Owen Wister - Lady Baltimore

And indoors, also, I made most agreeable use of my time, in spite of one disappointment when, on the day following my visit to the ladies, I returned full of expectancy to lunch at the Woman's exchange, the girl behind the counter was not there. I found in her stead, it is true, a most polite lady, who provided me with chocolate and sandwiches that were just as good as their predecessors; but she was of advanced years, and little inclined to light conversation. Beyond telling me that Miss Eliza La Heu was indisposed, but not gravely so, and that she was not likely to be long away from her post of duty, this lady furnished me with scant information.

Now I desired a great deal of information. To learn of an imminent wedding where the bridegroom attends to the cake, and is suspected of diminished eagerness for the bride, who is a steel wasp — that is not enough to learn of such nuptials. Therefore I fear — I mean, I know — that it was not wholly for the sake of telling Mrs. Gregory St. Michael about Aunt Carola that I repaired again to Le Maire Street and rang Mrs. St. Michael's door-bell.

She was at home, to be sure, but with her sat another visitor, the tall, severe lady who had embroidered and had not liked the freedom with which her sister had spoken to me about the wedding. There was not a bit of freedom to-day; the severe lady took care of that.

When, after some utterly unprofitable conversation, I managed to say in a casual voice, which I thought very well tuned for the purpose, "What part of Georgia did you say that General Rieppe came from?" the severe lady responded —

"I do not think that I mentioned him at all."

"Georgia?" said Mrs. Gregory St. Michael. "I never heard that they came from Georgia."

And this revived my hopes. But the severe lady at once remarked to her —

"I have received a most agreeable letter from my sister in Paris."

This stopped Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and dashed my hopes to earth.

The severe lady continued to me —

"My sister writes of witnessing a performance of the Lohengrin. Can you tell me if it is a composition of merit?"

I assured her that it was a composition of the highest merit.

"It is many years since I have heard an opera," she pursued. "In my day the works of the Italians were much applauded. But I doubt if Mozart will be surpassed. I hope you admire the Nozze?"

You will not need me to tell you that I came out of Mrs. Gregory St. Michael's house little wiser than I went in. My experience did not lead me to abandon all hope. I paid other visits to other ladies; but these answered my inquiries in much the same sort of way as had the lady who admired Mozart. They spoke delightfully of travel, books, people, and of the colonial renown of Kings Port and its leading families; but it is scarce an exaggeration to say that Mozart was as near the cake, the wedding, or the steel wasp as I came with any of them. By patience, however, and mostly at our boarding-house table, I gathered a certain knowledge, though small in amount.

If the health of John Mayrant's mother, I learned, had allowed that lady to bring him up Herself, many follies might have been saved the youth. His aunt, Miss Eliza St. Michael, though a pattern of good intentions, was not always a pattern of wisdom. Moreover, how should a spinster bring up a boy fitly?

Of the Rieppes, father and daughter, I also learned a little more. They did not (most people believed) come from Georgia. Natchez and Mobile seemed to divide the responsibility of giving them to the world. It was quite certain the General had run away from Chattanooga. Nobody disputed this, or offered any other battle as the authentic one. Of late the Rieppes were seldom to be seen in Kings Port. Their house (if it had ever been their own property, which I heard hotly argued both ways) had been sold more than two years ago, and their recent brief sojourns in the town were generally beneath the roof of hospitable friends — people by the name of Cornerly, "whom we do not know," as I was carefully informed by more than one member of the St. Michael family. The girl had disturbed a number of mothers whose sons were prone to slip out of the strict hereditary fold in directions where beauty or champagne was to be found; and the Cornerlys dined late, and had champagne. Miss Hortense had "splurged it" a good deal here, and the measure of her success with the male youth was the measure of her condemnation by their female elders.

Such were the facts which I gathered from women and from the few men whom I saw in Kings Port. This town seemed to me almost as empty of men as if the Pied Piper had passed through here and lured them magically away to some distant country. It was on the happy day that saw Miss Eliza La Heu again providing me with sandwiches and chocolate that my knowledge of the wedding and the bride and groom began really to take some steps forward.

It was not I who, at my sequestered lunch at the Woman's Exchange, began the conversation the next time. That confection, "Lady Baltimore," about which I was not to worry myself, had, as they say, "broken the ice" between the girl behind the counter and myself.

"He has put it off!" This, without any preliminaries, was her direct and stimulating news.

I never was more grateful for the solitude of the Exchange, where I had, before this, noted and blessed an absence of lunch customers as prevailing as the trade winds; the people I saw there came to talk, not to purchase. Well, I was certainly henceforth coming for both!

I eagerly plunged in with the obvious question —

"Indefinitely?"

"Oh, no! Only Wednesday week."

"But will it keep?"

My ignorance diverted her. "Lady Baltimore? Why, the idea!" And she laughed at me from the immense distance that the South is from the North.

"Then he'll have to pay for two?"

"Oh, no! I wasn't going to make it till Tuesday.

"I didn't suppose that kind of thing would keep," I muttered rather vaguely.

Her young spirits bubbled over. "Which kind of thing? The wedding — or the cake?"

This produced a moment of laughter on the part of us both; we giggled joyously together amid the silence and wares for sale, the painted cups, the embroidered souvenirs, the new food, and the old family "pieces."

So this delightful girl was a verbal skirmisher! Now nothing is more to my liking than the verbal skirmish, and therefore I began one immediately. "I see you quite know," was the first light shot that I hazarded.

Her retort to this was merely a very bland and inquiring stare.

I now aimed a trifle nearer the mark. "About him — her — it! Since you practically live in the Exchange, how can you exactly help yourself?"

Her laughter came back. "It's all, you know, so much later than 1812."

"Later! Why, a lot of it is to happen yet!"

She leaned over the counter. "Tell me what you know about it," she said with caressing insinuation.

"Oh, well — but probably they mean to have your education progress chronologically."

"I think I can pick it up anywhere. We had to at the plantation."

It was from my table in the distant dim back of the room, where things stood lumpily under mosquito netting, that I told her my history. She made me go there to my lunch. She seemed to desire that our talk over the counter should not longer continue. And so, back there, over my chocolate and sandwiches, I brought out my gleaned and arranged knowledge which rang out across the distance, comically, like a lecture. She, at her counter, now and then busy with her ledger, received it with the attentive solemnity of a lecture. The ledger might have been notes that she was dutifully and improvingly taking. After I had finished she wrote on for a little while in silence. The curly white dog rose into sight, looked amiably and vaguely about, stretched himself, and sank to sleep again out of sight.