Owen Wister - Lady Baltimore

"That's all?" she asked abruptly.

"So far," I answered.

"And what do you think of such a young man?" she inquired.

"I know what I think of such a young woman."

She was still pensive. "Yes, yes, but then that is so simple."

I had a short laugh. "Oh, if you come to the simplicity!"

She nodded, seeming to be doing sums with her pencil.

"Men are always simple — when they're in love."

I assented. "And women — you'll agree? — are always simple when they're not!"

She finished her sums. "Well, I think he's foolish!" she frankly stated. "Didn't Aunt Josephine think so, too?"

"Aunt Josephine?"

"Miss Josephine St. Michael — my greet-aunt — the lady who embroidered. She brought me here from the plantation."

"No, she wouldn't talk about it. But don't you think it is your turn now?"

"I've taken my turn!"

"Oh, not much. To say you think he's foolish isn't much. You've seen him since?"

"Seen him? Since when?"

"Here. Since the postponement. I take it he came himself about it."

"Yes, he came. You don't suppose we discussed the reasons, do you?"

"My dear young lady, I suppose nothing, except that you certainly must have seen how he looked (he can blush, you know, handsomely), and that you may have some knowledge or some guess—"

"Some guess why it's not to be until Wednesday week? Of course he said why. Her poor, dear father, the General, isn't very well."

"That, indeed, must be an anxiety for Johnny," I remarked.

This led her to indulge in some more merriment. "But he does," she then said, "seem anxious about something."

"Ah," I exclaimed. "Then you admit it, too!"

She resorted again to the bland, inquiring stare.

"What he won't admit," I explained, "even to his intimate Aunt, because he's so honorable."

"He certainly is simple," she commented, in soft and pensive tones.

"Isn't there some one," I asked, "who could — not too directly, of course — suggest that to him?"

"I think I prefer men to be simple," she returned somewhat quickly.

"Especially when they're in love," I reminded her somewhat slowly.

"Do you want some Lady Baltimore to-day?" she inquired in the official Exchange tone.

I rose obediently. "You're quite right, I should have gone back to the battle of Cowpens long ago, and I'll just say this — since you asked me what I thought of him — that if he's descended from that John Mayrant who fought the Serapes under Paul Jones—"

"He is!" she broke in eagerly.

"Then there's not a name in South Carolina that I'd rather have for my own."

I intended that thrust to strike home, but she turned it off most competently. "Oh, you mustn't accept us because of our ancestors. That's how we've been accepting ourselves, and only look where we are in the race!"

"Ah!" I said, as a parting attempt, "don't pretend you're not perfectly satisfied — all of you — as to where you are in the race!"

"We don't pretend anything!" she flashed back.

One is unthankful, I suppose, to call a day so dreary when one has lunched under the circumstances that I have attempted to indicate; the bright spot ought to shine over the whole. But you haven't an idea what a nightmare in the daytime Cowpens was beginning to be.

I had thumbed and scanned hundreds of ancient pages, some of them manuscript; I had sat by ancient shelves upon hard chairs, I had sneezed with the ancient dust, and I had not put my finger upon a trace of the right Fanning. I should have given it up, left unexplored the territory that remained staring at me through the backs of unread volumes, had it not been for my Aunt Carola. To her I owed constancy and diligence, and so I kept at it; and the hermit hours I spent at Court and Chancel streets grew worse as I knew better what rarely good company was ready to receive me. This Kings Port, this little city of oblivion, held, shut in with its lavender and pressed-rose memories, a handful of people who were like that great society of the world, the high society of distinguished men and women who exist no more, but who touched history with a light hand, and left their mark upon it in a host of memoirs and letters that we read to-day with a starved and home-sick longing in the midst of our sullen welter of democracy. With its silent houses and gardens, its silent streets, its silent vistas of the blue water in the sunshine, this beautiful, sad place was winning my heart and making it ache. Nowhere else in America such charm, such character, such true elegance as here — and nowhere else such an overwhelming sense of finality! — the doom of a civilization founded upon a crime. And yet, how much has the ballot done for that race? Or, at least, how much has the ballot done for the majority of that race? And what way was it to meet this problem with the sudden sweeping folly of the Fifteenth Amendment? To fling the "door of hope" wide open before those within had learned the first steps of how to walk sagely through it! Ah, if it comes to blame, who goes scatheless in this heritage of error? I could have shaped (we all could, you know) a better scheme for the universe, a plan where we should not flourish at each other's expense, where the lion should be lying down with the lamb now, where good and evil should not be husband and wife, indissolubly married by a law of creation.

With such highly novel thoughts as these I descended the steps from my researches at the corner of Court and Chancel streets an hour earlier than my custom, because — well, I couldn't, that day, stand Cowpens for another minute. Up at the corner of Court and Worship the people were going decently into church; it was a sweet, gentle late Friday in Lent. I had intended keeping out-of-doors, to smell the roses in the gardens, to bask in the soft remnant of sunshine, to loiter and peep in through the Kings Port garden gates, up the silent walks to the silent verandas. But the slow stream of people took me, instead, into church with the deeply veiled ladies of Kings Port, hushed in their perpetual mourning for not only, I think, those husbands and brothers and sons whom the war had turned to dust forty years ago, but also for the Cause, the lost Cause, that died with them. I sat there among these Christians suckled in a creed outworn, envying them their well-regulated faith; it, too, was part of the town's repose and sweetness, together with the old-fashioned roses and the old-fashioned ladies. Men, also, were in the congregation — not many, to be sure, but all unanimously wearing that expression of remarkable virtue which seems always to visit, when he goes to church, the average good fellow who is no better than he should be. I became, myself, filled with this same decorous inconsistency, and was singing the hymn, when I caught sight of John Mayrant. What lady was he with? It was just this that most annoyingly I couldn't make out, because the unlucky disposition of things hid it. I caught myself craning my neck and singing the hymn simultaneously and with no difficulty, because all my childhood was in that hymn; I couldn't tell when I hadn't known words and music by heart. Who was she? I tried for a clear view when we sat down, and also, let me confess, when we knelt down; I saw even less of her so; and my hope at the end of the service was dashed by her slow but entire disappearance amid the engulfing exits of the other ladies. I followed where I imagined she had gone, out by a side door, into the beautiful graveyard; but among the flowers and monuments she was not, nor was he; and next I saw, through the iron gate, John Mayrant in the street, walking with his intimate aunt and her more severe sister, and Miss La Heu. I somewhat superfluously hastened to the gate and greeted them, to which they responded with polite, masterly discouragement. He, however, after taking off his hat to them, turned back, and I watched them pursuing their leisurely, reticent course toward the South Place. Why should the old ladies strike me as looking like a tremendously proper pair of conspirators? I was wondering this as I turned back among the tombs, when I perceived John Mayrant coming along one of the churchyard paths. His approach was made at right angles with that of another personage, the respectful negro custodian of the place. This dignitary was evidently hoping to lead me among the monuments, recite to me their old histories, and benefit by my consequent gratitude; he had even got so far as smiling and removing his hat when John Mayrant stopped him. The young man hailed the negro by his first name with that particular and affectionate superiority which few Northerners can understand and none can acquire, and which resembles nothing so much as the way in which you speak to your old dog who has loved you and followed you, because you have cared for him.