“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.
“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.
V: The Boy of the Cake
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