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Lady Baltimore
by Owen Wister
July, 1998 [Etext #1386]
[Date last updated: 17th October, 2002]
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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.
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 everything 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 Catherne 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