Chapter IV: The Girl Behind the Counter--I (5)

She had, it seemed, no answer to this. But we trembled on the verge of a real quarrel. It was in her voice when she said:--

“I think I interrupted you.”

I pushed the risk one step nearer the verge, because of the words I wished finally to reach. “In 1812, when England burned our White House down, we did not sit in the ashes; we set about rebuilding.”

And now she burst out. “That’s not fair, that’s perfectly inexcusable! Did England then set loose on us a pack of black savages and politicians to help us rebuild? Why, this very day I cannot walk on the other side of the river, I dare not venture off the New Bridge; and you who first beat us and then unleashed the blacks to riot in a new ‘equality’ that they were no more fit for than so many apes, you sat back at ease in your victory and your progress, having handed the vote to the negro as you might have handed a kerosene lamp to a child of three, and let us crushed, breathless people cope with the chaos and destruction that never came near you. Why, how can you dare--” Once again, admirably she pulled herself up as she had done when she spoke of the President. “I mustn’t!” she declared, half whispering, and then more clearly and calmly, “I mustn’t.” And she shook her head as if shaking something off. “Nor must you,” she finished, charmingly and quietly, with a smile.

“I will not,” I assured her. She was truly noble.

“But I did think that you understood us,” she said pensively.

“Miss La Heu, when you talked to me about the President and the White House, I said that you were hard to answer. Do you remember?”

“Perfectly. I said I was glad you found me so.’

“You helped me to understand you then, and now I want to be helped to further understanding. Last night I heard the ‘Ode for the Daughters of Dixie.’ I had a bad time listening to that.”

“Do you presume to criticise it? Do we criticise your Grand Army reunions, and your ‘Marching through Georgia,’ and your ‘John Brown’s Body,’ and your Arlington Museum? Can we not be allowed to celebrate our heroes and our glories and sing our songs?”

She had helped me already! Still, still, the something I was groping for, the something which had given me such pain during the ode, remained undissolved, remained unanalyzed between us; I still had to have it out with her, and the point was that it had to be with her, and not simply with myself alone. We must thrash out together the way to an understanding; an agreement was not in the least necessary--we could agree to differ, for that matter, with perfect cordiality--but an understanding we must reach. And as I was thinking this my light increased, and I saw clearly the ultimate thing which lay at the bottom of my own feeling, and which had been strangely confusing me all along. This discovery was the key to the whole remainder of my talk; I never let go of it. The first thing it opened for me was that Eliza La Heu didn’t understand me, which was quite natural, since I had only just this moment become clear to myself.

“Many of us,” I began, “who have watched the soiling touch of politics make dirty one clean thing after another, would not be wholly desolated to learn that the Grand Army of the Republic had gone to another world to sing its songs and draw its pensions.”

She looked astonished, and then she laughed. Down in the South here she was too far away to feel the vile uses to which present politics had turned past heroism.

“But,” I continued, “we haven’t any Daughters of the Union banded together and handing it down.”

“It?” she echoed. “Well, if the deeds of your heroes are not a sacred trust to you, don’t invite us, please, to resemble you.”

I waited for more, and a little more came.

“We consider Northerners foreigners, you know.”

Again I felt that hurt which hearing the ode had given me, but I now knew how I was going to take it, and where we were presently coming out; and I knew she didn’t mean quite all that--didn’t mean it every day, at least--and that my speech had driven her to saying it.

“No, Miss La Heu; you don’t consider Northerners, who understand you, to be foreigners.”

“We have never met any of that sort.”

(“Yes,” I thought, “but you really want to. Didn’t you say you hoped I was one? Away down deep there’s a cry of kinship in you; and that you don’t hear it, and that we don’t hear it, has been as much our fault as yours. I see that very well now, but I’m afraid to tell you so, yet.”)

What I said was: “We’re handing the ‘sacred trust’ down, I hope.”

“I understood you to say you weren’t.”

“I said we were not handing ‘it’ down.”

I didn’t wonder that irritation again moulded her reply. “You must excuse a daughter of Dixie if she finds the words of a son of the Union beyond her. We haven’t had so many advantages.”

There she touched what I had thought over during my wakeful hours: the tale of the ashes, the desolate ashes! The war had not prevented my parents from sending me to school and college, but here the old had seen the young grow up starved of what their fathers had given them, and the young had looked to the old and known their stripped heritage.

“Miss La Heu,” I said, “I could not tell you, you would not wish me to tell you, what the sight of Kings Port has made me feel. But you will let me say this: I have understood for a long while about your old people, your old ladies, whose faces are so fine and sad.”

I paused, but she merely looked at me, and her eyes were hard.

“And I may say this, too. I thank you very sincerely for bringing completely home to me what I had begun to make out for myself. I hope the Daughters of Dixie will go on singing of their heroes.”

I paused again, and now she looked away, out of the window into Royal Street.

“Perhaps,” I still continued, “you will hardly believe me when I say that I have looked at your monuments here with an emotion more poignant even than that which Northern monuments raise in me.”

“Why?”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “Need you have asked that? The North won.”

“You are quite dispassionate!” Her eyes were always toward the window.

“That’s my ‘sacred trust.’”

It made her look at me. “Yours?”

“Not yours--yet! It would be yours if you had won.” I thought a slight change came in her steady scrutiny. “And, Miss La Heu, it was awful about the negro. It is awful. The young North thinks so just as much as you do. Oh, we shock our old people! We don’t expect them to change, but they mustn’t expect us not to. And even some of them have begun to whisper a little doubtfully. But never mind them--here’s the negro. We can’t kick him out. That plan is childish. So, it’s like two men having to live in one house. The white man would keep the house in repair, the black would let it rot. Well, the black must take orders from the white. And it will end so.”

She was eager. “Slavery again, you think?”

“Oh, never! It was too injurious to ourselves. But something between slavery and equality.” And I ended with a quotation: “‘Patience, cousin, and shuffle the cards.’”

“You may call me cousin--this once--because you have been, really, quite nice--for a Northerner.”

Now we had come to the place where she must understand me.

“Not a Northerner, Miss La Heu.”

She became mocking. “Scarcely a Southerner, I presume?”

But I kept my smile and my directness. “No more a Southerner than a Northerner.”

“Pray what, then?”

“An American.”

She was silent.

“It’s the ‘sacred trust’--for me.”

She was still silent.

“If my state seceded from the Union tomorrow, I should side with the Union against her.”

She was frankly astonished now. “Would you really?” And I think some light about me began to reach her. A Northerner willing to side against a Northern state! I was very glad that I had found that phrase to make clear to her my American creed.

I proceeded. “I shall help to hand down all the glories and all the sadnesses; Lee’s, Lincoln’s, everybody’s. But I shall not hand ‘it’ down.”

This checked her.

“It’s easy for me, you know,” I hastily explained. “Nothing noble about it at all. But from noble people”--and I looked hard at her--“one expects, sooner or later, noble things.”

She repressed something she had been going to reply.

“If ever I have children,” I finished, “they shall know ‘Dixie’ and ‘Yankee Doodle’ by heart, and never know the difference. By that time I should think they might have a chance of hearing ‘Yankee Doodle’ in Kings Port.”

Again she checked a rapid retort. “Well,” she, after a pause, repeated, “you have been really quite nice.”

“May I tell you what you have been?”

“Certainly not. Have you seen Mr. Mayrant to-day?”

“We have an engagement to walk this afternoon. May I go walking with you sometime?”

“May he, General?” A wagging tail knocked on the floor behind the counter. “General says that he will think about it. What makes you like Mr. Mayrant so much?”

This question struck me as an odd one; nor could I make out the import of the peculiar tone in which she put it. “Why, I should think everybody would like him--except, perhaps, his double victim.”

“Double?”

“Yes, first of his fist and then of--of his hand!”

But she didn’t respond.

“Of his hand--his poker hand,” I explained.

“Poker hand?” She remained honestly vague.

It rejoiced me to be the first to tell her. “You haven’t heard of Master John’s last performance? Well, finding himself forced by that immeasurable old Aunt Josephine of yours to shake hands, he shook ‘em all right, but he took thirty dollars away as a little set-off for his pious docility.”

“Oh!” she murmured, overwhelmed with astonishment. Then she broke into one of her delicious peals of laughter.

“Anybody,” I said, “likes a boy who plays a hand--and a fist--to that tune.” I continued to say a number of commendatory words about young John, while her sparkling eyes rested upon me. But even as I talked I grew aware that these eyes were not sparkling, were starry rather, and distant, and that she was not hearing what I said; so I stopped abruptly, and at the stopping she spoke, like a person waking up.

“Oh, yes! Certainly he can take care of himself. Why not?”

“Rather creditable, don’t you think?”

“Creditable?”

“Considering his aunts and everything.”

She became haughty on the instant. “Upon my word! And do you suppose the women of South Carolina don’t wish their men to be men? Why”--she returned to mirth and that arch mockery which was her special charm--“we South Carolina women consider virtue our business, and we don’t expect the men to meddle with it!”

“Primal, perpetual, necessary!” I cried. “When that division gets blurred, society is doomed. Are you sure John can take care of himself every way?”

“I have other things than Mr. Mayrant to think about.” She said this quite sharply.

It surprised me. “To be sure,” I assented. “But didn’t you once tell me that you thought he was simple?”

She opened her ledger. “It’s a great honor to have one’s words so well remembered.”

I was still at a loss. “Anyhow, the wedding is postponed,” I continued; “and the cake. Of course one can’t help wondering how it’s all coming out.”

She was now working at her ledger, bending her head over it. “Have you ever met Miss Rieppe?” She inquired this with a sort of wonderful softness--which I was to hear again upon a still more memorable occasion.

“Never,” I answered, “but there’s nobody at present living whom I long to see so much.”

She wrote on for a little while before saying, with her pencil steadily busy, “Why?”

“Why? Don’t you? After all this fuss?”

“Oh, certainly,” she drawled. “She is so much admired--by Northerners.”

“I do hope John is able to take care of himself,” I purposely repeated.

“Take care of yourself!” she laughed angrily over her ledger.

“Me? Why? I understand you less and less!”

“Very likely.”

“Why, I want to help him!” I protested. “I don’t want him to marry her. Oh, by the way do you happen to know what it is that she is coming here to see for herself?”

In a moment her ledger was left, and she was looking at me straight. Coming? When?

“Soon. In an automobile. To see something for herself.”

She pondered for quite a long moment; then her eyes returned, searchingly, to me. “You didn’t make that up?”

I laughed, and explained. “Some of them, at any rate,” I finished, “know what she’s coming for. They were rather queer about it, I thought.”

She pondered again. I noticed that she had deeply flushed, and that the flush was leaving her. Then she fixed her eyes on me once more. “They wouldn’t tell you?”

“I think that they came inadvertently near it, once or twice, and remembered just in time that I didn’t know about it.”

“But since you do know pretty much about it!” she laughed.

I shook my head. “There’s something else, something that’s turned up; the sort of thing that upsets calculations. And I merely hoped that you’d know.”

On those last words of mine she gave me quite an extraordinary look, and then, as if satisfied with what she saw in my face.--

“They don’t talk to me.”

It was an assurance, it was true, it had the ring of truth, that evident genuineness which a piece of real confidence always possesses; she meant me to know that we were in the same boat of ignorance to-day. And yet, as I rose from my lunch and came forward to settle for it, I was aware of some sense of defeat, of having been held off just as the ladies on High Walk had held me off.

“Well,” I sighed, “I pin my faith to the aunt who says he’ll never marry her.”

Miss La Heu had no more to say upon the subject. “Haven’t you forgotten something?” she inquired gayly; and, as I turned to see what I had left behind--“I mean, you had no Lady Baltimore to-day.”

“I clean forgot it!”

“No loss. It is very stale; and to-morrow I shall have a fresh supply ready.”

As I departed through the door I was conscious of her eyes following me, and that she had spoken of Lady Baltimore precisely because she was thinking of something else.

XIV: The Replacers

She had been strange, perceptibly strange, had Eliza La Heu; that was the most which I could make out of it. I had angered her in some manner wholly beyond my intention or understanding and not all at one fixed point in our talk; her irritation had come out and gone in again in spots all along the colloquy, and it had been a displeasure wholly apart from that indignation which had flashed up in her over the negro question. This, indeed, I understood well enough, and admired her for, and admired still more her gallant control of it; as for the other, I gave it up.

A sense of guilt--a very slight one, to be sure--dispersed my speculations when I was preparing for dinner, and Aunt Carola’s postscript, open upon my writing-table, reminded me that I had never asked Miss La Heu about the Bombos. Well, the Bombos could keep! And I descended to dinner a little late (as too often) to feel instantly in the air that they had been talking about me. I doubt if any company in the world, from the Greeks down through Machiavelli to the present moment, has ever been of a subtlety adequate to conceal from an observant person entering a room the fact that he has been the subject of their conversation. This company, at any rate, did not conceal it from me. Not even when the upcountry bride astutely greeted me with:--

“Why, we were just speaking of you! We were lust saying it would be a perfect shame if you missed those flowers at Live Oaks.” And, at this, various of the guests assured me that another storm would finish them; upon which I assured every one that to-morrow should see me embark upon the Live Oaks excursion boat, knowing quite well in my heart that some decidedly different question concerning me had been hastily dropped upon my appearance at the door. It poked up its little concealed head, did this question, when the bride said later to me, with immense archness:--

“How any gentleman can help falling just daid in love with that lovely young girl at the Exchange, I don’t see!”

“But I haven’t helped it!” I immediately exclaimed.

“Oh!” declared the bride with unerring perception, “that just shows he hasn’t been smitten at all! Well, I’d be ashamed, if I was a single gentleman.” And while I brought forth additional phrases concerning the distracted state of my heart, she looked at me with large, limpid eyes. “Anybody could tell you’re not afraid of a rival,” was her resulting comment; upon which several of the et ceteras laughed more than seemed to me appropriate.

I left them all free again to say what they pleased; for John Mayrant called for me to go upon our walk while we were still seated at table, and at table they remained after I had excused myself.

The bruise over John’s left eye was fading out, but traces of his spiritual battle were deepening. During the visit which he had paid (under compulsion, I am sure) to Juno at our boarding-house in company with Miss Josephine St. Michael, his recent financial triumph at the bedside had filled his face with diabolic elation as he confronted his victim’s enraged but checkmated aunt; when to the thinly veiled venom of her inquiry as to a bridegroom’s health he had retorted with venom as thinly veiled that he was feeling better that night than for many weeks, he had looked better, too; the ladies had exclaimed after his departure what a handsome young man he was, and Juno had remarked how fervently she trusted that marriage might cure him of his deplorable tendencies. But to-day his vitality had sagged off beneath the weight of his preoccupation: it looked to me as if, by a day or two more, the boy’s face might be grown haggard.

Whether by intention, or, as is more likely, by the perfectly natural and spontaneous working of his nature, he speedily made it plain to me that our relation, our acquaintance, had progressed to a stage more friendly and confidential. He did not reveal this by imparting any confidence to me; far from it; it was his silence that indicated the ease he had come to feel in my company. Upon our last memorable interview he had embarked at once upon a hasty yet evidently predetermined course of talk, because he feared that I might touch upon subjects which he wished excluded from all discussion between us; to-day he embarked upon nothing, made no conventional effort of any sort, but walked beside me, content with my mere society; if it should happen that either of us found a thought worth expressing aloud, good! and if this should not happen, why, good also! And so we walked mutely and agreeably together for a long while. The thought which was growing clear in my mind, and which was decidedly worthy of expression, was also unluckily one which his new reliance upon my discretion completely forbade my uttering in even the most shadowy manner; but it was a conviction which Miss Josephine St. Michael should have been quick to force upon him for his good. Quite apart from selfish reasons, he had no right to marry a girl whom he had ceased to care for. The code which held a “gentleman” to his plighted troth in such a case did more injury to the “lady” than any “jilting” could possibly do. Never until now had I thought this out so lucidly, and I was determined that time and my own tact should assuredly help me find a way to say it to him, if he continued in his present course.

“Daddy Ben says you can’t be a real Northerner.”

This was his first observation, and I think that we must have walked a mile before he made it.

“Because I pounded a negro? Of course, he retains your Southern ante-bellum mythical notion of Northerners--all of us willing to have them marry our sisters. Well, there’s a lady at our boarding-house who says you are a real gambler.”

The impish look came curling round his lips, but for a moment only, and it was gone.

“That shook Daddy Ben up a good deal.”

“Having his grandson do it, do you mean?”

“Oh, he’s used to his grandson! Grandsons in that race might just as well be dogs for all they know or care about their progenitors. Yet Daddy Ben spent his savings on educating Charles Cotesworth and two more--but not one of them will give the old man a house to-day. If ever I have a home--” John stopped himself, and our silence was no longer easy; our unspoken thoughts looked out of our eyes so that they could not meet. Yet no one, unless directly invited by him, had the right to say to hint what I was thinking, except some near relative. Therefore, to relieve this silence which had ceased to be agreeable, I talked about Daddy Ben and his grandsons, and negro voting, and the huge lie of “equality” which our lips vociferate and our lives daily disprove. This took us comfortably away from weddings and cakes into the subject of lynching, my violent condemnation of which surprised him; for our discussion had led us over a wide field, and one fertile in well-known disputes of the evergreen sort, conducted by the North mostly with more theory than experience, and by the South mostly with more heat than light; whereas, between John and me, I may say that our amiability was surpassed only by our intelligence! Each allowed for the other’s standpoint, and both met in many views: he would have voted against the last national Democratic ticket but for the Republican upholding of negro equality, while I assured him that such stupid and criminal upholding was on the wane. He informed me that he did not believe the pure blooded African would ever be capable of taking the intellectual side of the white man’s civilization, and I informed him that we must patiently face this probability, and teach the African whatever he could profitably learn and no more; and each of us agreed with the other. I think that we were at one, save for the fact that I was, after all, a Northerner--and that is a blemish which nobody in Kings Port can quite get over. John, therefore, was unprepared for my wholesale denunciation of lynching.

“With your clear view of the negro,” he explained.

“My dear man, it’s my clear view of the white! It’s the white, the American citizen, the ‘hope of humanity,’ as he enjoys being called, who, after our English-speaking race has abolished public executions, degenerates back to the Stone Age. It’s upon him that lynching works the true injury.”

“They’re nothing but animals,” he muttered.

“Would you treat an animal in that way?” I inquired.

He persisted. “You’d do it yourself if you had to suffer from them.”

“Very probably. Is that an answer? What I’d never do would be to make a show, an entertainment, a circus, out of it, run excursion trains to see it--come, should you like your sister to buy tickets for a lynching?”

This brought him up rather short. “I should never take part myself,” he presently stated, “unless it were immediate personal vengeance.”

“Few brothers or husbands would blame you,” I returned. “It would be hard to wait for the law. But let no community which treats it as a public spectacle presume to call itself civilized.”

He gave a perplexed smile, shaking his head over it. “Sometimes I think civilization costs--”

“Civilization costs all you’ve got!” I cried.

“More than I’ve got!” he declared. “I’m mortal tired of civilization.”

“Ah, yes! What male creature is not? And neither of us will live quite long enough to see the smash-up of our own.”

“Aren’t you sometimes inconsistent?” he inquired, laughing.

“I hope so,” I returned. “Consistency is a form of death. The dead are the only perfectly consistent people.”

“And sometimes you sound like a Socialist,” he pursued, still laughing.

“Never!” I shouted. “Don’t class me with those untrained puppies of thought. And you’ll generally observe,” I added, “that the more nobly a Socialist vaporizes about the rights of humanity, the more wives and children he has abandoned penniless along the trail of his life.”

He was livelier than ever at this. “What date have you fixed for the smash-up of our present civilization?”

“Why fix dates? Is it not diversion enough to watch, and step handsomely through one’s own part, with always a good sleeve to laugh in?”

Pensiveness returned upon him. “I shall be able to step through my own part, I think.” He paused, and I was wondering secretly, “Does that include the wedding?” when he continued: “What’s there to laugh at?”

“Why, our imperishable selves! For instance: we swear by universal suffrage. Well, sows’ ears are an invaluable thing in their place, on the head of the animal; but send them to make your laws, and what happens? Bribery, naturally. The silk purse buys the sow’s ear. We swear by Christianity, but dishonesty is our present religion. That little phrase ‘In God We Trust’ is about as true as the silver dollar it’s stamped on--worth some thirty-nine cents. We get awfully serious about whether or no good can come of evil, when every sky-scraping thief of finance is helping hospitals with one hand while the other’s in my pocket; and good and evil attend each other, lead to each other, are such Siamese twins that if separated they would both die. We make phrases about peace, pity, and brotherhood, while every nation stands prepared for shipwreck and for the sinking plank to which two are clinging and the stronger pushes the weaker into the flood and thus floats safe. Why, the old apple of wisdom, which Adam and Eve swallowed and thus lost their innocence, was a gentle nursery drug compared with the new apple of competition, which, as soon as chewed, instantly transforms the heart into a second brain. But why worry, when nothing is final? Haven’t you and I, for instance, lamented the present rottenness of smart society? Why, when kings by the name of George sat on the throne of England, society was just as drunken, just as dissolute! Then a decent queen came, and society behaved itself; and now, here we come round again to the Georges, only with the name changed! There’s nothing final. So, when things are as you don’t like them, remember that and bear them; and when they’re as you do like them, remember it and make the most of them--and keep a good sleeve handy!”

“Have you got any creed at all?” he demanded.

“Certainly; but I don’t live up to it.”

“That’s not expected. May I ask what it is?”

“It’s in Latin.”

“Well, I can probably bear it. Aunt Eliza had a classical tutor for me.”

I always relish a chance to recite my favorite poet, and I began accordingly:--

“Laetus in praesens animus quod ultra est
Oderit curare et--”

“I know that one!” he exclaimed, interrupting me. “The tutor made me put it into English verse. I had the severest sort of a time. I ran away from it twice to a deer-hunt.” And he, in his turn, recited:--

“Who hails each present hour with zest
Hates fretting what may be the rest,
Makes bitter sweet with lazy jest;
Naught is in every portion blest.”

I complimented him, in spite of my slight annoyance at being deprived by him of the chance to declaim Latin poetry, which is an exercise that I approve and enjoy; but of course, to go on with it, after he had intervened with his translation, would have been flat.

“You have written good English, and very close to the Latin, too,” I told him, “particularly in the last line.” And I picked up from the bridge which we were crossing, an oyster-shell, and sent it skimming over the smooth water that stretched between the low shores, wide, blue, and vacant.

“I suppose you wonder why we call this the ‘New Bridge,’” he remarked.

“I did wonder when I first came,” I replied.

He smiled. “You’re getting used to us!”

This long structure wore, in truth, no appearance of yesterday. It was newer than the “New Bridge” which it had replaced some fifteen years ago, and which for forty years had borne the same title. Spanning the broad river upon a legion of piles, this wooden causeway lies low against the face of the water, joining the town with a serene and pensive country of pines and live oaks and level opens, where glimpses of cabin and plantation serve to increase the silence and the soft, mysterious loneliness. Into this the road from the bridge goes straight and among the purple vagueness gently dissolves away.

We watched a slow, deep-laden boat sliding down toward the draw, across which we made our way, and drew near the further end of the bridge. The straight avenue of the road in front of us took my eyes down its quiet vista, until they were fixed suddenly by an alien object, a growing dot, accompanied by dust, whence came the small, distorted honks of an automobile. These fat, importunate sounds redoubled as the machine rushed toward the bridge, growing up to its full staring, brazen dimensions. Six or seven figures sat in it, all of the same dusty, shrouded likeness, their big glass eyes and their masked mouths suggesting some fabled, unearthly race, a family of replete and bilious ogres; so that as they flew honking by us I called out to John:--

“Behold the yellow rich!” and then remembered that his Hortense probably sat among them.

The honks redoubled, and we turned to see that the drawbridge had no thought of waiting for them. We also saw a bewildered curly white dog and a young girl, who called despairingly to him as he disappeared beneath the automobile. The engine of murder could not, as is usual, proceed upon its way, honking, for the drawbridge was visibly swinging open to admit the passage of the boat. When John and I had run back near enough to become ourselves a part of the incident, the white dog lay still behind the stationary automobile, whose passengers were craning their muffled necks and glass eyes to see what they had done, while one of their number had got out, and was stooping to examine if the machine had sustained any injuries. The young girl, with a face of anguish, was calling the dog’s name as she hastened toward him, and her voice aroused him: he lifted his head, got on his legs, and walked over to her, which action on his part brought from the automobile a penetrating female voice:--

“Well, he’s in better luck than that Savannah dog!”

But General was not in luck. He lay quietly down at the feet of his mistress and we soon knew that life had passed from his faithful body. The first stroke of grief, dealt her in such cruel and sudden form, overbore the poor girl’s pride and reserve; she made no attempt to remember or heed surroundings, but kneeling and placing her arms about the neck of her dead servant, she spoke piteously aloud:--

“And I raised him, I raised him from a puppy!”

The female voice, at this, addressed the traveller who was examining the automobile: “Charley, a five or a ten spot is what her feelings need.”

The obedient and munificent Charley straightened up from his stooping among the mechanical entrails, dexterously produced money, and advanced with the selected bill held out politely in his hand, while the glass eyes and the masks peered down at the performance. Eliza La Heu had perceived none of this, for she was intent upon General; nor had John Mayrant, who had approached her with the purpose of coming to her aid. But when Charley, quite at hand, began to speak words which were instantly obliterated from my memory by what happened, the young girl realized his intention and straightened stiffly, while John, with the rapidity of light, snatched the extended bill from Charley’s hand, and tearing it in four pieces, threw it in his face.

A foreign voice cackled from the automobile: “Oh la la! il a du panache!”

But Charley now disclosed himself to be a true man of the world--the financial world--by picking the pieces out of the mud; and, while he wiped them and enclosed them in his handkerchief and with perfect dignity returned them to his pocket, he remarked simply, with a shrug: “As you please.” His accent also was ever so little foreign--that New York downtown foreign, of the second generation, which stamps so, many of our bankers.

The female now leaned from her seat, and with the tone of setting the whole thing right, explained: “We had no idea it was a lady.”

“Doubtless you’re not accustomed to their appearance,” said John to Charley.

I don’t know what Charley would have done about this; for while the completely foreign voice was delightedly whispering, “Toujours le panache!” a new, deep, and altogether different female voice exclaimed:--

“Why, John, it’s you!”

So that was Hortense, then! That rich and quiet utterance was hers, a schooled and studied management of speech. I found myself surprised, and I knew directly why; that word of one of the old ladles, “I consider that she looks like a steel wasp,” had implanted in me some definite anticipations to which the voice certainly did not correspond. How fervently I desired that she would lift her thick veil, while John, with hat in hand, was greeting her, and being presented to her companions! Why she had not spoken to John sooner was of course a recondite question, and beyond my power to determine with merely the given situation to guide me. Hadn’t she recognized him before? Had her thick veil, and his position, and the general slight flurry of the misadventure, intercepted recognition until she heard his voice when he addressed Charley. Or had she known her lover at once, and rapidly decided that the moment was an unpropitious one for a first meeting after absence, and that she would pass on to Kings Port unrevealed, but then had found this plan become impossible through the collision between Charley and John? It was not until certain incidents of the days following brought Miss Rieppe’s nature a good deal further home to me, that a third interpretation of her delay in speaking to John dawned upon my mind; that I was also made aware how a woman’s understanding of the words “Steel wasp,” when applied by her to one of her own sex, may differ widely from a man’s understanding of them; and that Miss Rieppe, through her thick veil, saw from her seat in the automobile something which my own unencumbered vision had by no means detected.

But now, here on the bridge, even her outward appearance was as shrouded as her inward qualities--save such as might be audible in that voice, as her skilful, well-placed speeches to one and the other of the company tided over and carried off into ease this uneasy moment. All men, at such a voice, have pricked up their ears since the beginning; there was much woman in it; each slow, schooled syllable called its challenge to questing man. But I got no chance to look in the eye that went with that voice; she took all the advantages which her veil gave her; and how well she used them I was to learn later.

In the general smoothing-out process which she was so capably effecting, her attention was about to reach me, when my name was suddenly called out from behind her. It was Beverly Rodgers, that accomplished and inveterate bachelor of fashion. Ten years before, when I had seen much of him, he had been more particular in his company, frequently declaring in his genial, irresponsible way that New York society was going to the devil. But many tempting dances on the land, and cruises on the water, had taken him deep among our lower classes that have boiled up from the bottom with their millions--and besides, there would be nothing to marvel at in Beverly’s presence in any company that should include Hortense Rieppe, if she carried out the promise of her voice.

Beverly was his customary, charming, effusive self, coming out of the automobile to me with his “By Jove, old man,” and his “Who’d have thought it, old fellow?” and sprinkling urbane little drops of jocosity over us collectively, as the garden water-turning apparatus sprinkles a lawn. His knowing me, and the way he brought it out, and even the tumbling into the road of a few wraps and chattels of travel as he descended from the automobile, and the necessity of picking these up and handing them back with delightful little jocular apologies, such as, “By Jove, what a lout I am,” all this helped the meeting on prodigiously, and got us gratefully away from the disconcerting incident of the torn money. Charley was helpful, too; you would never have supposed from the polite small-talk which he was now offering to John Mayrant that he had within some three minutes received the equivalent of a slap across the eyes from that youth, and carried the soiled consequences in his pocket. And such a thing is it to be a true man of the world of finance, that upon the arrival now of a second automobile, also his property, and containing a set of maids and valets, and also some live dogs sitting up, covered with glass eyes and wrappings like their owners, munificent Charley at once offered the dead dog and his mistress a place in it, and begged she would let it take her wherever she wished to go. Everybody exclaimed copiously and condolingly over the unfortunate occurrence. What a fine animal he was, to be sure! What breed was he? Of course, he wasn’t used to automobiles! Was it quite certain that he was dead? Quel dommage! And Charley would be so happy to replace him.

And how was Eliza La Heu bearing herself amid these murmurously chattered infelicities? She was listening with composure to the murmurs of Hortense Rieppe, more felicitous, no doubt. Miss Rieppe, through her veil, was particularly devoting herself to Miss La Lieu. I could not hear what she said; the little chorus of condolence and suggestion intercepted all save her tone, and that, indeed, coherently sustained its measured cadence through the texture of fragments uttered by Charley and the others. Eliza La Heu had now got herself altogether in hand, and, saving her pale cheeks, no sign betrayed that the young girl’s feelings had been so recently too strong for her. To these strangers, ignorant of her usual manner, her present strange quietness may very well have been accepted as her habit.

“Thank you,” she replied to munificent Charley’s offer that she would use his second automobile. She managed to make her polite words cut like a scythe. “I should crowd it.”

“But they shall get out and walk; it will be good for them,” said Charley, indicating the valets and maids, and possibly the dogs, too.

Beverly Rodgers did much better than Charley. With a charming gesture and bow, he offered his own seat in the first automobile. “I am going to walk in any case,” he assured her.

“One gentleman among them,” I heard John Mayrant mutter behind me.

Miss La Heu declined, the chorus urged, but Beverly (who was indeed a gentleman, every inch of him) shook his head imperceptibly at Charley; and while the little exclamations--“Do come! So much more comfortable! So nice to see more of you!”--dropped away, Miss La Heu had settled her problem quite simply for herself. A little procession of vehicles, townward bound, had gathered on the bridge, waiting until the closing of the draw should allow them to continue upon their way. From these most of the occupants had descended, and were staring with avidity at us all; the great glass eyes and the great refulgent cars held them in timidity and fascination, and the poor lifeless white body of General, stretched beside the way, heightened the hypnotic mystery; one or two of the boldest had touched him, and found no outward injury upon him; and this had sent their eyes back to the automobile with increased awe. Eliza La Heu summoned one of the onlookers, an old negro; at some word she said to him he hurried back and returned, leading his horse and empty cart, and General was lifted into this. The girl took her seat beside the old driver.

“No,” she said to John Mayrant, “certainly not.”

I wondered at the needless severity with which she declined his offer to accompany her and help her.

He stood by the wheel of the cart, looking up at her and protesting, and I joined him.

“Thank you,” she returned, “I need no one. You will both oblige me by saying no more about it.”

“John!” It was the slow, well-calculated utterance of Hortense Rieppe. Did I hear in it the caressing note of love?

John turned.

The draw had swung to, the mast and sail of the vessel were separating away from the bridge with a stealthy motion, men with iron bars were at work fastening the draw secure, and horses’ hoofs knocked nervously upon the wooden flooring as the internal churning of the automobiles burst upon their innocent ears.

“John, if Mr. Rodgers is really not going with us--”

Thus Hortense; and at that Miss La Heu:--

“Why do you keep them waiting?” There was no caress in that note! It was polished granite.

He looked up at her on her high seat by the extremely dilapidated negro, and then he walked forward and took his place beside his veiled fiancee, among the glass eyes. A hiss of sharp noise spurted from the automobiles, horses danced, and then, smoothly, the two huge engines were gone with their cargo of large, distorted shapes, leaving behind them--quite as our present epoch will leave behind it--a trail of power, of ingenuity, of ruthlessness, and a bad smell.

“Hold hard, old boy!” chuckled Beverly, to whom I communicated this sentiment. “How do you know the stink of one generation does not become the perfume of the next?” Beverly, when he troubled to put a thing at all (which was seldom--for he kept his quite good brains well-nigh perpetually turned out to grass--or rather to grass widows) always put it well, and with a bracing vocabulary. “Hullo!” he now exclaimed, and walked out into the middle of the roadway, where he picked up a parasol. “Kitty will be in a jolly old stew. None of its expensive bones broken however.” And then he hailed me by a name of our youth. “What are you doing down here, you old sourbelly?”

“Watching you sun yourself on the fat cushions of the yellow rich.”

“Oh, shucks, old man, they’re not so yellow!”

“Charley strikes me as yellower than his own gold.”

“Charley’s not a bad little sort. Of course, he needs coaching a bit here and there--just now, for instance, when he didn’t see that that girl wouldn’t think of riding in the machine that had just killed her dog. By Jove, give that girl a year in civilization and she’d do! Who was the young fire-eater?”

“Fire-eater! He’s a lot more decent than you or I.”

“But that’s saying so little, dear boy!”

“Seriously, Beverly.”

“Oh, hang it with your ‘seriously’! Well, then, seriously, melodrama was the correct ticket and all that in 1840, but we’ve outgrown it; it’s devilish demode to chuck things in people’s faces.

“I’m not sorry John Mayrant did it!” I brought out his name with due emphasis.

“All the same,” Beverly was beginning, when the automobile returned rapidly upon us, and, guessing the cause of this, he waved the parasol. Charley descended to get it--an unnecessary act, prompted, I suppose, by the sudden relief of finding that it was not lost.

He made his thanks marked. “It is my sister’s,” he concluded, to me, by way of explanation, in his slightly foreign accent. “It is not much, but it has got some stones and things in the handle.”

We were favored with a bow from the veiled Hortense, shrill thanks from Kitty, and the car, turning, again left us in a moment.

“You’ve got a Frenchman along,” I said.

“Little Gazza,” Beverly returned. “Italian; though from his morals you’d never guess he wasn’t Parisian. Great people in Rome. Hereditary right to do something in the presence of the Pope--or not to do it, I forget which. Not a bit of a bad little sort, Gazza. He has just sold a lot of old furniture--Renaissance--Lorenzo du Borgia--that sort of jolly old truck--to Bohm, you know.”

I didn’t know.

“Oh, yes, you do, old boy. Harry Bohm, of Bohm & Cohn. Everybody knows Bohm, and we’ll all be knowing Cohn by next year. Gazza has sold him a lot of furniture, too. Bohm’s from Pittsfield, or South Lee, or East Canaan, or West Stockbridge, or some of those other back-country cider presses that squirt some of the hardest propositions into Wall Street. He’s just back from buying a railroad, and four or five mines in Mexico. Bohm represents Christianity in the firm. At Newport they call him the military attache to Jerusalem. He’s the big chap that sat behind me in the car. He’ll marry Kitty as soon as she can get her divorce. Bohm’s a jolly old sort--and I tell you, you old sourbelly, you’re letting this Southern moss grow over you a bit. Hey? What? Yellow rich isn’t half bad, and I’ll say it myself, and pretend it’s mine; but hang it, old man, their children won’t be worse than lemon-colored, and the grandchildren will be white!”

“Just in time,” I exclaimed, “to take a back seat with their evaporated fortunes!”

Beverly chuckled. “Well, if they do evaporate, there will be new ones. Now don’t walk along making Mayflower eyes at me. I’m no Puritan, and my people have had a front seat since pretty early in the game, which I’m holding on to, you know. And by Jove, old man, I tell you, if you wish to hold on nowadays, you can’t be drawing lines! If you don’t want to see yourself jolly well replaced, you must fall in with the replacers. Our blooming old republic is merely the quickest process of endless replacing yet discovered, and you take my tip, and back the replacers! That’s where Miss Rieppe, for all her Kings Port traditions, shows sense.”

I turned square on him. “Then she has broken it?”

“Broken what?”

“Her engagement to John Mayrant. You mean to say that you didn’t--?”

“See here, old man. Seriously. The fire-eater?”

I was so very much bewildered that I merely stared at Beverly Rodgers. Of course, I might have known that Miss Rieppe would not feel the need of announcing to her rich Northern friends an engagement which she had fallen into the habit of postponing.

But Beverly had a better right to be taken aback. “I suppose you must have some reason for your remark,” he said.

“You don’t mean that you’re engaged to her?” I shot out.

“Me? With my poor little fifteen thousand a year? Consider, dear boy! Oh, no, we’re merely playing at it, she and I. She’s a good player. But Charley--”

“He is?” I shouted.

“I don’t know, old man, and I don’t think he knows--yet.”

“Beverly,” said I, “let me tell you.” And I told him.

After he had got himself adjusted to the novelty of it he began to take it with a series of thoughtful chuckles.

Into these I dropped with: “Where’s her father, anyhow?” I began to feel, fantastically, that she mightn’t have a father.

“He stopped in Savannah,” Beverly answered. “He’s coming over by the train. Kitty--Charley’s sister, Mrs. Bleecker--did the chaperoning for us.

“Very expertly, I should guess,” I said.

“Perfectly; invisibly,” said Beverly. And he returned to his thoughts and his chuckles.

“After all, it’s simple,” he presently remarked.

“Doesn’t that depend on what she’s here for?”

“Oh, to break it.”

“Why come for that?”

He took another turn among his cogitations. I took a number of turns among my own, but it was merely walking round and round in a circle.

“When will she announce it, then?” he demanded.

“Ah!” I murmured. “You said she was a good player.”

“But a fire-eater!” he resumed. “For her. Oh, hang it! She’ll let him go!”

“Then why hasn’t she?”

He hesitated. “Well, of course her game could be spoiled by--”

His speech died away into more cogitation, and I had to ask him what he meant.

“By love getting into it somewhere.”

We walked on through Worship Street, which we had reached some while since, and the chief features of which I mechanically pointed out to him.

“Jolly old church, that,” said Beverly, as we reached my favorite corner and brick wall. “Well, I’ll not announce it!” he murmured gallantly.

“My dear man,” I said, “Kings Port will do all the announcing for you to-morrow.”

XV: What She Came to See

But in this matter my prognostication was thoroughly at fault; yet surely, knowing Kings Port’s sovereign habit, as I had had good cause to know it, I was scarce beyond reasonable bounds in supposing that the arrival of Miss Rieppe would heat up some very general and very audible talk about this approaching marriage, against which the prejudices of the town were set in such compact array. I have several times mentioned that Kings Port, to my sense, was buzzing over John Mayrant’s affairs; buzzing in the open, where one could hear it, and buzzing behind closed doors, where one could somehow feel it; I can only say that henceforth this buzzing ceased, dropped wholly away, as if Gossip were watching so hard that she forgot to talk, giving place to a great stillness in her kingdom. Such occasional words as were uttered sounded oddly and egregiously clear in the new-established void.

The first of these words sounded, indeed, quite enormous, issuing as it did from Juno’s lips at our breakfast-table, when yesterday’s meeting on the New Bridge was investing my mind with many thoughts. She addressed me in one of her favorite tones (I have met it, thank God! but in two or three other cases during my whole experience), which always somehow conveyed to you that you were personally to blame for what she was going to tell you.

“I suppose you know that your friend, Mr. Mayrant, has resigned from the Custom House?”

I was, of course, careful not to give Juno the pleasure of seeing that she had surprised me. I bowed, and continued in silence to sip a little coffee; then, setting my coffee down, I observed that it would be some few days yet before the resignation could take effect; and, noticing that Juno was getting ready some new remark, I branched off and spoke to her of my excursion up the river this morning to see the azaleas in the gardens at Live Oaks.

“How lucky the weather is so magnificent!” I exclaimed.

“I shall be interested to hear,” said Juno, “what explanation he finds to give Miss Josephine for his disrespectful holding out against her, and his immediate yielding to Miss Rieppe.”

Here I deemed it safe to ask her, was she quite sure it had been at the instance of Miss Rieppe that John had resigned?

“It follows suspiciously close upon her arrival,” stated Juno. She might have been speaking of a murder. “And how he expects to support a wife now--well, that is no affair of mine,” Juno concluded, with a washing-her-hands-of-it air, as if up to this point she had always done her best for the wilful boy. She had blamed him savagely for not resigning, and now she was blaming him because he had resigned; and I ate my breakfast in much entertainment over this female acrobat in censure.