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.
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."
"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.