Chapter 3

“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.