Chapter 14
“Your fire-eater is a civil chap,” said Beverly. “And by the way, do you happen to know,” here he pulled from his pocket a letter and consulted its address, “Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael?”
I was delighted that he brought an introduction to this lady; Hortense Rieppe could not open for him any of those haughty doors; and I wished not only that Beverly (since he was just the man to appreciate it and understand it) should see the fine flower of Kings Port, but also that the fine flower of Kings Port should see him; the best blood of the South could not possibly turn out anything better than Beverly Rodgers, and it was horrible and humiliating to think of the other Northern specimens of men whom Hortense had imported with her. I was here suddenly reminded that the young woman was a guest of the Cornerlys, the people who swept their garden, the people whom Eliza La Heu at the Exchange did not “know”; and at this the remark of Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, when I had walked with her and Mrs. Weguelin, took on an added lustre of significance:--
“We shall have to call.”
Call on the Cornerlys! Would they do that? Were they ready to stand by their John to that tune? A hotel would be nothing; you could call on anybody at a hotel, if you had to; but here would be a demarche indeed! Yet, nevertheless, I felt quite certain that, if Hortense, though the Cornerlys’ guest, was also the guaranteed fiancee of John Mayrant, the old ladies would come up to the scratch, hate and loathe it as they might, and undoubtedly would: they could be trusted to do the right thing.
I told Beverly how glad I was that he would meet Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. “The rest of your party, my friend,” I said, “are not very likely to.” And I generalized to him briefly upon the town of Kings Port. “Supposing I take you to call upon Mrs. St. Michael when I come back this afternoon?” I suggested.
Beverly thought it over, and then shook his head. “Wouldn’t do, old man. If these people are particular and know, as you say they do, hadn’t I better leave the letter with my card, and then wait till she sends some word?”
He was right, as he always was, unerringly. Consorting with all the Charleys, and the Bohms, and the Cohns, and the Kitties hadn’t taken the fine edge from Beverly’s good inheritance and good bringing up; his instinct had survived his scruples, making of him an agile and charming cynic, whom you could trust to see the right thing always, and never do it unless it was absolutely necessary; he would marry any amount of Kitties for their money, and always know that beside his mother and sisters they were as dirt; and he would see to it that his children took after their father, went to school in England for a good accent and enunciation, as he had done, went to college in America for the sake of belonging in their own country, as he had done, and married as many fortunes, and had as few divorces, as possible.
“Who was that girl on the bridge?” he now inquired as we reached the steps of the post-office; and when I had told him again, because he had asked me about Eliza La Heu at the time, “She’s the real thing,” he commented. “Quite extraordinary, you know, her dignity, when poor old awful Charley was messing everything--he’s so used to mere money, you know, that half the time he forgets people are not dollars, and you have to kick him to remind him--yes, quite perfect dignity. Gad, it took a lady to climb up and sit by that ragged old darky and take her dead dog away in the cart! The cart and the darky only made her look what she was all the more. Poor Kitty couldn’t do that--she’d look like a chambermaid! Well, old man, see you again.”
I stood on the post-office steps looking after Beverly Rodgers as he crossed Court Street. His admirably good clothes, the easy finish of his whole appearance, even his walk, and his back, and the slope of his shoulders, were unmistakable. The Southern men, going to their business in Court Street, looked at him. Alas, in his outward man he was as a rose among weeds! And certainly, no well-born American could unite with an art more hedonistic than Beverly’s the old school and the nouveau jeu!
Over at the other corner he turned and stood admiring the church and gazing at the other buildings, and so perceived me still on the steps. With a gesture of remembering something he crossed back again.
“You’ve not seen Miss Rieppe?”
“Why, of course I haven’t!” I exclaimed. Was everybody going to ask me that?
“Well, something’s up, old boy. Charley has got the launch away with him--and I’ll bet he’s got her away with him, too. Charley lied this morning.”
“Is lying, then, so rare with him?”
“Why, it rather is, you know. But I’ve come to be able to spot him when he does it. Those little bulgy eyes of his look at you particularly straight and childlike. He said he had to hunt up a man on business--V-C Chemical Company, he called it--”
“There is such a thing here,” I said.
“Oh, Charley’d never make up a thing, and get found out in that way! But he was lying all the same, old man.”
“Do you mean they’ve run off and got married?”
“What do you take them for? Much more like them to run off and not get married. But they haven’t done that either. And, speaking of that, I believe I’ve gone a bit adrift. Your fire-eater, you know--she is an extraordinary woman!” And Beverly gave his mellow, little humorous chuckle. “Hanged if I don’t begin to think she does fancy him.”
“Well!” I cried, “that would explain--no, it wouldn’t. Whence comes your theory?”
“Saw her look at him at dinner once last night. We dined with some people--Cornerly. She looked at him just once. Well, if she intends--by gad, it upsets one’s whole notion of her!”
“Isn’t just one look rather slight basis for--”
“Now, old man, you know better than that!” Beverly paused to chuckle. “My grandmother Livingston,” he resumed, “knew Aaron Burr, and she used to say that he had an eye which no honest woman could meet without a blush. I don’t know whether your fire-eater is a Launcelot, or a Galahad, but that girl’s eye at dinner--”
“Did he blush?” I laughed.
“Not that I saw. But really, old man, confound it, you know! He’s no sort of husband for her. How can he make her happy and how can she make him happy, and how can either of them hit it off with the other the least little bit? She’s expensive, he’s not; she’s up-to-date, he’s not; she’s of the great world, he’s provincial. She’s all derision, he’s all faith. Why, hang it, old boy, what does she want him for?”
Beverly’s handsome brow was actually furrowed with his problem; and, as I certainly could furnish him no solution for it, we stood in silence on the post-office steps. “What can she want him for?” he repeated. Then he threw it off lightly with one of his chuckles. “So glad I’ve no daughters to marry! Well--I must go draw some money.”
He took himself off with a certain alacrity, giving an impatient cut with his stick at a sparrow in the middle of Worship Street, nor did I see him again this day, although, after hurriedly getting my letters (for the starting hour of the boat had now drawn near), I followed where he had gone down Court Street, and his cosmopolitan figure would have been easy to descry at any distance along that scantily peopled pavement. He had evidently found the bank and was getting his money.
David of the yellow heir and his limpid-looking bride were on the horrible little excursion boat, watching for me and keeping with some difficulty a chair next themselves that I might not have to stand up all the way; and, as I came aboard, the bride called out to me her relief, she had made sure that I would be late.
“David said you wouldn’t,” she announced in her clear up-country accent across the parasols and heads of huddled tourists, “but I told him a gentleman that’s late to three meals aivry day like as not would forget boats can’t be kept hot in the kitchen for you.”
I took my place in the chair beside her as hastily as possible, for there is nothing that I so much dislike as being made conspicuous for any reason whatever; and my thanks to her were, I fear, less gracious in their manner than should have been the case. Nor did she find me, I must suppose, as companionable during this excursion--during the first part of it, at any rate--as a limpid-looking bride, who has kept at some pains a seat beside her for a single gentleman, has the right to expect; the brief hours of this morning had fed my preoccupation too richly, and I must often have fallen silent.
The horrible little tug, or ferry, or wherry, or whatever its contemptible inconvenience makes it fitting that this unclean and snail-like craft should be styled, cast off and began to lumber along the edges of the town with its dense cargo of hats and parasols and lunch parcels. We were a most extraordinary litter of man and womankind. There was the severe New England type, improving each shining hour, and doing it in bleak costume and with a thoroughly northeast expression; there were pink sunbonnets from (I should imagine) Spartanburg, or Charlotte, or Greenville; there were masculine boots which yet bore incrusted upon their heels the red mud of Aiken or of Camden; there was one fat, jewelled exhalation who spoke of Palm Beach with the true stockyard twang, and looked as if she swallowed a million every morning for breakfast, and God knows how many more for the ensuing repasts; she was the only detestable specimen among us; sunbonnets, boots, and even ungenial New England proved on acquaintance kindly, simple, enterprising Americans; yet who knows if sunbonnets and boots and all of us wouldn’t have become just as detestable had we but been as she was, swollen and puffy with the acute indigestion of sudden wealth?
This reflection made me charitable, which I always like to be, and I imparted it to the bride.
“My!” she said. And I really don’t know what that meant.
But presently I understood well why people endured the discomfort of this journey. I forgot the cinders which now and then showered upon us, and the heat of the sun, and the crowded chairs; I forgot the boat and myself, in looking at the passing shores. Our course took us round Kings Port on three sides. The calm, white town spread out its width and length beneath a blue sky softer than the tenderest dream; the white steeples shone through the enveloping brightness, taking to each other, and to the distant roofs beneath them, successive and changing relations, while the dwindling mass of streets and edifices followed more slowly the veering of the steeples, folded upon itself, and refolded, opened into new shapes and closed again, dwindling always, and always white and beautiful; and as the far-off vision of it held the eye, the few masts along the wharves grew thin and went out into invisibility, the spires became as masts, the distant drawbridge through which we had passed sank down into a mere stretching line, and shining Kings Port was dissolved in the blue of water and of air.
The curving and the narrowing of the river took it at last from view; and after it disappeared the spindling chimneys and their smoke, which were along the bank above the town and bridge, leaving us to progress through the solitude of marsh and wood and shore. The green levels of stiff salt grass closed in upon the breadth of water, and we wound among them, looking across their silence to the deeper silence of the woods that bordered them, the brooding woods, the pines and the liveoaks, misty with the motionless hanging moss, and misty also in that Southern air that deepened when it came among their trunks to a caressing, mysterious, purple veil. Every line of this landscape, the straight forest top, the feathery breaks in it of taller trees, the curving marsh, every line and every hue and every sound inscrutably spoke sadness. I heard a mocking-bird once in some blossoming wild fruit tree that we gradually reached and left gradually behind; and more than once I saw other blossoms, and the yellow of the trailing jessamine; but the bird could not sing the silence away, and spring with all her abundance could not hide this spiritual autumn.
Dreams, a land of dreams, where even the high noon itself was dreamy; a melting together of earth and air and water in one eternal gentleness of revery! Whence came the melancholy of this? I had seen woods as solitary and streams as silent, I had felt nature breathing upon me a greater awe; but never before such penetrating and quiet sadness. I only know that this is the perpetual mood of those Southern shores, those rivers that wind in from the ocean among their narrowing marshes and their hushed forests, and that it does not come from any memory of human hopes and disasters, but from the elements themselves.
So did we move onward, passing in due time another bridge and a few dwellings and some excavations, until the river grew quite narrow, and there ahead was the landing at Live Oaks, with negroes idly watching for us, and a launch beside the bank, and Charley and Hortense Rieppe about to step into it. Another man stood up in the launch and talked to them where they were on the landing platform, and pointed down the river as we approached; but evidently he did not point at us. I looked hastily to see what he was indicating to them, but I could see nothing save the solitary river winding away between the empty woods and marshes.
So this was Hortense Rieppe! It was not wonderful that she had caused young John to lose his heart, or, at any rate, his head and his senses; nor was it wonderful that Charley, with his little bulging eyes, should take her in his launch whenever she would go; the wonderful thing was that John, at his age and with his nature, should have got over it--if he had got over it! I felt it tingling in me; any man would. Steel wasp indeed!
She was slender, and oh, how well dressed! She watched the passengers get off the boat, and I could not tell you from that first sight of her what her face was like, but only her hair, the sunburnt amber of its masses making one think of Tokay or Chateau-Yquem. She was watching me, I felt, and then saw; and as soon as I was near she spoke to me without moving, keeping one gloved hand lightly posed upon the railing of the platform, so that her long arm was bent with perfect ease and grace. I swear that none but a female eye could have detected any toboggan fire-escape.
Her words dropped with the same calculated deliberation, the same composed and rich indifference. “These gardens are so beautiful.”
Such was her first remark, chosen with some purpose, I knew quite well; and I observed that I hoped I was not too late for their full perfection, if too late to visit them in her company.
She turned her head slightly toward Charley. “We have been enjoying them so much.”
It was of absorbing interest to feel simultaneously in these brief speeches he vouchsafed--speeches consummate in their inexpressive flatness--the intentional coldness and the latent heat of the creature. Since Natchez and Mobile (or whichever of them it had been that had witnessed her beginnings) she had encountered many men and women, those who could be of use to her and those who could not; and in dealing with them she had tempered and chiselled her insolence to a perfect instrument, to strike or to shield. And of her greatest gift, also, she was entirely aware--how could she help being, with her evident experience? She knew that round her whole form swam a delicious, invisible sphere, a distillation that her veriest self sent forth, as gardenias do their perfume, moving where she moved and staying where she stayed, and compared with which wine was a feeble vapor for a man to get drunk on.
“Flowers are always so delightful.”
That was her third speech, pronounced just like the others, in a low, clear voice--simplicity arrived at by much well-practiced complexity. And she still looked at Charley.
Charley now responded in his little banker accent. “It is a magnificent collection.” This he said looking at me, and moving a highly polished finger-nail along a very slender mustache.
The eyes of Hortense now for a moment glanced at the mixed company of boat-passengers, who were beginning to be led off in pilgrim groups by the appointed guides.
“We were warned it would be too crowded,” she remarked.
Charley was looking at her foot. I can’t say whether or not the two light taps that the foot now gave upon the floor of the landing brought out for me a certain impatience which I might otherwise have missed in those last words of hers. From Charley it brought out, I feel quite sure, the speech which (in some form) she had been expecting from him as her confederate in this unwelcome and inopportune interview with me, and which his less highly schooled perceptions had not suggested to him until prompted by her.
“I should have been very glad to include you in our launch party if I had known you were coming here to-day,” lied little Charley.
“Thank you so much!” I murmured; and I fancy that after this Hortense hated me worse than ever. Well, why should I play her game? If anybody had any claim upon me, was it she? I would get as much diversion as I could from this encounter.
Hortense had looked at Charley when she spoke for my benefit, and it now pleased me very much to look at him when I spoke for hers.
“I could almost give up the gardens for the sake of returning with you,” I said to him.
This was most successful in producing a perceptible silence before Hortense said, “Do come.”
I wanted to say to her, “You are quite splendid--as splendid as you look, through and through! You wouldn’t have run away from any battle of Chattanooga!” But what I did say was, “These flowers here will fade, but may I not hope to see you again in Kings Port?”
She was looking at me with eyes half closed; half closed for the sake of insolence--and better observation; when eyes like that take on drowsiness, you will be wise to leave all your secrets behind you, locked up in the bank, or else toss them right down on the open table. Well, I tossed mine down, thereto precipitated by a warning from the stranger in the launch:--
“We shall need all the tide we can get.”
“I’m sure you’d be glad to know,” I then said immediately (to Charley, of course), “that Miss La Heu, whose dog you killed, is back at her work as usual this morning.”
“Thank you,” returned Charley. “If there could be any chance for me to replace--”
“Miss La Heu is her name?” inquired Hortense. “I did not catch it yesterday. She works, you say?”
“At the Woman’s Exchange. She bakes cakes for weddings--among her other activities.”
“So interesting!” said Hortense; and bowing to me, she allowed the spellbound Charley to help her down into the launch.
Each step of the few that she had to take was upon unsteady footing, and each was taken with slow security and grace, and with a mastery of her skirts so complete that they seemed to do it of themselves, falling and folding in the soft, delicate curves of discretion.
For the sake of not seeming too curious about this party, I turned from watching it before the launch had begun to move, and it was immediately hidden from me by the bank, so that I did not see it get away. As I crossed an open space toward the gardens I found myself far behind the other pilgrims, whose wandering bands I could half discern among winding walks and bordering bushes. I was soon taken into somewhat reprimanding charge by an admirable, if important, negro, who sighted me from a door beneath the porch of the house, and advanced upon me speedily. From him I learned at once the rule of the place, that strangers were not allowed to “go loose,” as he expressed it; and recognizing the perfect propriety of this restriction, I was humble, and even went so far as to put myself right with him by quite ample purchases of the beautiful flowers that he had for sale; some of these would be excellent for the up-country bride, who certainly ought to have repentance from me in some form for my silence as we had come up the river: the scenery had caused me most ungallantly to forget her.
My rule-breaking turned out all to my advantage. The admirable and important negro was so pacified by my liberal amends that he not only placed the flowers which I had bought in a bucket of water to wait in freshness until my tour of the gardens should be finished and the moment for me to return upon the boat should arrive, but he also honored me with his own special company; and instead of depositing me in one of the groups of other travellers, he took me to see the sights alone, as if I were somebody too distinguished to receive my impressions with the common herd. Thus I was able to linger here and there, and even to return to certain points for another look.
I shall not attempt to describe the azaleas at Live Oaks. You will understand me quite well, I am sure, when I say that I had heard the people at Mrs. Trevise’s house talk so much about them, and praise them so superlatively, that I was not prepared for much: my experience of life had already included quite a number of azaleas. Moreover, my meeting with Hortense and Charley had taken me far away from flowers. But when that marvelous place burst upon me, I forgot Hortense. I have seen gardens, many gardens, in England, in France; in Italy; I have seen what can be done in great hothouses, and on great terraces; what can be done under a roof, and what can be done in the open air with the aid of architecture and sculpture and ornamental land and water; but no horticulture that I have seen devised by mortal man approaches the unearthly enchantment of the azaleas at Live Oaks. It was not like seeing flowers at all; it was as if there, in the heart of the wild and mystic wood, in the gray gloom of those trees veiled and muffled in their long webs and skeins of hanging moss, a great, magic flame of rose and red and white burned steadily. You looked to see it vanish; you could not imagine such a thing would stay. All idea of individual petals or species was swept away in this glowing maze of splendor, this transparent labyrinth of rose and red and white, through which you looked beyond, into the gray gloom of the hanging moss and the depths of the wild forest trees.
I turned back as often as I could, and to the last I caught glimpses of it, burning, glowing, and shining like some miracle, some rainbow exorcism, with its flooding fumes of orange-rose and red and white, merging magically. It was not until I reached the landing, and made my way on board again, that Hortense returned to my thoughts. She hadn’t come to see the miracle; not she! I knew that better than ever. And who was the other man in the launch?
“Wasn’t it perfectly elegant!” exclaimed the up-country bride. And upon my assenting, she made a further declaration to David: “It’s just aivry bit as good as the Isle of Champagne.”
This I discovered to be a comic opera, mounted with spendthrift brilliance, which David had taken her to see at the town of Gonzales, just before they were married.
As we made our way down the bending river she continued to make many observations to me in that up-country accent of hers, which is a fashion of speech that may be said to differ as widely from the speech of the low-country as cotton differs from rice. I began to fear that, in spite of my truly good intentions, I was again failing to be as “attentive” as the occasion demanded; and so I presented her with my floral tribute.
She was immediately arch. “I’d surely be depriving somebody!” and on this I got to the full her limpid look.
I assured her that this would not be so, and pointed to the other flowers I had.