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.
“Not this time,” John Mayrant said. “I wish to show our relics to this
gentleman myself--if he will permit me?” This last was a question put to
me with a courteous formality, a formality which a few minutes more were
to see smashed to smithereens.