Part 36

There were two other places, I may add, where one could but work the impression for all it was, in the modern phrase, “worth,” and where I had, I may venture to say, the sense of making as much of it as was likely ever to be made again. Meanings without end were to be read, under tuition, into one of these, which was neither more nor less than a slightly shy, yet after all quite serene place of refection, a luncheon-room or tea-house, denominated for quaint reasons an “Exchange”—_the_ very Exchange in fact lately commemorated in a penetrating study, already much known to fame, of the little that is left of the local society. My tuition, at the hands of my ingenious comrade, was the very best it was possible to have. Nothing, usually, is more wonderful than the quantity of significant character that, with such an example set, the imagination may recognize in the scantest group of features, objects, persons. I fantastically feasted here, at my luncheon-table, not only, as the genius of the place demanded, on hot chocolate, sandwiches and “Lady Baltimore” cake (this last a most delectable compound), but on the exact _nuance_ of oddity, of bravery, of reduced gentility, of irreducible superiority, to which the opening of such an establishment, without derogation, by the proud daughters of war-wasted families, could exquisitely testify. They hovered, the proud impoverished daughters, singly or in couples, behind the counter—a counter, again, delectably charged; they waited, inscrutably, irreproachably, yet with all that peculiarly chaste _bonhomie_ of the Southern tone, on the customers’ wants, even coming to ascertain these at the little thrifty tables; and if the drama and its adjusted theatre really contained all the elements of history, tragedy, comedy, irony, that a pair of expert romancers, closely associated for the hour, were eager to evoke, the scene would have been, I can only say, supreme of its kind. That desire of the artist to linger where the breath of a “subject,” faintly stirring the air, reaches his vigilant sense, would here stay my steps—as this very influence was in fact, to his great good fortune, to stay those of my companion. The charm I speak of, the charm to cherish, however, was most exhaled for me in other conditions—conditions that scarce permit of any direct reference to their full suggestiveness. If I alluded above to the vivid Charleston background, where its “mystification” most scenically persists, the image is all rounded and complete, for memory, in this connection at which—as the case is of an admirably mature and preserved interior—I can only glance as I pass. The puzzlement elsewhere is in the sense that though the elements of earth and air, the colour, the tone, the light, the sweetness in fine, linger on, the “old South” could have had no such unmitigated mildness, could never have seen itself as subject to such strange feminization. The feminization is there just to promote for us some eloquent antithesis; just to make us say that whereas the ancient order was masculine, fierce and moustachioed, the present is at the most a sort of sick lioness who has so visibly parted with her teeth and claws that we may patronizingly walk all round her.

This image really gives us the best word for the general effect of Charleston—that of the practically vacant cage which used in the other time to emit sounds, even to those of the portentous shaking of bars, audible as far away as in the listening North. It is the vacancy that is a thing by itself, a thing that makes us endlessly wonder. How, in an at all complex, a “great political,” society, can _everything_ so have gone?—assuming indeed that, under this aegis, very much ever had come. How can everything so have gone that the only “Southern” book of any distinction published for many a year is _The Souls of Black Folk_, by that most accomplished of members of the negro race, Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois? Had the _only_ focus of life then been Slavery?—from the point onward that Slavery had reached a quarter of a century before the War, so that with the extinction of that interest none other of any sort was left. To say “yes” seems the only way to account for the degree of the vacancy, and yet even as I form that word I meet as a reproach the face of the beautiful old house I just mentioned, whose ample spaces had so unmistakably echoed to the higher amenities that one seemed to feel the accumulated traces and tokens gradually come out of their corners like blest objects taken one by one from a reliquary worn with much handling. The note of such haunted chambers as these—haunted structurally, above all, quite as by the ghost of the grand style—was not, certainly, a thinness of reverberation; so that I had to take refuge here in the fact that everything appeared thoroughly to _antedate_, to refer itself to the larger, the less vitiated past that had closed a quarter of a century or so before the War, before the fatal time when the South, mono-maniacal at the parting of the ways, “elected” for extension and conquest. The admirable old house of the stately hall and staircase, of the charming coved and vaulted drawing-room, of the precious mahogany doors, the tall unsophisticated portraits, the delicate dignity of welcome, owed nothing of its noble identity, nothing at all appreciable, to the monomania. However that might be, moreover, I kept finding the mere melancholy charm reassert itself where it could—the charm, I mean, of the flower-crowned waste that was, by my measure, what the monomania had most prepared itself to bequeathe. In the old Cemetery by the lagoon, to which I have already alluded, this influence distils an irresistible poetry—as one has courage to say even in remembering how disproportionately, almost anywhere on the American scene, the general place of interment is apt to be invited to testify for the presence of charm. The golden afternoon, the low, silvery, seaward horizon, as of wide, sleepy, game-haunted inlets and reed-smothered banks, possible site of some Venice that had never mustered, the luxury, in the mild air, of shrub and plant and blossom that the pale North can but distantly envy; something that I scarce know how to express but as the proud humility of the whole idle, easy loveliness, made even the restless analyst, for the hour, among the pious inscriptions that scarce ever belie the magniloquent clime or the inimitable tradition, feel himself really capable of the highest Carolinian pitch.

To what height did he rise, on the other hand, on being introduced another day, at no great distance from this point, and where the silvery seaward outlook still prevails, to the lapsed and readministered residence, also already named, that was to give him his one glimpse of any local modernism? This was the nearest approach for him to any reanimation of the flower-crowned waste, and he has still in memory, for symbol of the modernism, a vision of the great living, blazing fire of logs round which, as the afternoon had turned wet and chill, this contribution to his view of a possible new society, a possible youthful tone, a possible Southern future in short, had disposed itself. There were men here, in the picture—a few, and young ones: that odd other sense as of a becraped, feminized world was accordingly for the moment in abeyance. For the moment, I say advisedly—for the moment only; since what aspect of the social scene anywhere in the States strikes any second glance as exempt from that condition? It is overwhelmingly feminized or it _is_ not—that is the formula with which its claim to existence pierces the ear. Lest, however, the recognition again of this truth should lead me too far, I content myself with noting a matter perhaps more relevant just here—one’s inevitable consciousness, in presence of the “new” manifestations, that the South is in the predicament of having to be tragic, as it were, in order to beguile. It was very hard, I said to myself, and very cruel and very perverse, and above all very strange; but what “use” had the restless analyst here for a lively and oblivious type? Was there not something in the lively and oblivious that, given the materials employed for it and the effect produced by it, threw one back with renewed relish on the unforgetting and the devoted, on the resentful and even, if need might be, the vindictive? These things would represent certainly a bad _état d’âme_—and was one thus cold-bloodedly, critically, to wish such a condition perpetuated? The answer to that seemed to be, monstrously enough, “Well, yes—for these people; since it appears the only way by which they can be interesting. See when they try other ways! Their sadness and sorrow, as my friend called it, has at least for it that it has been expensively produced. Everything else, on the other hand, anything that may pretend to be better—oh, so cheaply!”

One had already, in moving about, winced often enough at sight of where one was, intellectually, to “land,” under these last consistencies of observation and reflection; so I may put it here that I _didn’t_, after all, land, but recoiled rather and forbore, making my skiff fast to no conclusion whatever, only pushing out again and letting it, for a supreme impression and to prepare in the aftertime the best remembrance, drift where it would. So, accordingly, the aftertime having a little arrived, it touches now once more of its own motion, carries me back and puts me ashore on the one spot where the impression had been perfectly felicitous. I have already named the place—under the mild, the bright south wall of St. Michael’s Church, where the whole precinct offered the full-blown Southern spring, that morning, the finest of all canvases to embroider. The canvas here, yes, was of the best; not only did Charleston show me none other so good, but I was doubtless to have met, South or North, none of an equal happy grain and form. The high, complicated, inflated spire of the church has the sincerity, approved of time, that is so rare, over the land, in the work of man’s hands, laden though these be with the millions he offers as a vain bribe to it; and in the sweet old churchyard ancient authority seemed to me, on the occasion of my visit, to sit, among the sun-warmed tombs and the interrelated slabs and the extravagant flowers, as on the sole cushion the general American bareness in such connections had left it. There was more still of association and impression; I found, under this charm, I confess, character in every feature. Even in the much-maintained interior revolutions and renovations have respected its sturdy, rather sombre essence: the place feels itself, in the fine old dusky archaic way, the constituted temple of a faith—achieves, in a word, the air of reality that one had seen in every other such case, from town to town and from village to village, missed with an unconsciousness that had to do duty for success.

XIV FLORIDA

I

It is the penalty of the state of receiving too many impressions of too many things that when the question arises of giving some account of these a small sharp anguish attends the act of selection and the necessity of omission. They have so hung together, have so almost equally contributed, for the fond critic, to the total image, the chapter of experience, whatever such may have been, that to detach and reject is like mutilation or falsification; the history of any given impression residing often largely in others that have led to it or accompanied it. This I find the case, again and again, with my American memories; there was something of a hundred of those I may not note in each of those I may, and I feel myself, amid the swarm, pluck but a fruit or two from any branch. When I think of Florida, for instance, I think of twenty matters involved in the start and the approach; I think of the moist, the slightly harsh, Sunday morning under the portico of the Charleston Hotel; I think of the inauspicious drizzle about the yellow omnibus, archaic and “provincial,” that awaited the departing guests—remembering how these antique vehicles, repudiated, rickety “stages” of the age ignorant of trolleys, affected me here and there as the quaintest, most immemorial of American things, the persistent use of which surely represented the very superstition of the past. I think of the gentleman, in the watchful knot, who, while our luggage emerged, was moved to say to me, for some reason, “I guess we manage our travelling here better than in _your_ country!”—whereby he so easily triumphed, blank as I had to remain as to the country he imputed to me. I think of the inimitable detachment with which, at the very moment he spoke, the negro porter engaged at the door of the conveyance put straight down into the mud of the road the dressing-bag I was obliged, a few minutes later, in our close-pressed company, to nurse on my knees; and I go so far, even, as almost to lose myself in the sense of other occasions evoked by that reminiscence; this marked anomaly, the apparently deep-seated inaptitude of the negro race at large for any alertness of personal service, having been throughout a lively surprise.

One had counted, with some eagerness, in moving southward, on the virtual opposite—on finding this deficiency, encountered right and left at the North, beautifully corrected; one had remembered the old Southern tradition, the house alive with the scramble of young darkies for the honour of fetching and carrying; and one was to recognize, no doubt, at the worst, its melancholy ghost. Its very ghost, however, by my impression, had ceased to walk; or, if this be not the case, the old planters, the cotton gentry, were the people in the world the worst ministered to. I could have shed tears for them at moments, reflecting that it was for _this_ they had fought and fallen. The negro waiter at the hotel is in general, by an oddity of his disposition, so zealous to break for you two or three eggs into a tumbler, or to drop for you three or four lumps of sugar into a coffee-cup, that he scarce waits, in either case, for your leave; but these struck me everywhere as the limit of his accomplishment. He lends himself sufficiently to the rough, gregarious bustle of crowded feeding-places, but seemed to fall below the occasion on any appeal to his individual promptitude. Which reflections, doubtless, exactly illustrate my profession of a moment ago as to the insidious continuity, the close inter-relation, of observed phenomena. I might with a little audacity insist still further on that—which was in fact what I had originally quite promised myself to do. I certainly should have been half heart-broken at the hour itself, for example, had I _then_ had to estimate as pure waste my state of sensibility to the style and stamp of my companions; aspects and sounds burned into my memory, as I find, but none the less overstraining, I am obliged to feel, the frame of these remarks. So vivid on the spot was the sense of these particular human and “sectional” appearances, and of certain others of the same cluster, that they remained for me afterwards beautifully _placed_—placed in this connection of the pilgrimage to Palm Beach, and not the less relevant for being incidental. I was to find the obvious “bagman,” the lusty “drummer” of the Southern trains and inns (if there be not, as yet unrevealed to me, some later fond diminutive of designation for the ubiquitous commercial traveller)—I was to find, I say, this personage promptly insist on a category of his own, a category which, at the moments I here recall, loomed so large as to threaten to block out of view almost every other object.

Was I the victim of grave mischance? was my infelicity exceptional?—or was the type with which the scene so abounded, were the specimens I was thus to treasure, all of the common class and the usual frequency? I was to treasure them as specimens of something I had surely never yet so _undisputedly_ encountered. They went, all by themselves, as it were, so far—were, as to facial character, vocal tone, primal rawness of speech, general accent and attitude, extraordinarily base and vulgar; and it was interesting to make out why this fact took on, for my edification, so unwonted an intensity. The fact of the influence, on the whole man, of a sordid and ravenous habit, was naturally no new thing; one had met him enough about the world, the brawny peddler more or less gorged with the fruits of misrepresentation and blatant and brazen in the key of his “special line of goods” and the measure of his need. But if the figure was immemorial, why did it now usurp a value out of proportion to other values? What, for instance, were its remorseless reasons for treating the restless analyst, at the breakfast-hour perhaps above all, to so lurid a vision of its triumph? He had positively come to associate the breakfast-hour, from hotel to dining-car and from dining-car to hotel, with the perfect security of this exhibition, the sight of the type in completely unchallenged possession. I scarce know why my sensibility, at the juncture in question, so utterly gave way to it; why I appealed in vain from one of these so solemnly-feeding presences to another. They refused to the wondering mind any form of relief; they insisted, as I say, with the strange crudity of their air of commercial truculence, on being exactly as “low” as they liked. And the affirmation was made, in the setting of the great greasy inelegant room, as quietly as possible, and without the least intention of offence: there were ladies and children all about—though indeed there may have been sometimes _but_ the lone breakfasting child to reckon with; the little pale, carnivorous, coffee-drinking ogre or ogress who prowls down in advance of its elders, engages a table—dread vision!—and has the “run” of the bill of fare.

The great blank decency, at all events, was no more broken than, on the general American scene, it ever is; yet the apprehension of marks and signs, the trick of speculation, declined none the less to drop. Whom were they constructed, such specimens, to talk with, to talk over, or to talk under, and what form of address or of intercourse, what uttered, what intelligible terms of introduction, of persuasion, of menace, what developed, what specific human process of any sort, was it possible to impute to them? What reciprocities did they imply, what presumptions did they, could they, create? What happened, inconceivably, when such Greeks met such Greeks, such faces looked into such faces, and such sounds, in especial, were exchanged with such sounds? What women did they live with, what women, living with them, could yet leave them as they were? What wives, daughters, sisters, did they in fine make credible; and what, in especial, was the speech, what the manners, what the general dietary, what most the monstrous morning meal, of ladies receiving at such hands the law or the licence of life? Questions, these latter, some of which, all the while, were not imperceptibly answered—save that the vainest, no doubt, was that baffled inquiry as to the thinkable ground, amid such relations, of preliminary confidence. What _was_ preliminary confidence, where it had to reckon so with the minimum of any finished appearance? How, when people were like that, did any one trust any one enough to begin, or understand any one enough to go on, or keep the peace with any one enough to survive? Wasn’t it, however, at last, none the less, the sign of a fallacy somewhere in my impression that the peace _was_ kept, precisely, while I so luxuriously wondered?—the consciousness of which presently led me round to something that was at the least a temporary, a working answer. My friends the drummers bore me company thus, in the smoking-car, through the deepening, sweetening South (where the rain soon gave way to a refinement of mildness) all the way to Savannah; at the end of which time, under the enchantment of the spreading scene, I had more or less issued from my maze.

It was not, probably, that, inflated though they might be, after early refreshment, with the inward conflict of a greater number of strange sacrifices to appetite than I had ever before seen perpetrated at once, they were really more gruesome examples of a class at best disquieting than might elsewhere have been discovered; it was only that, by so sad a law of their situation, they were at once more exposed and less susceptible of bearing exposure. They so became, to my imagination, and by a mere turn of the hand of that precious faculty, something like victims and martyrs, creatures touchingly, tragically doomed. For they hadn’t _asked_, when one reflected, to be almost the only figures in the social landscape—hadn’t wanted the fierce light to beat _all_ on themselves. They hadn’t actively usurped the appearance of carrying on life without aid of any sort from other _kinds_ of persons, other types, presences, classes. If these others were absent it wasn’t _their_ fault; and though they devoured, at a matutinal sitting, thirty little saucers of insane, of delirious food, this was yet a law which, over much of the land, appeared to recognize no difference of application for age, sex, condition or constitution, and it had not in short been their pretension to take over the whole social case. It would have been so different, this case, and the general effect, for the human scene, would have been so different, with a due proportion of other presences, other figures and characters, members of other professions, representatives of other interests, exemplars of other possibilities in man than the mere possibility of getting the better of his fellow-man over a “trade.” Wondrous always to note is this sterility of aspect and this blight of vulgarity, humanly speaking, where a single type has had the game, as one may say, all in its hands. Character is developed to visible fineness only by friction and discipline on a large scale, only by its having to reckon with a complexity of forces—a process which results, at the worst, in a certain amount of social training.