“Then it was a good laugh, indeed!” I cried heartily.
“Oh, don’t let’s go back to our fine manners!” he begged comically.
“We’ve satisfied each other that we have them! I feel so lonely; and my
aunt just now--well, never mind about that. But you really must excuse
us about Miss Beaufain, and all that sort of thing. I see it, because
I’m of the new generation, since the war, and--well, I’ve been to other
places, too. But Aunt Eliza, and all of them, you know, can’t see it.
And I wouldn’t have them, either! So I don’t ever attempt to explain
to them that the world has to go on. They’d say, ‘We don’t see the
necessity!’ When slavery stopped, they stopped, you see, just like a
clock. Their hand points to 1865--it has never moved a minute since. And
some day”--his voice grew suddenly tender--“they’ll go, one by one, to
join the still older ones. And I shall miss them very much.”
For a moment I did not speak, but watched the roses nodding and moving.
Then I said: “May I say that I shall miss them, too?”
He looked at me. “Miss our old Kings Port people?” He didn’t invite
outsiders to do that!
“Don’t you see how it is?” I murmured. “It was the same thing once with
us.”
“The same thing--in the North?” His tone still held me off.
“The same sort of dear old people--I mean charming, peppery, refined,
courageous people; in Salem, in Boston, in New York, in every place that
has been colonial, and has taken a hand in the game.” And, as certain
beloved memories of men and women rose in my mind, I continued: “If you
knew some of the Boston elder people as I have known them, you would
warm with the same admiration that is filling me as I see your people of
Kings Port.”
“But politics?” the young Southerner slowly suggested.
“Oh, hang slavery! Hang the war!” I exclaimed. “Of course, we had a
family quarrel. But we were a family once, and a fine one, too! We knew
each other, we visited each other, we wrote letters, sent presents, kept
up relations; we, in short, coherently joined hands from one generation
to another; the fibres of the sons tingled with the current from their
fathers, back and back to the old beginnings, to Plymouth and Roanoke
and Rip Van Winkle! It’s all gone, all done, all over. You have to be a
small, well-knit country for that sort of exquisite personal unitedness.
There’s nothing united about these States any more, except Standard Oil
and discontent. We’re no longer a small people living and dying for a
great idea; we’re a big people living and dying for money. And these
ladies of yours--well, they have made me homesick for a national and
a social past which I never saw, but which my old people knew. They’re
like legends, still living, still warm and with us. In their quiet
clean-cut faces I seem to see a reflection of the old serene candlelight
we all once talked and danced in--sconces, tall mirrors, candles burning
inside glass globes to keep them from the moths and the draft that, of
a warm evening, blew in through handsome mahogany doors; the good bright
silver; the portraits by Copley and Gilbert Stuart; a young girl at a
square piano, singing Moore’s melodies--and Mr. Pinckney or Commodore
Perry, perhaps, dropping in for a hot supper!”
John Mayrant was smiling and looking at the graves. “Yes, that’s it;
that’s all it,” he mused. “You do understand.”
But I had to finish my flight. “Such quiet faces are gone now in the
breathless, competing North: ground into oblivion between the clashing
trades of the competing men and the clashing jewels and chandeliers of
their competing wives--while yours have lingered on, spared by your very
adversity. And that’s why I shall miss your old people when they follow
mine--because they’re the last of their kind, the end of the chain, the
bold original stock, the great race that made our glory grow and saw
that it did grow through thick and thin: the good old native blood of
independence.”
I spoke as a man can always speak when he means it; and my listener’s
face showed that my words had gone where meant words always go--home to
the heart. But he merely nodded at me. His nod, however, telling as it
did of a quickly established accord between us, caused me to bring out
to this new acquaintance still more of those thoughts which I condescend
to expose to very few old ones.
“Haven’t you noticed,” I said, “or don’t you feel it, away down here in
your untainted isolation, the change, the great change, that has come
over the American people?”
He wasn’t sure.
“They’ve lost their grip on patriotism.”
He smiled. “We did that here in 1861.”
“Oh, no! You left the Union, but you loved what you considered was your
country, and you love it still. That’s just my point, just my strange
discovery in Kings Port. You retain the thing we’ve lost. Our big men
fifty years ago thought of the country, and what they could make it; our
big men to-day think of the country and what they can make out of it.
Rather different, don’t you see? When I walk about in the North, I
merely meet members of trusts or unions--according to the length of
the individual’s purse; when I walk about in Kings Port, I meet
Americans.--Of course,” I added, taking myself up, “that’s too sweeping
a statement. The right sort of American isn’t extinct in the North by
any means. But there’s such a commercial deluge of the wrong sort, that
the others sometimes seem to me sadly like a drop in the bucket.”
“You certainly understand it all,” John Mayrant repeated. “It’s amazing
to find you saying things that I have thought were my own private
notions.”