“Oh, don’t let’s go back to our fine manners!” he begged comically. “We’ve satisfied each other that we have them! I feel so lonely; and my aunt just now—well, never mind about that. But you really must excuse us about Miss Beaufain, and all that sort of thing. I see it, because I’m of the new generation, since the war, and—well, I’ve been to other places, too. But Aunt Eliza, and all of them, you know, can’t see it. And I wouldn’t have them, either! So I don’t ever attempt to explain to them that the world has to go on. They’d say, ‘We don’t see the necessity!’ When slavery stopped, they stopped, you see, just like a clock. Their hand points to 1865—it has never moved a minute since. And some day”—his voice grew suddenly tender—“they’ll go, one by one, to join the still older ones. And I shall miss them very much.”
For a moment I did not speak, but watched the roses nodding and moving. Then I said: “May I say that I shall miss them, too?”
He looked at me. “Miss our old Kings Port people?” He didn’t invite outsiders to do that!
“Don’t you see how it is?” I murmured. “It was the same thing once with us.”
“The same thing—in the North?” His tone still held me off.
“The same sort of dear old people—I mean charming, peppery, refined, courageous people; in Salem, in Boston, in New York, in every place that has been colonial, and has taken a hand in the game.” And, as certain beloved memories of men and women rose in my mind, I continued: “If you knew some of the Boston elder people as I have known them, you would warm with the same admiration that is filling me as I see your people of Kings Port.”
“But politics?” the young Southerner slowly suggested.
“Oh, hang slavery! Hang the war!” I exclaimed. “Of course, we had a family quarrel. But we were a family once, and a fine one, too! We knew each other, we visited each other, we wrote letters, sent presents, kept up relations; we, in short, coherently joined hands from one generation to another; the fibres of the sons tingled with the current from their fathers, back and back to the old beginnings, to Plymouth and Roanoke and Rip Van Winkle! It’s all gone, all done, all over. You have to be a small, well-knit country for that sort of exquisite personal unitedness. There’s nothing united about these States any more, except Standard Oil and discontent. We’re no longer a small people living and dying for a great idea; we’re a big people living and dying for money. And these ladies of yours—well, they have made me homesick for a national and a social past which I never saw, but which my old people knew. They’re like legends, still living, still warm and with us. In their quiet clean-cut faces I seem to see a reflection of the old serene candlelight we all once talked and danced in—sconces, tall mirrors, candles burning inside glass globes to keep them from the moths and the draft that, of a warm evening, blew in through handsome mahogany doors; the good bright silver; the portraits by Copley and Gilbert Stuart; a young girl at a square piano, singing Moore’s melodies—and Mr. Pinckney or Commodore Perry, perhaps, dropping in for a hot supper!”
John Mayrant was smiling and looking at the graves. “Yes, that’s it; that’s all it,” he mused. “You do understand.”
But I had to finish my flight. “Such quiet faces are gone now in the breathless, competing North: ground into oblivion between the clashing trades of the competing men and the clashing jewels and chandeliers of their competing wives—while yours have lingered on, spared by your very adversity. And that’s why I shall miss your old people when they follow mine—because they’re the last of their kind, the end of the chain, the bold original stock, the great race that made our glory grow and saw that it did grow through thick and thin: the good old native blood of independence.”
I spoke as a man can always speak when he means it; and my listener’s face showed that my words had gone where meant words always go—home to the heart. But he merely nodded at me. His nod, however, telling as it did of a quickly established accord between us, caused me to bring out to this new acquaintance still more of those thoughts which I condescend to expose to very few old ones.
“Haven’t you noticed,” I said, “or don’t you feel it, away down here in your untainted isolation, the change, the great change, that has come over the American people?”
He wasn’t sure.
“They’ve lost their grip on patriotism.”
He smiled. “We did that here in 1861.”
“Oh, no! You left the Union, but you loved what you considered was your country, and you love it still. That’s just my point, just my strange discovery in Kings Port. You retain the thing we’ve lost. Our big men fifty years ago thought of the country, and what they could make it; our big men to-day think of the country and what they can make out of it. Rather different, don’t you see? When I walk about in the North, I merely meet members of trusts or unions—according to the length of the individual’s purse; when I walk about in Kings Port, I meet Americans.—Of course,” I added, taking myself up, “that’s too sweeping a statement. The right sort of American isn’t extinct in the North by any means. But there’s such a commercial deluge of the wrong sort, that the others sometimes seem to me sadly like a drop in the bucket.”
“You certainly understand it all,” John Mayrant repeated. “It’s amazing to find you saying things that I have thought were my own private notions.”
I laughed. “Oh, I fancy there are more than two of us in the country.”
“Even the square piano and Mr. Pinckney,” he went on. “I didn’t suppose anybody had thought things like that, except myself.”
“Oh,” I again said lightly, “any American—any, that is, of the world—who has a colonial background for his family, has thought, probably, very much the same sort of things. Of course it would be all Greek or gibberish to the new people.”
He took me up with animation. “The new people! My goodness, sir, yes! Have you seen them? Have you seen Newport, for instance?” His diction now (and I was to learn it was always in him a sign of heightening intensity) grew more and more like the formal speech of his ancestors. “You have seen Newport?” he said.
“Yes; now and then.”
“But lately, sir? I knew we were behind the times down here, sir, but I had not imagined how much. Not by any means! Kings Port has a long road to go before she will consider marriage provincial and chastity obsolete.”
“Dear me, Mr. Mayrant! Well, I must tell you that it’s not all quite so—so advanced—as that, you know. That’s not the whole of Newport.”
He hastened to explain. “Certainly not, sir! I would not insult the honorable families whom I had the pleasure to meet there, and to whom my name was known because they had retained their good position since the days when my great-uncle had a house and drove four horses there himself. I noticed three kinds of Newport, sir.”
“Three?”
“Yes. Because I took letters; and some of the letters were to people who—who once had been, you know; it was sad to see the thing, sir, so plain against the glaring proximity of the other thing. And so you can divide Newport into those who leave to sell their old family pictures, those who have to buy their old family pictures, and the lucky few who need neither buy nor sell, who are neither goin’ down nor bobbing up, but who have kept their heads above the American tidal wave from the beginning and continue to do so. And I don’t believe that there are any nicer people in the world than those.”
“Nowhere!” I exclaimed. “When Near York does her best, what’s better?—If only those best set the pace!”
“If only!” he assented. “But it’s the others who get into the papers, who dine the drunken dukes, and make poor chambermaids envious a thousand miles inland!”
“There should be a high tariff on drunken dukes,” I said.
“You’ll never get it!” he declared. “It’s the Republican party whose daughters marry them.”
I rocked with enjoyment where I sat; he was so refreshing. And I agreed with him so well. “You’re every bit as good as Miss Beaufain,” I cried.
“Oh, no; oh, no! But I often think if we could only deport the negroes and Newport together to one of our distant islands, how happily our two chief problems would be solved!”
I still rocked. “Newport would, indeed, enjoy your plan for it. Do go on!” I entreated him But he had, for the moment, ceased; and I rose to stretch my legs and saunter among the old headstones and the wafted fragrance.
His aunt (or his cousin, or whichever of them it had been) was certainly right as to his inheriting a pleasant and pointed gift of speech; and a responsive audience helps us all. Such an audience I certainly was for young John Mayrant, yet beneath the animation that our talk had filled his eyes with lay (I seemed to see or feel) that other mood all the time, the mood which had caused the girl behind the counter to say to me that he was “anxious about something.” The unhappy youth, I was gradually to learn, was much more than that—he was in a tangle of anxieties. He talked to me as a sick man turns in bed from pain; the pain goes on, but the pillow for a while is cool.
Here there broke upon us a little interruption, so diverting, so utterly like the whole quaint tininess of Kings Port, that I should tell it to you, even if it did not bear directly upon the matter which was beginning so actively to concern me—the love difficulties of John Mayrant.
It was the letter-carrier.
We had come, from our secluded seats, round a corner, and so by the vestry door and down the walk beside the church, and as I read to myself the initials upon the stones wherewith the walk was paved, I drew near the half-open gateway upon Worship Street. The postman was descending the steps of the post-office opposite. He saw me through the gate and paused. He knew me, too! My face, easily marked out amid the resident faces he was familiar with, had at once caught his attention; very likely he, too, had by now learned that I was interested in the battle of Cowpens; but I did not ask him this. He crossed over and handed me a letter.
“No use,” he said most politely, “takin’ it away down to Mistress Trevise’s when you’re right here, sir. Northern mail eight hours late to-day,” he added, and bowing, was gone upon his route.
My home letter, from a man, an intimate running mate of mine, soon had my full attention, for on the second page it said:—
“I have just got back from accompanying her to Baltimore. One of us went as far as Washington with her on the train. We gave her a dinner yesterday at the March Hare by way of farewell. She tried our new toboggan fire-escape on a bet. Clean from the attic, my boy. I imagine our native girls will rejoice at her departure. However, nobody’s engaged to her, at least nobody here. How many may fancy themselves so elsewhere I can’t say. Her name is Hortense Rieppe.”
I suppose I must have been silent after finishing this letter.
“No bad news, I trust?” John Mayrant inquired.
I told him no; and presently we had resumed our seats in the quiet charm of the flowers.
I now spoke with an intention. “What a lot you seem to have seen and suffered of the advanced Newport!”
The intention wrought its due and immediate effect. “Yes. There was no choice. I had gone to Newport upon—upon an urgent matter, which took me among those people.”
He dwelt upon the pictures that came up in his mind. But he took me away again from the “urgent matter.”
“I saw,” he resumed more briskly, “fifteen or twenty—most amazing, sir!—young men, some of them not any older than I am, who had so many millions that they could easily—” he paused, casting about for some expression adequate—“could buy Kings Port and put it under a glass case in a museum—my aunts and all—and never know it!” He livened with disrespectful mirth over his own picture of his aunts, purchased by millionaire steel or coal for the purposes of public edification.
“And a very good thing if they could be,” I declared.
He wondered a moment. “My aunts? Under a glass case?”
“Yes, indeed—and with all deference be it said! They’d be more invaluable, more instructive, than the classics of a thousand libraries.”
He was prepared not to be pleased. “May I ask to whom and for what?”
“Why, you ought to see! You’ve just been saying it yourself. They would teach our bulging automobilists, our unlicked boy cubs, our alcoholic girls who shout to waiters for ‘high-balls’ on country club porches—they would teach these wallowing creatures, whose money has merely gilded their bristles, what American refinement once was. The manners we’ve lost, the decencies we’ve banished, the standards we’ve lowered, their light is still flickering in this passing generation of yours. It’s the last torch. That’s why I wish it could, somehow, pass on the sacred fire.”
He shook his head. “They don’t want the sacred fire. They want the high-balls—and they have money enough to be drunk straight through the next world!” He was thoughtful. “They are the classics,” he added.
I didn’t see that he had gone back to my word. “Roman Empire, you mean?”
“No, the others; the old people we’re bidding good-by to. Roman Republic! Simple lives, gallant deeds, and one great uniting inspiration. Liberty winning her spurs. They were moulded under that, and they are our true American classics. Nothing like them will happen again.”
“Perhaps,” I suggested, “our generation is uneasily living in a ‘bad quarter-of-an-hour’—good old childhood gone, good new manhood not yet come, and a state of chicken-pox between whiles.” And on this I made to him a much-used and consoling quotation about the old order changing.
“Who says that?” he inquired; and upon my telling him, “I hope so,” he said, “I hope so. But just now Uncle Sam ‘aspires to descend.’”
I laughed at his counter-quotation. “You know your classics, if you don’t know Tennyson.”
He, too, laughed. “Don’t tell Aunt Eliza!”
“Tell her what?”
“That I didn’t recognize Tennyson. My Aunt Eliza educated me—and she thinks Tennyson about the only poet worth reading since—well, since Byron and Sir Walter at the very latest!”
“Neither she nor Sir Walter come down to modern poetry—or to alcoholic girls.” His tone, on these last words, changed.
Again, as when he had said “an urgent matter,” I seemed to feel hovering above us what must be his ceaseless preoccupation; and I wondered if he had found, upon visiting Newport, Miss Hortense sitting and calling for “high-balls.”
I gave him a lead. “The worst of it is that a girl who would like to behave herself decently finds that propriety puts her out of the running. The men flock off to the other kind.”
He was following me with watching eyes.
“And you know,” I continued, “what an anxious Newport parent does on finding her girl on the brink of being a failure.”
“I can imagine,” he answered, “that she scolds her like the dickens.”
“Oh, nothing so ineffectual! She makes her keep up with the others, you know. Makes her do things she’d rather not do.”
“High-balls, you mean?”
“Anything, my friend; anything to keep up.”
He had a comic suggestion. “Driven to drink by her mother! Well, it’s, at any rate, a new cause for old effects.” He paused. It seemed strangely to bring to him some sort of relief. “That would explain a great deal,” he said.
Was he thus explaining to himself his lady-love, or rather certain Newport aspects of her which had, so to speak, jarred upon his Kings Port notions of what a lady might properly do? I sat on my gravestone with my wonder, and my now-dawning desire to help him (if improbably I could), to get him out of it, if he were really in it; and he sat on his gravestone opposite, with the path between us, and the little noiseless breeze rustling the white irises, and bearing hither and thither the soft perfume of the roses. His boy face, lean, high-strung, brooding, was full of suppressed contentions. I made myself, during our silence, state his possible problem: “He doesn’t love her any more, he won’t admit this to himself; he intends to go through with it, and he’s catching at any justification of what he has seen in her that has chilled him, so that he may, poor wretch! coax back his lost illusion.” Well, if that was it, what in the world could I, or anybody, do about it?
His next remark was transparent enough. “Do you approve of young ladies smoking?”
I met his question with another: “What reasons can be urged against it?”
He was quick. “Then you don’t mind it?” There was actual hope in the way he rushed at this.
I laughed. “I didn’t say I didn’t mind it.” (As a matter of fact I do mind it; but it seemed best not to say so to him.)
He fell off again. “I certainly saw very nice people doing it up there.”
I filled this out. “You’ll see very nice people doing it everywhere.”
“Not in Kings Port! At least, not my sort of people!” He stiffly proclaimed this.
I tried to draw him out. “But is there, after all, any valid objection to it?”
But he was off on a preceding speculation. “A mother or any parent,” he said, “might encourage the daughter to smoke, too. And the girl might take it up so as not to be thought peculiar where she was, and then she might drop it very gladly.”
I became specific. “Drop it, you mean, when she came to a place where doing it would be thought—well, in bad style?”
“Or for the better reason,” he answered, “that she didn’t really like it herself.”
“How much you don’t ‘really like it’ yourself!” I remarked.
This time he was slow. “Well—well—why need they? Are not their lips more innocent than ours? Is not the association somewhat—?”
“My dear fellow,” I interrupted, “the association is, I think you’ll have to agree, scarcely of my making!”
“That’s true enough,” he laughed. “And, as you say, very nice people do it everywhere. But not here. Have you ever noticed,” he now inquired with continued transparency, “how much harder they are on each other than we are on them?”
“Oh, yes! I’ve noticed that.” I surmised it was this sort of thing he had earlier choked himself off from telling me in his unfinished complaint about his aunt; but I was to learn later that on this occasion it was upon the poor boy himself and not on the smoking habits of Miss Rieppe, that his aunt had heavily descended. I also reflected that if cigarettes were the only thing he deprecated in the lady of his choice, the lost illusion might be coaxed back. The trouble was that deprecated something fairly distant from cigarettes. The cake was my quite sufficient trouble; it stuck in my throat worse than the probably magnified gossip I had heard; this, for the present, I could manage to swallow.
He came out now with a personal note. “I suppose you think I’m a ninny.”
“Never in the wildest dream!”
“Well, but too innocent for a man, anyhow.”
“That would be an insult,” I declared laughingly.
“For I’m not innocent in the least. You’ll find we’re all men here, just as much as any men in the North you could pick out. South Carolina has never lacked sporting blood, sir. But in Newport—well, sir, we gentlemen down here, when we wish a certain atmosphere and all that, have always been accustomed to seek the demi-monde.”
“So it was with us until the women changed it.”
“The women, sir?” He was innocent!
“The ‘ladies,’ as you Southerners so chivalrously continue to style them. The rich new fashionable ladies became so desperate in their competition for men’s allegiance that they—well, some of them would, in the point of conversation, greatly scandalize the smart demi-monde.”
He nodded. “Yes. I heard men say things in drawing-rooms to ladies that a gentleman here would have been taken out and shot for. And don’t you agree with me, sir, that good taste itself should be a sort of religion? I don’t mean to say anything sacrilegious, but it seems to me that even if one has ceased to believe some parts of the Bible, even if one does not always obey the Ten Commandments, one is bound, not as a believer but as a gentleman, to remember the difference between grossness and refinement, between excess and restraint—that one can have and keep just as the pagan Greeks did, a moral elegance.”
He astonished me, this ardent, ideal, troubled boy; so innocent regarding the glaring facts of our new prosperity, so finely penetrating as to some of the mysteries of the soul. But he was of old Huguenot blood, and of careful and gentle upbringing; and it was delightful to find such a young man left upon our American soil untainted by the present fashionable idolatries.
“I bow to your creed of ‘moral elegance,’” I cried. “It never dies. It has outlasted all the mobs and all the religions.”
“They seemed to think,” he continued, pursuing his Newport train of thought, “that to prove you were a dead game sport you must behave like—behave like—”
“Like a herd of swine,” I suggested.
He was merry. “Ah, if they only would—completely!”
“Completely what?”
“Behave so. Rush over a steep place into the sea.”
We sat in the quiet relish of his Scriptural idea, and the western crimson and the twilight began to come and mingle with the perfumes. John Mayrant’s face changed from its vivacity to a sort of pensive wistfulness, which, for all the dash and spirit in his delicate features, was somehow the final thing one got from the boy’s expression. It was as though the noble memories of his race looked out of his eyes, seeking new chances for distinction, and found instead a soil laid waste, an empty fatherland, a people benumbed past rousing. Had he not said, “Poor Kings Port!” as he tapped the gravestone? Moral elegance could scarcely permit a sigh more direct.
“I am glad that you believe it never dies,” he resumed. “And I am glad to find somebody to—talk to, you know. My friends here are everything friends and gentlemen should be, but they don’t—I suppose it’s because they have not had my special experiences.”
I sat waiting for the boy to go on with it. How plainly he was telling me of his “special experiences”! He and his creed were not merely in revolt against the herd of swine; there would be nothing special in that; I had met people before who were that; but he was tied by honor, and soon to be tied by the formidable nuptial knot, to a specimen devotee of the cult. He shouldn’t marry her if he really did not want to, and I could stop it! But how was I to begin spinning the first faint web of plan how I might stop it, unless he came right out with the whole thing? I didn’t believe he was the man to do that ever, even under the loosening inspiration of drink. In wine lies truth, no doubt; but within him, was not moral elegance the bottom truth that would, even in his cups, keep him a gentleman, and control all such revelations? He might smash the glasses, but he would not speak of his misgivings as to Hortense Rieppe.
He began again, “Nor do I believe that a really nice girl would continue to think as those few do, if she once got safe away from them. Why, my dear sir,” he stretched out his hand in emphasis, “you do not have to do anything untimely and extreme if you are in good earnest a dead game sport. The time comes, and you meet the occasion as the duck swims. There was one of them—the right kind.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Why—you’re leaning against her headstone!”
The little incongruity made us both laugh, but it was only for the instant. The tender mood of the evening, and all that we had said, sustained the quiet and almost grave undertone of our conference. My own quite unconscious act of rising from the grave and standing before him on the path to listen brought back to us our harmonious pensiveness.
“She was born in Kings Port, but educated in Europe. I don’t suppose until the time came that she ever did anything harder than speak French, or play the piano, or ride a horse. She had wealth and so had her husband. He was killed in the war, and so were two of her sons. The third was too young to go. Their fortune was swept away, but the plantation was there, and the negroes were proud to remain faithful to the family. She took hold of the plantation, she walked the rice-banks in high boots. She had an overseer, who, it was told her, would possibly take her life by poison or by violence. She nevertheless lived in that lonely spot with no protector except her pistol and some directions about antidotes. She dismissed him when she had proved he was cheating her; she made the planting pay as well as any man did after the war; she educated her last son, got him into the navy, and then, one evening, walking the river-banks too late, she caught the fever and died. You will understand she went with one step from cherished ease to single-handed battle with life, a delicately nurtured lady, with no preparation for her trials.”
“Except moral elegance,” I murmured.
“Ah, that was the point, sir! To see her you would never have guessed it! She kept her burdens from the sight of all. She wore tribulation as if it were a flower in her bosom. We children always looked forward to her coming, because she was so gay and delightful to us, telling us stories of the old times—old rides when the country was wild, old journeys with the family and servants to the Hot Springs before the steam cars were invented, old adventures, with the battle of New Orleans or a famous duel in them—the sort of stories that begin with (for you seem to know something of it yourself, sir) ‘Your grandfather, my dear John, the year that he was twenty, got himself into serious embarrassments through paying his attentions to two reigning beauties at once.’ She was full of stories which began in that sort of pleasant way.”
I said: “When a person like that dies, an impoverishment falls upon us; the texture of life seems thinner.”
“Oh, yes, indeed! I know what you mean—to lose the people one has always seen from the cradle. Well, she has gone away, she has taken her memories out of the world, the old times, the old stories. Nobody, except a little nutshell of people here, knows or cares anything about her any more; and soon even the nutshell will be empty.” He paused, and then, as if brushing aside his churchyard mood, he translated into his changed thought another classic quotation: “But we can’t dawdle over the ‘tears of things’; it’s Nature’s law. Only, when I think of the rice-banks and the boots and the pistol, I wonder if the Newport ladies, for all their high-balls, could do any better!”
The crimson had faded, the twilight was altogether come, but the little noiseless breeze was blowing still; and as we left the quiet tombs behind us, and gained Worship Street, I could not help looking back where slept that older Kings Port about which I had heard and had said so much. Over the graves I saw the roses, nodding and moving, as if in acquiescent revery.
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