trevise.
The poetess now took up the broken thread. “Had I a son,” she declared, “I would sooner witness him starve than hear him take orders from a menial race.”
“But mightn’t starving be harder for him to experience than for you to witness, y’ know?” asked the Briton.
At this one of the et ceteras made a sort of snuffing noise, and ate his dinner hard.
It was the male honeymooner who next spoke. “Must have been quite a tussle, ma’am.”
“It was an infamous onslaught!” repeated Juno. “Wish I’d seen it!” sighed the honeymooner.
His bride smiled at him beamingly. “You’d have felt right lonesome to be out of it, David.”
“No apology has yet been offered,” continued Juno.
“But must your nephew apologize besides taking a licking?” inquired the Briton.
Juno turned an awful face upon hint. “It is from his brutal assailant that apologies are due. Mr. Mayrant’s family” (she paused here for blighting emphasis) “are well-bred people, and he will be coerced into behaving like a gentleman for once.”
I checked an impulse here to speak out and express my doubts as to the family coercion being founded upon any dissatisfaction with John’s conduct.
“I wonder if reading or recitation might not soothe your nephew?” said the poetess, now.
“I should doubt it,” answered Juno. “I have just come from his bedside.”
“I should so like to soothe him, if I could,” the poetess murmured. “If he were well enough to hear my convention ode—”
“He is not nearly well enough,” said Juno.
The et cetera here coughed and blew his nose so remarkably that we all started.
A short silence followed, which Juno relieved.
“I will give the young ruffian’s family the credit they deserve,” she stated. “The whole connection despises his keeping the position.”
Another et cetera now came into it. “Is it known what exactly precipitated the occurrence?”
Juno turned to him. “My nephew is a gentleman from whose lips no unworthy word could ever fall.’
“Oh!” said the et cetera, mildly. “He said something, then?”
“He conveyed a well-merited rebuke in fitting terms.”
“What were the terms?” inquired the Briton.
Juno again did not hear him. “It was after a friendly game of cards. My nephew protested against any gentleman remaining at the custom house since the recent insulting appointment.”
I was now almost the only member of the party who had preserved strict silence throughout this very interesting conversation, because, having no wish to converse with Juno at any time, I especially did not desire it now, just after her seeing me (I thought she must have seen me) in amicable conference with the object of her formidable displeasure.
“Every Mayrant is ferocious that I ever heard of,” she continued. “You cannot trust that seemingly delicate and human exterior. His father had it, too—deceiving exterior and raging interior, though I will say for that one that he would never have stooped to humiliate the family name as his son is doing. His regiment was near by when the Northern vandals burned our courthouse, and he made them run, I can tell you! It’s a mercy for that poor girl that the scales have dropped from her eyes and she has broken her engagement with him.”
“With the father?” asked a third et cetera.
Juno stared at the intruder.
Mrs. Trevise drawled a calm contribution. “The father died before this boy was born.”
“Oh, I see!” murmured the et cetera, gratefully.
Juno proceeded. “No woman’s life would be safe with him.”
“But mightn’t he be safer for a person’s niece than for their nephew?” said the Briton.
Mrs. Trevise’s hand moved toward the bell.
But Juno answered the question mournfully: “With such hereditary bloodthirstiness, who can tell?” And so Mrs. Trevise moved her hand away again.
“Excuse me, but do you know if the other gentleman is laid up, too?” inquired the male honeymooner, hopefully.
“I am happy to understand that he is,” replied Juno.
In sheer amazement I burst out, “Oh!” and abruptly stopped.
But it was too late. I had instantly become the centre of interest. The et ceteras and honeymooners craned their necks; the Briton leaned toward me from opposite; the poetess, who had worn an absent expression since being told that the injured champion was not nearly well enough to listen to her ode, now put on her glasses and gazed at me kindly; while Juno reared her headdress and spoke, not to me, but to the air in my general neighborhood.
“Has any one later intelligence than what I bring from my nephew’s bedside?”
So she hadn’t perceived who my companion at the step had been! Well, she should be enlightened, they all should be enlightened, and vengeance was mine. I spoke with gentleness:—
“Your nephew’s impressions, I fear, are still confused by his deplorable misadventure.”
“May I ask what you know about his impressions?”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the hand of Mrs. Trevise move toward her bell; but she wished to hear all about it more than she wished concord at her harmonious table; and the hand stopped.
Juno spoke again. “Who, pray, has later news than what I bring?”
My enemy was in my hand; and an enemy in the hand is worth I don’t know how many in the bush.
I answered most gently: “I do not come from Mr. Mayrant’s bedside, because I have just left him at the front door in sound health—saving a bruise over his left eye.”
During a second we all sat in a high-strung silence, and then Juno became truly superb. “Who sees the scars he brazenly conceals?”
It took away my breath; my battle would have been lost, when the Briton suggested: “But mayn’t he have shown those to his Aunt?”
We sat in no silence now; the first et cetera made extraordinary sounds on his plate, Mrs. Trevise tinkled her handbell with more unction than I had ever yet seen in her; and while she and Daphne interchanged streams of severe words which I was too disconcerted to follow, the other et ceteras and the honeymooners hectically effervesced into small talk. I presently found myself eating our last course amid a reestablished calm, when, with a rustle, Juno swept out from among us, to return (I suppose) to the bedside. As she passed behind the Briton’s chair, that invaluable person kicked me under the table, and on my raising my eyes to him he gave me a large, robust wink.
X: High Walk and the Ladies
I now burned to put many questions to the rest of the company. If, through my foolish and outreaching slyness with the girl behind the counter, the door of my comprehension had been shut, Juno had now opened it sufficiently wide for a number of facts to come crowding in, so to speak, abreast. Indeed, their simultaneous arrival was not a little confusing, as if several visitors had burst in upon me and at once begun speaking loudly, each shouting a separate and important matter which demanded my intelligent consideration. John Mayrant worked in the custom house, and Kings Port frowned upon this; not merely Kings Port in general—which counted little with the boy, if indeed he noticed general opinion at all—but the boy’s particular Kings Port, his severe old aunts, and his cousins, and the pretty girl at the Exchange, and the men he played cards with, all these frowned upon it, too; yet even this condemnation one could disregard if some lofty personal principle, some pledge to one’s own sacred honor, were at stake—but here was no such thing: John Mayrant hated the position himself. The salary? No, the salary would count for nothing in the face of such a prejudice as I had seen glitter from his eye! A strong, clever youth of twenty-three, with the world before him, and no one to support—stop! Hortense Rieppe! There was the lofty personal principle, the sacred pledge to honor; he was engaged presently to endow her with all his worldly goods; and to perform this faithfully a bridegroom must not, no matter how little he liked “taking orders from a negro,” fling away his worldly goods some few days before he was to pronounce his bridegroom’s vow. So here, at Mrs. Trevise’s dinner-table, I caught for one moment, to the full, a vision of the unhappy boy’s plight; he was sticking to a task which he loathed that he might support a wife whom he no longer desired. Such, as he saw it, was his duty; and nobody, not even a soul of his kin or his kind, gave him a word or a thought of understanding, gave him anything except the cold shoulder. Yes; from one soul he had got a sign—from aged Daddy Ben, at the churchyard gate; and amid my jostling surmises and conclusions, that quaint speech of the old negro, that little act of fidelity and affection from the heart of a black man, took on a strange pathos in its isolation amid the general harshness of his white superiors. Over this it was that I was pausing when, all in a second, perplexity again ruled my meditations. Juno had said that the engagement was broken. Well, if that were the case—But was it likely to be the case? Juno’s agreeable habit, a habit grown familiar to all of us in the house, was to sprinkle about, along with her vitriol, liberal quantities of the by-product of inaccuracy. Mingled with her latest illustrations, she had poured out for us one good dose of falsehood, the antidote for which it had been my happy office to administer on the spot. If John Mayrant wasn’t in bed from the wounds of combat, as she had given us to suppose, perhaps Hortense Rieppe hadn’t released him from his plighted troth, as Juno had also announced; and distinct relief filled me when I reasoned this out. I leave others to reason out why it was relief, and why a dull disappointment had come over me at the news that the match was off. This, for me, should have been good news, when you consider that I had been so lately telling myself such a marriage must not be, that I must myself, somehow (since no one else would), step in and arrest the calamity; and it seems odd that I should have felt this blankness and regret upon learning that the parties had happily settled it for themselves, and hence my difficult and delicate assistance was never to be needed by them.
Did any one else now sitting at our table know of Miss Rieppe’s reported act? What particulars concerning John’s fight had been given by Juno before my entrance? It didn’t surprise me that her nephew was in bed from Master Mayrant’s lusty blows. One could readily guess the manner in which young John, with his pent-up fury over the custom house, would “land” his chastisement all over the person of any rash critic! And what a talking about it must be going on everywhere to-day! If Kings Port tongues had been set in motion over me and my small notebook in a library, the whole town must be buzzing over every bruise given and taken in this evidently emphatic battle. I had hoped to glean some more precise information from my fellow-boarders after Juno had disembarrassed us of her sonorous presence; but even if they were possessed of all the facts which I lacked, Mrs. Trevise in some masterly fashion of her own banished the subject from further discussion. She held us off from it chiefly, I think, by adopting a certain upright posture in her chair, and a certain tone when she inquired if we wished a second help of the pudding. After thirty-five years of boarders and butchers, life held no secrets or surprises for her; she was a mature, lone, disenchanted, able lady, and even her silence was like an arm of the law.
An all too brief conversation, nipped by Mrs. Trevise at a stage even earlier than the bud, revealed to me that perhaps my fellow-boarders would have been glad to ask me questions, too.
It was the male honeymooner who addressed me. “Did I understand you to say, sir, that Mr. Mayrant had received a bruise over his left eye?”
“Daphne!” called out Mrs. Trevise, “Mr. Henderson will take an orange.”
And so we finished our meal without further reference to eyes, or noses, or anything of the sort. It was just as well, I reflected, when I reached my room, that I on my side had been asked no questions, since I most likely knew less than the others who had heard all that Juno had to say; and it would have been humiliating, after my superb appearance of knowing more, to explain that John Mayrant had walked with me all the way from the Library, and never told me a word about the affair.
This reflection increased my esteem for the boy’s admirable reticence. What private matter of his own had I ever learned from him? It was other people, invariably, who told me of his troubles. There had been that single, quickly controlled outbreak about his position in the Custom House, and also he had let fall that touching word concerning his faith and his liking to say his prayers in the place where his mother had said them; beyond this, there had never yet been anything of all that must at the present moment be intimately stirring in his heart.
Should I “like to take orders from a negro?” Put personally, it came to me now as a new idea came as something which had never entered my mind before, not even as an abstract hypothesis I didn’t have to think before reaching the answer though; something within me, which you ma call what you please—convention, prejudice, instinct—something answered most prompt and emphatically in the negative. I revolved in my mind as I tried to pack into a box a number of objects that I had bought in one or to “antique” shops. They wouldn’t go in, the objects; they were of defeating and recalcitrant shapes, and of hostile materials—glass and brass—and I must have a larger box made, and in that case I would buy this afternoon the other kettle-supporter (I forget its right name) and have the whole lot decently packed. Take orders from a colored man? Have him give you directions, dictate you letters, discipline you if you were unpunctual? No, indeed! And if such were my feeling, how must this young Southerner feel? With this in my mind, I made sure that the part in my back hair was right, and after that precaution soon found myself on my way, in a way somewhat roundabout, to the kettle-supporter sauntering northward along High Walk, and stopping often; the town, and the water, and the distant shores all were so lovely, so belonged to one another, so melted into one gentle impression of wistfulness and tenderness! I leaned upon the stone parapet and enjoyed the quiet which every surrounding detail brought to my senses. How could John Mayrant endure such a situation? I continued to wonder; and I also continued to assure myself it was absurd to suppose that the engagement was broken.
The shutting of a front door across the street almost directly behind me attracted my attention because of its being the first sound that had happened in noiseless, empty High Walk since I had been strolling there; and I turned from the parapet to see that I was no longer the solitary person in the street. Two ladies, one tall and one diminutive, both in black and with long black veils which they had put back from their faces, were evidently coming from a visit. As the tall one bowed to me I recognized Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and took off my hat. It was not until they had crossed the street and come up the stone steps near where I stood on High Walk that the little lady also bowed to me; she was Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, and from something in her prim yet charming manner I gathered that she held it to be not perfectly well-bred in a lady to greet a gentleman across the width of a public highway, and that she could have wished that her tall companion had not thus greeted me, a stranger likely to comment upon Kings Port manners. In her eyes, such free deportment evidently went with her tall companion’s method of speech: hadn’t the little lady informed me during our first brief meeting that Kings Port at times thought Mrs. Gregory St. Michael’s tongue “too downright”?
The two ladies having graciously granted me permission to join them while they took the air, Mrs. Gregory must surely have shocked Mrs. Weguelin by saying to me, “I haven’t a penny for your thoughts, but I’ll exchange.”
“Would you thus bargain in the dark, madam?”
“Oh, I’ll risk that; and, to say truth, even your back, as we came out of that house, was a back of thought.”
“Well, I confess to some thinking. Shall I begin?”
It was Mrs. Weguelin who quickly replied, smiling: “Ladies first, you know. At least we still keep it so in Kings Port.”
“Would we did everywhere!” I exclaimed devoutly; and I was quite aware that beneath the little lady’s gentle smile a setting down had lurked, a setting down of the most delicate nature, administered to me not in the least because I had deserved one, but because she did not like Mrs. Gregory’s “downright” tongue, and could not stop her.
Mrs. Gregory now took the prerogative of ladies, and began. “I was thinking of what we had all just been saying during our visit across the way—and with which you are not going to agree—that our young people would do much better to let us old people arrange their marriages for them, as it Is done in Europe.”
“O dear!”
“I said that you would not agree; but that is because you are so young.”
“I don’t know that twenty-eight is so young.”
“You will know it when you are seventy-three.” This observation again came from Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, and again with a gentle and attractive smile. It was only the second time that she had spoken; and throughout the talk into which we now fell as we slowly walked up and down High Walk, she never took the lead; she left that to the “downright” tongue—but I noticed, however, that she chose her moments to follow the lead very aptly. I also perceived plainly that what we were really going to discuss was not at all the European principle of marriage-making, but just simply young John and his Hortense; they were the true kernel of the nut with whose concealing shell Mrs. Gregory was presenting me, and in proposing an exchange of thoughts she would get back only more thoughts upon the same subject. It was pretty evident how much Kings Port was buzzing over all this! They fondly believed they did not like it; but what would they have done without it? What, indeed, were they going to do when it was all over and done with, one way or another? As a matter of fact, they ought to be grateful to Hortense for contributing illustriously to the excitement of their lives.
“Of course, I am well aware,” Mrs. Gregory pursued, “that the young people of to-day believe they can all ‘teach their grandmothers to suck eggs,’ as we say in Kings Port.”
“We say it elsewhere, too,” I mildly put in.
“Indeed? I didn’t know that the North, with its pest of Hebrew and other low immigrants, had retained any of the good old homely saws which we brought from England. But do you imagine that if the control of marriage rested in the hands of parents and grandparents (where it properly belongs), you would be witnessing in the North this disgusting spectacle of divorce?”
“But, Mrs. St. Michael—”
“We didn’t invite you to argue when we invited you to walk!” cried the lady, laughing.
“We should like you to answer the question,” said Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael.
“And tell us,” Mrs. Gregory continued, “if it’s your opinion that a boy who has never been married is a better judge of matrimony’s pitfalls than his father.”
“Or than any older person who has bravely and worthily gone through with the experience,” Mrs. Weguelin added.
“Ladies, I’ve no mind to argue. But we’re ahead of Europe; we don’t need their clumsy old plan.”
Mrs. Gregory gave a gallant, incredulous snort. “I shall be interested to learn of anything that is done better here than in Europe.”
“Oh, many things, surely! But especially the mating of the fashionable young. They don’t need any parents to arrange for them; it’s much better managed through precocity.”
“Through precocity? I scarcely follow you.”
And Mrs. Weguelin softly added, “You must excuse us if we do not follow you.” But her softness nevertheless indicated that if there were any one present needing leniency, it was myself.
“Why, yes,” I told them, “it’s through precocity. The new-rich American no longer commits the blunder of keeping his children innocent. You’ll see it beginning in the dancing-class, where I heard an exquisite little girl of six say to a little boy, ‘Go away; I can’t dance with you, because my mamma says your mamma only keeps a maid to answer the doorbell.’ When they get home from the dancing-class, tutors in poker and bridge are waiting to teach them how to gamble for each other’s little dimes. I saw a little boy in knickerbockers and a wide collar throw down the evening paper—”
“At that age? They read the papers?” interrupted Mrs. Gregory.
“They read nothing else at any age. He threw it down and said, ‘Well, I guess there’s not much behind this raid on Steel Preferred.’ What need has such a boy for parents or grandparents? Presently he is travelling to a fashionable boarding-school in his father’s private car. At college all his adolescent curiosities are lavishly gratified. His sister at home reads the French romances, and by eighteen she, too, knows (in her head at least) the whole of life, so that she can be perfectly trusted; she would no more marry a mere half-millionaire just because she loved him than she would appear twice in the same ball-dress. She and her ball-dresses are described in the papers precisely as if she were an animal at a show—which indeed is what she has become; and she’s eager to be thus described, because she and her mother—even if her mother was once a lady and knew better—are haunted by one perpetual, sickening fear, the fear of being left out. And if you desire to pay correct ballroom compliments, you no longer go to her mother and tell her she’s looking every bit as young as her daughter; you go to the daughter and tell her she’s looking every bit as old as her mother, for that’s what she wishes to do, that’s what she tries for, what she talks, dresses, eats, drinks, goes to indecent plays and laughs for. Yes, we manage it through precocity, and the new-rich American parent has achieved at least one new thing under the sun, namely, the corruption of the child.”
My ladies silently consulted each other’s expressions, after which, in equal silence, their gaze returned to me; but their equally intent scrutiny was expressive of quite different things. It was with expectancy that Mrs. Gregory looked at me—she wanted more. Not so Mrs. Weguelin; she gave me disapproval; it was shadowed in her beautiful, lustrous eyes that burned dark in her white face with as much fire as that of youth, yet it was not of youth, being deeply charged with retrospection.
In what, then, had I sinned? For the little lady’s next words, coldly murmured, increased in me an uneasiness, as of sin:—
“You have told us much that we are not accustomed to hear in Kings Port.”
“Oh, I haven’t begun to tell you!” I exclaimed cheerily.
“You certainly have not told us,” said Mrs. Gregory, “how your ‘precocity’ escapes this divorce degradation.”
“Escape it? Those people think it is—well, provincial—not to have been divorced at least once!”
Mrs. Gregory opened her eyes, but Mrs. Weguelin shut her lips.
I continued: “Even the children, for their own little reasons, like it. Only last summer, in Newport, a young boy was asked how he enjoyed having a father and an ex-father.”
“Ex-father!” said Mrs. Gregory. “Vice-father is what I should call him.”
“Maria!” murmured Mrs. Weguelin, “how can you jest upon such topics?”
“I am far from jesting, Julia. Well, young gentleman, and what answer did this precious Newport child make?”
“He said (if you will pardon my giving you his little sentiment in his own quite expressive idiom), ‘Me for two fathers! Double money birthdays and Christmases. See?’ That was how he saw divorce.”
Once again my ladies consulted each other’s expressions; we moved along High Walk in such silence that I heard the stiff little rustle which the palmettos were making across the street; even these trees, you might have supposed, were whispering together over the horrors that I had recited in their decorous presence.
It was Mrs. Gregory who next spoke. “I can translate that last boy’s language, but what did the other boy mean about a ‘raid on Steel Preferred’—if I’ve got the jargon right?”
While I translated this for her, I felt again the disapproval in Mrs. Weguelin’s dark eyes; and my sins—for they were twofold—were presently made clear to me by this lady.
“Are such subjects as—as stocks” (she softly cloaked this word in scorn immeasurable)—“are such subjects mentioned in your good society at the North?”
I laughed heartily. “Everything’s mentioned!”
The lady paused over my reply. “I am afraid you must feel us to be very old-fashioned in, Kings Port,” she then said.
“But I rejoice in it!”
She ignored my not wholly dexterous compliment. “And some subjects,” she pursued, “seem to us so grave that if we permit ourselves to speak of them at all we cannot speak of them lightly.”
No, they couldn’t speak of them lightly! Here, then, stood my two sins revealed; everything I had imparted, and also my tone of imparting it, had displeased Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, not with the thing, but with me. I had transgressed her sound old American code of good manners, a code slightly pompous no doubt, but one in which no familiarity was allowed to breed contempt. To her good taste, there were things in the world which had, apparently, to exist, but which one banished from drawing-room discussion as one conceals from sight the kitchen and outhouses; one dealt with them only when necessity compelled, and never in small-talk; and here had I been, so to speak, small-talking them in that glib, modern, irresponsible cadence with which our brazen age rings and clatters like the beating of triangles and gongs. Not triangles and gongs, but rather strings and flutes, had been the music to which Kings Port society had attuned its measured voice.
I saw it all, and even saw that my own dramatic sense of Mrs. Weguelin’s dignity had perversely moved me to be more flippant than I actually felt; and I promised myself that a more chastened tone should forthwith redeem me from the false position I had got into.
“My dear,” said Mrs. Gregory to Mrs. Weguelin, “we must ask him to excuse our provincialism.”
For the second time I was not wholly dexterous. “But I like it so much!” I exclaimed; and both ladies laughed frankly.
Mrs. Gregory brought in a fable. “You’ll find us all ‘country mice’ here.”
This time I was happy. “At least, then, there’ll be no cat!” And this caused us all to make little bows.
But the word “cat” fell into our talk as does a drop of some acid into a chemical solution, instantly changing the whole to an unexpected new color. The unexpected new color was, in this instance, merely what had been latently lurking in the fluid of our consciousness all through and now it suddenly came out.
Mrs. Gregory stared over the parapet at the harbor. “I wonder if anybody has visited that steam yacht?”
“The Hermana?” I said. “She’s waiting, I believe, for her owner, who is enjoying himself very much on land.” It was a strong temptation to add, “enjoying himself with the cat,” but I resisted it.
“Oh!” said Mrs. Gregory. “Possibly a friend of yours?”
“Even his name is unknown to me. But I gather that he may be coming to Kings Port—to attend Mr. John Mayrant’s wedding next Wednesday week.”
I hadn’t gathered this; but one is at times driven to improvising. I wished so much to know if Juno was right about the engagement being broken, and I looked hard at the ladies as my words fairly grazed the “cat.” This time I expected them to consult each other’s expressions, and such, indeed, was their immediate proceeding.
“The Wednesday following, you mean,” Mrs. Weguelin corrected.
“Postponed again? Dear me!”
Mrs. Gregory spoke this time. “General Rieppe. Less well again, it seems.”
It would be like Juno to magnify a delay into a rupture. Then I had a hilarious thought, which I instantly put to the ladies. “If the poor General were to die completely, would the wedding be postponed completely?”
“There would not be the slightest chance of that,” Mrs. Gregory declared. And then she pronounced a sentence that was truly oracular: “She’s coming at once to see for herself.”
To which Mrs. Weguelin added with deeper condemnation than she had so far employed at all: “There is a rumor that she is actually coming in an automobile.”
My silence upon these two remarks was the silence of great and sudden interest; but it led Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael to do my perceptions a slight injustice, and she had no intention that I should miss the quality of her opinion regarding the vehicle in which Hortense was reported to be travelling.
“Miss Rieppe has the extraordinary taste to come here in an automobile,” said Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, with deepened severity.
Though I understood quite well, without this emphasizing, that the little lady would, with her unbending traditions, probably think it more respectable to approach Kings Port in a wheelbarrow, I was absorbed by the vague but copious import of Mrs. Gregory’s announcement. The oracles, moreover, continued.
“But she is undoubtedly very clever to come and see for herself,” was Mrs. Weguelin’s next comment.
Mrs. Gregory’s face, as she replied to her companion, took on a censorious and superior expression. “You’ll remember, Julia, that I told Josephine St. Michael it was what they had to expect.”
“But it was not Josephine, my dear, who at any time approved of taking such a course. It was Eliza’s whole doing.”
It was fairly raining oracles round me, and they quite resembled, for all the help and light they contained, their Delphic predecessors.
“And yet Eliza,” said Mrs. Gregory, “in the face of it, this very morning, repeated her eternal assertion that we shall all see the marriage will not take place.”
“Eliza,” murmured Mrs. Weguelin, “rates few things more highly than her own judgment.”
Mrs. Gregory mused. “Yet she is often right when she has no right to be right.”
I could not bear it any longer, and I said, “I heard to-day that Miss Rieppe had broken her engagement.”
“And where did you hear that nonsense?” asked Mrs. Gregory.
My heart leaped, and I told her where.
“Oh, well! you will hear anything in a boarding-house. Indeed, that would be a great deal too good to be true.”
“May I ask where Miss Rieppe is all this while?”
“The last news was from Palm Beach, where the air was said to be necessary for the General.”
“But,” Mrs. Weguelin repeated, “we have every reason to believe that she is coming here in an automobile.”
“We shall have to call, of course,” added Mrs. Gregory to her, not to me; they were leaving me out of it. Yes, these ladies were forgetting about me in their using preoccupation over whatever crisis it was that now hung over John Mayrant’s love affairs—a preoccupation which was evidently part of Kings Port’s universal buzz to-day, and which my joining them in the street had merely mitigated for a moment. I did not wish to be left out of it; I cannot tell you why—perhaps it was contagious in the local air—but a veritable madness of craving to know about it seized upon me. Of course, I saw that Miss Rieppe was, almost too grossly and obviously, “playing for time”; the health of people’s fathers did not cause weekly extensions of this sort. But what was it that the young lady expected time to effect for her? Her release, formally, by her young man, on the ground of his worldly ill fortune? Or was it for an offer from the owner of the Hermana that she was waiting, before she should take the step of formally releasing John Mayrant? No, neither of these conjectures seemed to furnish a key to the tactics of Miss Rieppe and the theory that each of these affianced parties was strategizing to cause the other to assume the odium of breaking their engagement, with no result save that of repeatedly countermanding a wedding-cake, struck me as belonging admirably to a stage-comedy in three acts, but scarcely to life as we find it. Besides, poor John Mayrant was, all too plainly, not strategizing; he was playing as straight a game as the honest heart of a gentleman could inspire. And so, baffled at all points, I said (for I simply had to try something which might lead to my sharing in Kings Port’s vibrating secret):—
“I can’t make out whether she wants to marry him or not.”
Mrs. Gregory answered. “That is just what she is coming to see for herself.”
“But since her love was for his phosphates only—!” was my natural exclamation.
It caused (and this time I did not expect it) my inveterate ladies to consult each other’s expressions. They prolonged their silence so much that I spoke again:—
“And backing out of this sort of thing can be done, I should think, quite as cleverly, and much more simply, from a distance.”
It was Mrs. Weguelin who answered now, or, rather, who headed me off. “Have you been able to make out whether he wants to marry her or not?”
“Oh, he never comes near any of that with me!”
“Certainly not. But we all understand that he has taken a fancy to you, and that you have talked much with him.”
So they all understood this, did they? This, too, had played its little special part in the buzz? Very well, then, nothing of my private impressions should drop from my lips here, to be quoted and misquoted and battledored and shuttlecocked, until it reached the boy himself (as it would inevitably) in fantastic disarrangement. I laughed. “Oh, yes! I have talked much with him. Shakespeare, I think, was our latest subject.”
Mrs. Weguelin was plainly watching for something to drop. “Shakespeare!” Her tone was of surprise.
I then indulged myself in that most delightful sort of impertinence, which consists in the other person’s not seeing it. “You wouldn’t be likely to have heard of that yet. It occurred only before dinner to-day. But we have also talked optimism, pessimism, sociology, evolution—Mr. Mayrant would soon become quite—” I stopped myself on the edge of something very clumsy.
But sharp Mrs. Gregory finished for me. “Yes, you mean that if he didn’t live in Kings Port (where we still have reverence, at any rate), he fit would imbibe all the shallow quackeries of the hour and resemble all the clever young donkeys of the minute.”
“Maria!” Mrs. Weguelin murmurously expostulated.
Mrs. Gregory immediately made me a handsome but equivocal apology. “I wasn’t thinking of you at all!” she declared gayly; and it set me doubting if perhaps she hadn’t, after all, comprehended my impertinence. “And, thank Heaven!” she continued, “John is one of us, in spite of his present stubborn course.”
But Mrs. Weguelin’s beautiful eyes were resting upon me with that disapproval I had come to know. To her, sociology and evolution and all “isms” were new-fangled inventions and murky with offense; to touch them was defilement, and in disclosing them to John Mayrant I was a corrupter of youth. She gathered it all up into a word that was radiant with a kind of lovely maternal gentleness:—
“We should not wish John to become radical.”
In her voice, the whole of old Kings Port was enshrined: hereditary faith and hereditary standards, mellow with the adherence of generations past, and solicitous for the boy of the young generation. I saw her eyes soften at the thought of him; and throughout the rest of our talk to its end her gaze would now and then return to me, shadowed with disapproval.
I addressed Mrs. Gregory. “By his ‘present stubborn course’ I suppose you mean the Custom House.”
“All of us deplore his obstinacy. His Aunt Eliza has strongly but vainly expostulated with him. And after that, Miss Josephine felt obliged to tell him that he need not come to see her again until he resigned a position which reflects ignominy upon us all.”
I suppressed a whistle. I thought (as I have said earlier) that I had caught a full vision of John Mayrant’s present plight. But my imagination had not soared to the height of Miss Josephine St. Michael’s act of discipline. This, it must have been, that the boy had checked himself from telling me in the churchyard. What a character of sterner times was Miss Josephine! I thought of Aunt Carola, but even she was not quite of this iron, and I said so to Mrs. Gregory. “I doubt if there be any old lady left in the North,” I said, “capable of such antique severity.”
But Mrs. Gregory opened my eyes still further. “Oh, you’d have them if you had the negro to deal with as we have him. Miss Josephine,” she added, “has to-day removed her sentence of banishment.”
I felt on the verge of new discoveries. “What!” I exclaimed, “and did she relent?”
“New circumstances intervened,” Mrs. Gregory loftily explained. “There was an occurrence—an encounter, in fact—in which John Mayrant fittingly punished one who had presumed. Upon hearing of it, this morning, Miss Josephine sent a message to John that he might resume visiting her.
“But that is perfectly grand!” I cried in my delight over Miss Josephine as a character.
“It is perfectly natural,” returned Mrs. Gregory, quietly. “John has behaved with credit throughout. He was at length made to see that circumstances forbade any breach between his family and that of the other young man. John held back—who would not, after such an insult?—but Miss Josephine was firm, and he has promised to call and shake hands. My cousin, Doctor Beaugarcon, assures me that the young man’s injuries are trifling—a week will see him restored and presentable again.”
“A week? A mere nothing!” I answered “Do you know,” I now suggested, “that you have forgotten to ask me what I was thinking about when we met?”
“Bless me, young gentleman! and was it so remarkable?”
“Not at all, but it partly answers what Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael asked me. If a young man does not really wish to marry a young woman there are ways well known by which she can be brought to break the engagement.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Gregory, “of course; gayeties and irregularities—”
“That is, if he’s not above them,” I hastily subjoined.
“Not always, by any means,” Mrs. Gregory returned. “Kings Port has been treated to some episodes—”
Mrs. Weguelin put in a word of defence. “It is to be said, Maria, that John’s irregularities have invariably been conducted with perfect propriety.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Gregory, “no Mayrant was ever known to be gross!”
“But this particular young lady,” said Mrs. Weguelin, “would not be estranged by an masculine irregularities and gayeties. Not many.”
“How about infidelities?” I suggested. “If he should flagrantly lose his heart to another?”
Mrs. Weguelin replied quickly. “That answers very well where hearts are in question.”
“But,” said I, “since phosphates are no longer—?”
There was a pause. “It would be a new dilemma,” Mrs. Gregory then said slowly, “if she turned out to care for him, after all.”
Throughout all this I was getting more and more the sense of how a total circle of people, a well-filled, wide circle of interested people, surrounded and cherished John Mayrant, made itself the setting of which he was the jewel; I felt in it, even stronger than the manifestation of personal affection (which certainly was strong enough), a collective sense of possession in him, a clan value, a pride and a guardianship concentrated and jealous, as of an heir to some princely estate, who must be worthy for the sake of a community even before he was worthy for his own sake. Thus he might amuse himself—it was in the code that princely heirs so should pour se deniaiser, as they neatly put it in Paris—thus might he and must he fight when his dignity was assailed; but thus might he not marry outside certain lines prescribed, or depart from his circle’s established creeds, divine and social, especially to hold any position which (to borrow Mrs. Gregory’s phrase) “reflected ignominy” upon them all. When he transgressed, their very value for him turned them bitter against him. I know that all of us are more or less chained to our community, which is pleased to expect us to walk its way, and mightily displeased when we please ourselves instead by breaking the chain and walking our own way; and I know that we are forgiven very slowly; but I had not dreamed what a prisoner to communal criticism a young American could be until I beheld Kings Port over John Mayrant.
And to what estate was this prince heir? Alas, his inheritance was all of it the Past and none of it the Future; was the full churchyard and the empty wharves! He was paying dear for his princedom! And then, there was yet another sense of this beautiful town that I got here completely, suddenly crystallized, though slowly gathering ever since my arrival: all these old people were clustered about one young one. That was it; that was the town’s ultimate tragic note: the old timber of the forest dying and the too sparse new growth appearing scantily amid the tall, fine, venerable, decaying trunks. It had been by no razing to the ground and sowing with salt that the city had perished; a process less violent but more sad had done away with it. Youth, in the wake of commerce, had ebbed from Kings Port, had flowed out from the silent, mourning houses, and sought life North and West, and wherever else life was to be found. Into my revery floated a phrase from a melodious and once favorite song: O tempo passato perche non ritorni?
And John Mayrant? Why, then, had he tarried here himself? That is a hard saying about crabbed age and youth, but are not most of the sayings hard that are true? What was this young man doing in Kings Port with his brains, and his pride, and his energetic adolescence? If the Custom House galled him, the whole country was open to him; why not have tried his fortune out and away, over the hills, where the new cities lie, all full of future and empty of past? Was it much to the credit of such a young man to find himself at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four, sound and lithe of limb, yet tied to the apron strings of Miss Josephine, and Miss Eliza, and some thirty or forty other elderly female relatives?
With these thoughts I looked at the ladies and wondered how I might lead them to answer me about John Mayrant, without asking questions which might imply something derogatory to him or painful to them. I could not ever say to them a word which might mean, however indirectly, that I thought their beautiful, cherished town no place for a young man to go to seed in; this cut so close to the quick of truth that discourse must keep wide away from it. What, then, could I ask them? As I pondered, Mrs. Weguelin solved it for me by what she was saying to Mrs. Gregory, of which, in my preoccupation, I had evidently missed a part:—
“—if he should share the family bad taste in wives.”
“Eliza says she has no fear of that.”
“Were I Eliza, Hugh’s performance would make me very uneasy.”
“Julia, John does not resemble Hugh.”
“Very decidedly, in coloring, Maria.”
“And Hugh found that girl in Minneapolis, Julia, where there was doubtless no pick for the poor fellow. And remember that George chose a lady, at any rate.”
Mrs. Weguelin gave to this a short assent. “Yes.” It portended something more behind, which her next words duly revealed. “A lady; but do—any—ladies ever seem quite like our own?
“Certainly not, Julia.”
You see, they were forgetting me again; but they had furnished me with a clue.
“Mr. John Mayrant has married brothers?”
“Two,” Mrs. Gregory responded. “John is the youngest of three children.”
“I hadn’t heard of the brothers before.”
“They seldom come here. They saw fit to leave their home and their delicate mother.”
“Oh!”
“But John,” said Mrs. Gregory, “met his responsibility like a Mayrant.”
“Whatever temptations he has yielded to,” said Mrs. Weguelin, “his filial piety has stood proof.”
“He refused,” added Mrs. Gregory, “when George (and I have never understood how George could be so forgetful of their mother) wrote twice, offering him a lucrative and rising position in the railroad company at Roanoke.”
“That was hard!” I exclaimed.
She totally misapplied my sympathy. “Oh, Anna Mayrant,” she corrected herself, “John’s mother, Mrs. Hector Mayrant, had harder things than forgetful sons to bear! I’ve not laid eyes on those boys since the funeral.”
“Nearly two years,” murmured Mrs. Weguelin. And then, to me, with something that was almost like a strange severity beneath her gentle tone: “Therefore we are proud of John, because the better traits in his nature remind us of his forefathers, whom we knew.”
“In Kings Port,” said Mrs. Gregory, “we prize those who ring true to the blood.”
By way of response to this sentiment, I quoted some French to her. “Bon chien chasse de race.”
It pleased Mrs. Weguelin. Her guarded attitude toward me relented. “John mentioned your cultivation to us,” she said. “In these tumble-down days it is rare to meet with one who still lives, mentally, on the gentlefolks’ plane—the piano nobile of intelligence!”
I realized how high a compliment she was paying me, and I repaid it with a joke. “Take care. Those who don’t live there would call it the piano snobile.”
“Ah!” cried the delighted lady, “they’d never have the wit!”
“Did you ever hear,” I continued, “the Bostonian’s remark—‘The mission of America is to vulgarize the world’?”
“I never expected to agree so totally with a Bostonian!” declared Mrs. Gregory.
“Nothing so hopeful,” I pursued, “has ever been said of us. For refinement and thoroughness and tradition delay progress, and we are sweeping them out of the road as fast as we can.”
“Come away, Julia,” said Mrs. Gregory. “The young gentleman is getting flippant again, and we leave him.”
The ladies, after gracious expressions concerning the pleasure of their stroll, descended the steps at the north end of High Walk, where the parapet stops, and turned inland from the water through a little street. I watched them until they went out of my sight round a corner; but the two silent, leisurely figures, moving in their black and their veils along an empty highway, come back to me often in the pictures of my thoughts; come back most often, indeed, as the human part of what my memory sees when it turns to look at Kings Port. For, first, it sees the blue frame of quiet sunny water, and the white town within its frame beneath the clear, untainted air; and then it sees the high-slanted roofs, red with their old corrugated tiles, and the tops of leafy enclosures dipping below sight among quaint and huddled quadrangles; and, next, the quiet houses standing in their separate grounds, their narrow ends to the street and their long, two-storied galleries open to the south, but their hushed windows closed as if against the prying, restless Present that must not look in and disturb the motionless memories which sit brooding behind these shutters; and between all these silent mansions lie the narrow streets, the quiet, empty streets, along which, as my memory watches them, pass the two ladies silently, in their black and their veils, moving between high, mellow-colored garden walls over whose tops look the oleanders, the climbing roses, and all the taller flowers of the gardens.
And if Mrs. Gregory and Mrs. Weguelin seemed to me at moments as narrow as those streets, they also seemed to me as lovely as those serene gardens; and if I had smiled at their prejudices, I had loved their innocence, their deep innocence, of the poisoned age which has succeeded their own; and if I had wondered this day at their powers for cruelty, I wondered the next day at the glimpse I had of their kindness. For during a pelting cold rainstorm, as I sat and shivered in a Royal Street car, waiting for it to start upon its north-bound course, the house-door opposite which we stood at the end of the track opened, and Mrs. Weguelin’s head appeared, nodding to the conductor as she sent her black servant out with hot coffee for him! He took off his hat, and smiled, and thanked her; and when we had started and I, the sole passenger in the chilly car, asked him about this, he said with native pride: “The ladies always watches out for us conductors in stormy weather, sir. That’s Mistress Weguelin St. Michael, one of our finest.” And then he gave me careful directions how to find a shop that I was seeking.
Think of this happening in New York! Think of the aristocracy of that metropolis warming up with coffee the—but why think of it, or of a New York conductor answering your questions with careful directions! It is not New York’s fault, it is merely New York’s misfortune: New York is in a hurry; and a world of haste cannot be a world either of courtesy or of kindness. But we have progress, progress, instead; and that is a tremendous consolation.
XI: Daddy Ben and His Seed
But what was Hortense Rieppe coming to see for herself?
Many dark things had been made plain to me by my talk with the two ladies; yet while disclosing so much, they had still left this important matter in shadow. I was very glad, however, for what they had revealed. They had showed me more of John Mayrant’s character, and more also of the destiny which had shaped his ends, so that my esteem for him had increased; for some of the words that they had exchanged shone like bright lanterns down into his nature upon strength and beauty lying quietly there—young strength and beauty, yet already tempered by manly sacrifice. I saw how it came to pass through this, through renunciation of his own desires, through performance of duties which had fallen upon him not quite fairly, that the eye of his spirit had been turned away from self; thus had it grown strong-sighted and able to look far and deep, as his speech sometimes revealed, while still his flesh was of his youthful age, and no saint’s flesh either. This had the ladies taught me during the fluttered interchange of their reminders and opinions, and by their eager agreements and disagreements, I was also grateful to them in that I could once more correct Juno. The pleasure should be mine to tell them in the public hearing of our table that Miss Rieppe was still engaged to John Mayrant.
But what was this interesting girl coming to see for herself?
This little hole in my knowledge gave me discomfort as I walked along toward the antiquity shop where I was to buy the other kettle-supporter. The ladies, with all their freedom of comment and censure, had kept something from me. I reviewed, I pieced together, their various remarks, those oracles, especially, which they had let fall, but it all came back to the same thing. I did not know, and they did, what Hortense Rieppe was coming to see for herself. At all events, the engagement was not broken, the chance to be instrumental in having it broken was still mine; I might still save John Mayrant from his deplorable quixotism; and as this reflection grew with me I took increasing comfort in it, and I stepped onward toward my kettle-supporter, filled with that sense of moral well-being which will steal over even the humblest of us when we feel that we are beneficently minding somebody else’s business.
Whenever the arrangement did not take me too widely from my course, I so mapped out my walks and errands in Kings Port that I might pass by the churchyard and church at the corner of Court and Worship streets. Even if I did not indulge myself by turning in to stroll and loiter among the flowers, it was enough pleasure to walk by that brick-wall. If you are willing to wander curiously in our old towns, you may still find in many of them good brick walls standing undisturbed, and equal in their color and simple excellence to those of Kings Port; but fashion has pushed these others out of its sight, among back streets and all sorts of forgotten purlieus and abandoned dignity, and takes its walks to-day amid cold, expensive ugliness; while the old brick walls of Kings Port continually frame your steps with charm. No one workman famous for his skill built them so well proportioned, so true to comeliness; it was the general hand of their age that could shape nothing wrong, as the hand of to-day can shape nothing right, save by a rigid following of the old.
I gave myself the pleasure this afternoon of walking by the churchyard wall; and when I reached the iron gate, there was Daddy Ben. So full was I of my thoughts concerning John Mayrant, and the vicissitudes of his heart, and the Custom House, that I was moved to have words with the old man upon the general topic.
“Well,” I said, “and so Mr. John is going to be married.”
No attempt to start a chat ever failed more signally. He assented with a manner of mingled civility and reserve that was perfection, and after the two syllables of which his answer consisted, he remained as impenetrably respectful as before. I felt rather high and dry, but I tried it again:—
“And I’m sure, Daddy Ben, that you feel as sorry as any of the family that the phosphates failed.”
Again he replied with his two syllables of assent, and again he stood mute, respectful, a little bent with his great age; but now his good manners—and better manners were never seen—impelled him to break silence upon some subject, since he would not permit himself to speak concerning the one which I had introduced. It was the phosphates which inspired him.
“Dey is mighty fine prostrate wukks heah, sah.”
“Yes, I’ve been told so, Daddy Ben.”
“On dis side up de ribber an’ tudder side down de ribber ‘cross de new bridge. Wuth visitin’ fo’ strangers, sah.”
I now felt entirely high and dry. I had attempted to enter into conversation with him about the intimate affairs of a family to which he felt that he belonged; and with perfect tact he had not only declined to discuss them with me, but had delicately informed me that I was a stranger and as such had better visit the phosphate works among the other sights of Kings Port. No diplomat could have done it better; and as I walled away from him I knew that he regarded me as an outsider, a Northerner, belonging to a race hostile to his people; he had seen Mas’ John friendly with me, but that was Mas’ John’s affair. And so it was that if the ladies had kept something from me, this cunning, old, polite, coal-black African had kept everything from me.
If all the negroes in Kings Port were like Daddy Ben, Mrs. Gregory St. Michael would not have spoken of having them “to deal with,” and the girl behind the counter would not have been thrown into such indignation when she alluded to their conceit and ignorance. Daddy Ben had, so far from being puffed up by the appointment in the Custom House, disapproved of this. I had heard enough about the difference between the old and new generations of the negro of Kings Port to believe it to be true, and I had come to discern how evidently it lay at the bottom of many things here: John Mayrant and his kind were a band united by a number of strong ties, but by nothing so much as by their hatred of the modern negro in their town. Yes, I was obliged to believe that the young Kings Port African left to freedom and the ballot, was a worse African than his slave parents; but this afternoon brought me a taste of it more pungent than all the assurances in the world.
I bought my kettle-supporter, and learned from the robber who sold it to me (Kings Port prices for “old things” are the most exorbitant that I know anywhere) that a carpenter lived not far from Mrs. Trevise’s boarding-house, and that he would make for me the box in which I could pack my various purchases.
“That is, if he’s working this week,” added the robber.
“What else would he be doing?”
“It may be his week for getting drunk on what he earned the week before.” And upon this he announced with as much bitterness as if he had been John Mayrant or any of his aunts, “That’s what Boston philanthropy has done for him.”
I dared up at this. “I suppose that’s a Southern argument for reestablishing slavery.”
“I am not Southern; Breslau is my native town, and I came from New York here to live five years ago. I’ve seen what your emancipation has done for the black, and I say to you, my friend, honest I don’t know a fool from a philanthropist any longer.”
He had much right upon his side; and it can be seen daily that philanthropy does not always walk hand-in-hand with wisdom. Does anything or anybody always walk so? Moreover, I am a friend to not many superlatives, and have perceived no saying to be more true than the one that extremes meet: they meet indeed, and folly is their meeting-place. Nor could I say in the case of the negro which folly were the more ridiculous;—that which expects a race which has lived no one knows how many thousand years in mental nakedness while Confucius, Moses, and Napoleon were flowering upon adjacent human stems, should put on suddenly the white man’s intelligence, or that other folly which declares we can do nothing for the African, as if Hampton had not already wrought excellent things for him. I had no mind to enter into all the inextricable error with this Teuton, and it was he who continued:—
“Oh, these Boston philanthropists; oh, these know-it-alls! Why don’t they stay home? Why do they come down here to worry us with their ignorance? See here, my friend, let me show you!”
He rushed about his shop in a search of distraught eagerness, and with a multitude of small exclamations, until, screeching jubilantly once, he pounced upon a shabby and learned-looking volume. This he brought me, thrusting it with his trembling fingers between my own, and shuffling the open pages. But when the apparently right one was found, he exclaimed, “No, I have better! and dashed away to a pile of pamphlets on the floor, where he began to plough and harrow. Wondering if I was closeted with a maniac, I looked at the book in my passive hand, and saw diagrams of various bones to me unknown, and men’s names of which I was equally ignorant—Mivart, Topinard, and more,—but at last that of Huxley. But this agreeable sight was spoiled at once by the quite horrible words Nycticebidoe, platyrrhine, catarrhine, from which I raised my eyes to see him coming at me with two pamphlets, and scolding as he came.
“Are you educated, yes? Have been to college, yes? Then perhaps you will understand.”
Certainly I understood immediately that he and his pamphlets were as bad as the book, or worse, in their use of a vocabulary designed to cause almost any listener the gravest inconvenience. Common Eocene ancestors occurred at the beginning of his lecture; and I believed that if it got no stronger than this, I could at least preserve the appearance of comprehending him; but it got stronger, and at sacro-iliac notch I may say, without using any grossly exaggerated expression, that I became unconscious. At least, all intelligence left me. When it returned, he was saying.—
“But this is only the beginning. Come in here to my crania and jaws.”
Evidently he held me hypnotized, for he now hurried me unresisting through a back door into a dark little where he turned up the gas, and I saw shelves as in a museum, to one of which he led me. I suppose that it was curiosity that rendered me thus sheep-like. Upon the shelf were a number of skulls and jaws in admirable condition and graded arrangement, beginning to the left with that flat kind of skull which one associates with gorillas. He resumed his scolding harangue, and for a few brief moments I understood him. Here, told by themselves, was as much of the story of the skulls as we know, from manlike apes through glacial man to the modern senator or railroad president. But my intelligence was destined soon to die away again.
“That is the Caucasian skull: your skull,” he said, touching a specimen at the right.
“Interesting,” I murmured. “I’m afraid I know nothing about skulls.”
“But you shall know someding before you leave,” he retorted, wagging his head at me; and this time it was not the book, but a specimen, that he pushed into my grasp. He gave it a name, not as bad as platyrrhine, but I feared worse was coming; then he took it away from me, gave me another skull, and while I obediently held it, pronounced something quite beyond me.
“And what is the translation of that?” he demanded excitedly.
“Tell me,” I feebly answered.
He shouted with overweening triumph: “The translation of that is South Carolina nigger. Notice well this so egcellent specimen. Prognathous, megadont, platyrrhine.”
“Ha! Platyrrhine!” I saluted the one word I recognized as I drowned.
“You have said it yourself!” was his extraordinary answer;—for what had I said? Almost as if he were going to break into a dance for joy, he took the Caucasian skull and the other two, and set the three together by themselves, away from the rest of the collection. The picture which they thus made spoke more than all the measurements and statistics which he now chattered out upon me, reading from his book as I contemplated the skulls. There was a similarity of shape, a kinship there between the three, which stared you in the face; but in the contours of vaulted skull, the projecting jaws, and the great molar teeth—what was to be seen? Why, in every respect that the African departed from the Caucasian, he departed in the direction of the ape! Here was zoology mutely but eloquently telling us why there had blossomed no Confucius, no Moses, no Napoleon, upon that black stem; why no Iliad, no Parthenon, no Sistine Madonna, had ever risen from that tropic mud.
The collector touched my sleeve. “Have you now learned someding about skulls, my friend? Will you invite those Boston philanthropists to stay home? They will get better results in civilization by giving votes to monkeys than teaching Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to riggers.”
Retaliation rose in me. “Haven’t you learned to call them negroes?” I remarked. But this was lost upon the Teuton. I was tempted to tell him that I was no philanthropist, and no Bostonian, and that he need not shout so loud, but my more dignified instincts restrained me. I withdrew my sleeve from his touch (it was this act of his, I think, that had most to do with my displeasure), and merely bidding him observe that the enormous price of the kettle-supporter had been reduced for me by his exhibition to a bagatelle, I left the shop of the screaming anatomist—or Afropath, or whatever it may seem most fitting that he should be called.
I bore the kettle-supporter with me, tied up objectionably in newspaper, and knotted with ungainly string; and it was this bundle which prevented my joining the girl behind the counter, and ending by a walk with a young lady the afternoon that had begun by a walk with two old ones. I should have liked to make my confession to her. She was evidently out for the sake of taking the air, and had with her no companion save the big curly white dog; confession would have been very agreeable; but I looked again at my ugly newspaper bundle, and turned in a direction that she was not herself pursuing.
Twice, as I went, I broke into laughter over my interview in the shop, which I fear has lost its comical quality in the relating. To enter a door and come serenely in among dingy mahogany and glass objects, to bargain haughtily for a brass bauble with the shopkeeper, and to have a few exchanged remarks suddenly turn the whole place into a sort of bedlam with a gibbering scientist dashing skulls at me to prove his fixed idea, and myself quite furious—I laughed more than twice; but, by the time I had approached the neighborhood of the carpenter’s shop, another side of it had brought reflection to my mind. Here was a foreigner to whom slavery and the Lost Cause were nothing, whose whole association with the South had begun but five years ago; and the race question had brought his feelings to this pitch! He had seen the Kings Port negro with the eyes of the flesh, and not with the eyes of theory, and as a result the reddest rag for him was pale beside a Boston philanthropist!
Nevertheless, I have said already that I am no lover of superlatives, and in doctrine especially is this true. We need not expect a Confucius from the negro, nor yet a Chesterfield; but I am an enemy also of that blind and base hate against him, which conducts nowhere save to the de-civilizing of white and black alike. Who brought him here? Did he invite himself? Then let us make the best of it and teach him, lead him, compel him to live self-respecting, not as statesman, poet, or financier, but by the honorable toil of his hand and sweat of his brow. Because “the door of hope” was once opened too suddenly for him is no reason for slamming it now forever in his face.
Thus mentally I lectured back at the Teuton as I went through the streets of Kings Port; and after a while I turned a corner which took me abruptly, as with one magic step, out of the white man’s world into the blackest Congo. Even the well-inhabited quarter of Kings Port (and I had now come within this limited domain) holds narrow lanes and recesses which teem and swarm with negroes. As cracks will run through fine porcelain, so do these black rifts of Africa lurk almost invisible among the gardens and the houses. The picture that these places offered, tropic, squalid, and fecund, often caused me to walk through them and watch the basking population; the intricate, broken wooden galleries, the rickety outside stair cases, the red and yellow splashes of color on the clothes lines, the agglomerate rags that stuffed holes in decaying roofs or hung nakedly on human frames, the small, choked dwellings, bursting open at doors and windows with black, round-eyed babies as an overripe melon bursts with seeds, the children playing marbles in the court, the parents playing cards in the room, the grandparents smoking pipes on the porch, and the great-grandparents stairs gazing out at you like creatures from the Old Testament or the jungle. From the jungle we had stolen them, North and South had stolen them together, long ago, to be slaves, not to be citizens, and now here they were, the fruits of our theft; and for some reason (possibly the Teuton was the reason) that passage from the Book of Exodus came into my head: “For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children.”
These thoughts were interrupted by sounds as of altercation. I had nearly reached the end of the lane, where I should again emerge into the White man’s world, and where I was now walking the lane spread into a broader space with ells and angles and rotting steps, and habitations mostly too ruinous to be inhabited. It was from a sashless window in one of these that the angry voices came. The first words which were distinct aroused my interest quite beyond the scale of an ordinary altercation:—
“Calls you’self a reconstuckted niggah?”
This was said sharply and with prodigious scorn. The answer which it brought was lengthy and of such a general sullen incoherence that I could make out only a frequent repetition of “custom house,” and that somebody was going to take care of somebody hereafter.
Into this the first voice broke with tones of highest contempt and rapidity:—
“President gwine to gib brekfus’ an’ dinnah an suppah to de likes ob you fo’ de whole remaindah oh youh wuthless nat’ral life? Get out ob my sight, you reconstuckted niggah. I come out oh de St. Michael.”
There came through the window immediately upon this sounds of scuffling and of a fall, and then cries for help which took me running into the dilapidated building. Daddy Ben lay on the floor, and a thick, young savage was kicking him. In some remarkable way I thought of the solidity of their heads, and before the assailant even knew that he had a witness, I sped forward, aiming my kettle-supporter, and with its sharp brass edge I dealt him a crack over his shin with astonishing accuracy. It was a dismal howl that he gave, and as he turned he got from me another crack upon the other shin. I had no time to be alarmed at my deed, or I think that I should have been very much so; I am a man above all of peace, and physical encounters are peculiarly abhorrent to me; but, so far from assailing me, the thick, young savage, with the single muttered remark, “He hit me fuss,” got himself out of the house with the most agreeable rapidity.
Daddy Ben sat up, and his first inquiry greatly reassured me as to his state. He stared at my paper bundle. “You done make him hollah wid dat, sah!”
I showed him the kettle-supporter through a rent in its wrapping, and I assisted him to stand upright. His injuries proved fortunately to be slight (although I may say here that the shock to his ancient body kept him away for a few days from the churchyard), and when I began to talk to him about the incident, he seemed unwilling to say much in answer to my questions. And when I offered to accompany him to where he lived, he declined altogether, assuring me that it was close, and that he could walk there as well as if nothing had happened to him; but upon my asking him if I was on the right way to the carpenter’s shop, he looked at me curiously.
“No use you gwine dab, sah. Dat shop close up. He not wukkin, dis week, and dat why fo’ I jaw him jus’ now when you come in an’ stop him. He de cahpentah, my gran’son, Cha’s Coteswuth.”
XII: From the Bedside
Next morning when I saw the weltering sky I resigned myself to a day of dullness; yet before its end I had caught a bright new glimpse of John Mayrant’s abilities, and also had come, through tribulation, to a further understanding of the South; so that I do not, to-day, regret the tribulation. As the rain disappointed me of two outdoor expeditions, to which I had been for some little while looking forward, I dedicated most of my long morning to a sadly neglected correspondence, and trusted that the expeditions, as soon as the next fine weather visited Kings Port, would still be in store for me. Not only everybody in town here, but Aunt Carola, up in the North also, had assured me that to miss the sight of Live Oaks when the azaleas in the gardens of that country seat were in flower would be to lose one of the rarest and most beautiful things which could be seen anywhere; and so I looked out of my window at the furious storm, hoping that it might not strip the bushes at Live Oaks of their bloom, which recent tourists at Mrs. Trevise’s had described as drawing near the zenith of its luxuriance. The other excursion to Udolpho with John Mayrant was not so likely to fall through. Udolpho was a sort of hunting lodge or country club near Tern Creek and an old colonial church, so old that it bore the royal arms upon a shield still preserved as a sign of its colonial origin. A note from Mayrant, received at breakfast, informed me that the rain would take all pleasure from such an excursion, and that he should seize the earliest opportunity the weather might afford to hold me to my promise. The wet gale, even as I sat writing, was beating down some of the full-blown flowers in the garden next Mrs. Trevise’s house, and as the morning wore on I watched the paths grow more strewn with broken twigs and leaves.
I filled my correspondence with accounts of Daddy Ben and his grandson, the carpenter, doubtless from some pride in my part in that, but also because it had become, through thinking it over, even more interesting to-day than it had been at the moment of its occurrence; and in replying to a sort of postscript of Aunt Carola’s in which she hurriedly wrote that she had forgotten to say she had heard the La Heu family in South Carolina was related to the Bombos, and should be obliged to me if I would make inquiries about this, I told her that it would be easy, and then described to her the Teuton, plying his “antiquity” trade externally while internally cherishing his collected skulls and nursing his scientific rage. All my letters were the more abundant concerning these adventures of mine from my having kept entirely silent upon them at Mrs. Trevise’s tea-table. I dreaded Juno when let loose upon the negro question; and the fact that I was beginning to understand her feelings did not at all make me wish to be deafened by them. Neither Juno, therefore, nor any of them learned a word from me about the kettle-supporter incident. What I did take pains to inform the assembled company was my gratification that the report of Mr. Mayrant’s engagement being broken was unfounded; and this caused Juno to observe that in that case Miss Rieppe must have the most imperative reasons for uniting herself to such a young man.
Unintimidated by the rain, this formidable creature had taken herself off to her nephew’s bedside almost immediately after breakfast; and later in the day I, too, risked a drenching for the sake of ordering the packing-box that I needed. When I returned, it was close on tea-time; I had seen Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael send out the hot coffee to the conductor, and I had found a negro carpenter whose week it happily was to stay sober; and now I learned that, when tea should be finished, the poetess had in store for us, as a treat, her ode.
Our evening meal was not plain sailing, even for the veteran navigation of Mrs. Trevise; Juno had returned from the bedside very plainly displeased (she was always candid even when silent) by something which had happened there; and before the joyful moment came when we all learned what this was, a very gouty Boston lady who had arrived with her husband from Florida on her way North—and whose nature you will readily grasp when I tell you that we found ourselves speaking of the man as Mrs. Braintree’s husband and never as Mr. Braintree—this crippled lady, who was of a candor equal to Juno’s, embarked upon a conversation with Juno that compelled Mrs. Trevise to tinkle her bell for Daphne after only two remarks had been exchanged.
I had been sorry at first that here in this Southern boarding-house Boston should be represented only by a lady who appeared to unite in herself all the stony products of that city, and none of the others; for she was as convivial as a statue and as well-informed as a spelling-book; she stood no more for the whole of Boston than did Juno for the whole of Kings Port. But my sorrow grew less when I found that in Mrs. Braintree we had indeed a capable match for her Southern counterpart. Juno, according to her custom, had remembered something objectionable that had been perpetrated in 1865 by the Northern vandals.
“Edward,” said Mrs. Braintree to her husband, in a frightfully clear voice, “it was at Chambersburg, was it not, that the Southern vandals burned the house in which were your father’s title-deeds?”
Edward, who, it appeared, had fought through the whole Civil War, and was in consequence perfectly good-humored and peaceable in his feelings upon that subject, replied hastily and amiably: “Oh, yes, yes! Why, I believe it was!”
But this availed nothing; Juno bent her great height forward, and addressed Mrs. Braintree. “This is the first time I have been told Southerners were vandals.”
“You will never be able to say that again!” replied Mrs. Braintree.
After the bell and Daphne had stopped, the invaluable Briton addressed a genial generalization to us all: “I often think how truly awful your war would have been if the women had fought it, y’know, instead of the men.”
“Quite so!” said the easy-going Edward “Squaws! Mutilation! Yes!” and he laughed at his little joke, but he laughed alone.
I turned to Juno. “Speaking of mutilation, I trust your nephew is better this evening.”
I was rejoiced by receiving a glare in response. But still more joy was to come.
“An apology ought to help cure him a lot,” observed the Briton.
Juno employed her policy of not hearing him.
“Indeed, I trust that your nephew is in less pain,” said the poetess.
Juno was willing to answer this. “The injuries, thank you, are the merest trifles—all that such a light-weight could inflict.” And she shrugged her shoulders to indicate the futility of young John’s pugilism.
“But,” the surprised Briton interposed, “I thought you said your nephew was too feeble to eat steak or hear poetry.”
Juno could always stem the eddy of her own contradictions—but she did raise her voice a little. “I fancy, sir, that Doctor Beaugarcon knows what he is talking about.”
“Have they apologized yet?” inquired the male honeymooner from the up-country.
“My nephew, sir, nobly consented to shake hands this afternoon. He did it entirely out of respect for Mr. Mayrant’s family, who coerced him into this tardy reparation, and who feel unable to recognize him since his treasonable attitude in the Custom House.”
“Must be fairly hard to coerce a chap you can’t recognize,” said the Briton.
An et cetera now spoke to the honeymoon bride from the up-country: “I heard Doctor Beaugarcon say he was coming to visit you this evening.”
“Yais,” assented the bride. “Doctor Beaugarcon is my mother’s fourth cousin.”
Juno now took—most unwisely, as it proved—a vindictive turn at me. “I knew that your friend, Mr. Mayrant, was intemperate,” she began.
I don’t think that Mrs. Trevise had any intention to ring for Daphne at this point—her curiosity was too lively; but Juno was going to risk no such intervention, and I saw her lay a precautionary hand heavily down over the bell. “But,” she continued, “I did not know that Mr. Mayrant was a gambler.”
“Have you ever seen him intemperate?” I asked.
“That would be quite needless,” Juno returned. “And of the gambling I have ocular proof, since I found him, cards, counters, and money, with my sick nephew. He had actually brought cards in his pocket.”
“I suppose,” said the Briton, “your nephew was too sick to resist him.”
The male honeymooner, with two of the et ceteras, made such unsteady demonstrations at this that Mrs. Trevise protracted our sitting no longer. She rose, and this meant rising for us all.
A sense of regret and incompleteness filled me, and finding the Briton at my elbow as our company proceeded toward the sitting room, I said: “Too bad!”
His whisper was confident. “We’ll get the rest of it out of her yet.”
But the rest of it came without our connivance.
In the sitting room Doctor Beaugarcon sat waiting, and at sight of Juno entering the door (she headed our irregular procession) he sprang up and lifted admiring hands. “Oh, why didn’t I have an aunt like you!” he exclaimed, and to Mrs. Trevise as she followed: “She pays her nephew’s poker debts.”
“How much, cousin Tom?” asked the upcountry bride.
And the gay old doctor chuckled, as he kissed her: “Thirty dollars this afternoon, my darling.”