“Not in Kings Port! At least, not my sort of people!” He stiffly
proclaimed this.
I tried to draw him out. “But is there, after all, any valid objection
to it?”
But he was off on a preceding speculation. “A mother or any parent,” he
said, “might encourage the daughter to smoke, too. And the girl might
take it up so as not to be thought peculiar where she was, and then she
might drop it very gladly.”
I became specific. “Drop it, you mean, when she came to a place where
doing it would be thought--well, in bad style?”
“Or for the better reason,” he answered, “that she didn’t really like it
herself.”
“How much you don’t ‘really like it’ yourself!” I remarked.
This time he was slow. “Well--well--why need they? Are not their lips
more innocent than ours? Is not the association somewhat--?”
“My dear fellow,” I interrupted, “the association is, I think you’ll
have to agree, scarcely of my making!”
“That’s true enough,” he laughed. “And, as you say, very nice people
do it everywhere. But not here. Have you ever noticed,” he now inquired
with continued transparency, “how much harder they are on each other
than we are on them?”
“Oh, yes! I’ve noticed that.” I surmised it was this sort of thing
he had earlier choked himself off from telling me in his unfinished
complaint about his aunt; but I was to learn later that on this occasion
it was upon the poor boy himself and not on the smoking habits of Miss
Rieppe, that his aunt had heavily descended. I also reflected that if
cigarettes were the only thing he deprecated in the lady of his choice,
the lost illusion might be coaxed back. The trouble was that deprecated
something fairly distant from cigarettes. The cake was my quite
sufficient trouble; it stuck in my throat worse than the probably
magnified gossip I had heard; this, for the present, I could manage to
swallow.
He came out now with a personal note. “I suppose you think I’m a ninny.”
“Never in the wildest dream!”
“Well, but too innocent for a man, anyhow.”
“That would be an insult,” I declared laughingly.
“For I’m not innocent in the least. You’ll find we’re all men here, just
as much as any men in the North you could pick out. South Carolina
has never lacked sporting blood, sir. But in Newport--well, sir, we
gentlemen down here, when we wish a certain atmosphere and all that,
have always been accustomed to seek the demi-monde.”
“So it was with us until the women changed it.”
“The women, sir?” He was innocent!
“The ‘ladies,’ as you Southerners so chivalrously continue to style
them. The rich new fashionable ladies became so desperate in their
competition for men’s allegiance that they--well, some of them would, in
the point of conversation, greatly scandalize the smart demi-monde.”
He nodded. “Yes. I heard men say things in drawing-rooms to ladies that
a gentleman here would have been taken out and shot for. And don’t you
agree with me, sir, that good taste itself should be a sort of religion?
I don’t mean to say anything sacrilegious, but it seems to me that even
if one has ceased to believe some parts of the Bible, even if one does
not always obey the Ten Commandments, one is bound, not as a believer
but as a gentleman, to remember the difference between grossness and
refinement, between excess and restraint--that one can have and keep
just as the pagan Greeks did, a moral elegance.”
He astonished me, this ardent, ideal, troubled boy; so innocent
regarding the glaring facts of our new prosperity, so finely penetrating
as to some of the mysteries of the soul. But he was of old Huguenot
blood, and of careful and gentle upbringing; and it was delightful
to find such a young man left upon our American soil untainted by the
present fashionable idolatries.
“I bow to your creed of ‘moral elegance,’” I cried. “It never dies. It
has outlasted all the mobs and all the religions.”
“They seemed to think,” he continued, pursuing his Newport train of
thought, “that to prove you were a dead game sport you must behave
like--behave like--”
“Like a herd of swine,” I suggested.
He was merry. “Ah, if they only would--completely!”
“Completely what?”
“Behave so. Rush over a steep place into the sea.”
We sat in the quiet relish of his Scriptural idea, and the western
crimson and the twilight began to come and mingle with the perfumes.
John Mayrant’s face changed from its vivacity to a sort of pensive
wistfulness, which, for all the dash and spirit in his delicate
features, was somehow the final thing one got from the boy’s expression.
It was as though the noble memories of his race looked out of his eyes,
seeking new chances for distinction, and found instead a soil laid
waste, an empty fatherland, a people benumbed past rousing. Had he not
said, “Poor Kings Port!” as he tapped the gravestone? Moral elegance
could scarcely permit a sigh more direct.
“I am glad that you believe it never dies,” he resumed. “And I am glad
to find somebody to--talk to, you know. My friends here are everything
friends and gentlemen should be, but they don’t--I suppose it’s because
they have not had my special experiences.”
I sat waiting for the boy to go on with it. How plainly he was telling
me of his “special experiences”! He and his creed were not merely in
revolt against the herd of swine; there would be nothing special in
that; I had met people before who were that; but he was tied by honor,
and soon to be tied by the formidable nuptial knot, to a specimen
devotee of the cult. He shouldn’t marry her if he really did not want
to, and I could stop it! But how was I to begin spinning the first faint
web of plan how I might stop it, unless he came right out with the whole
thing? I didn’t believe he was the man to do that ever, even under the
loosening inspiration of drink. In wine lies truth, no doubt; but within
him, was not moral elegance the bottom truth that would, even in his
cups, keep him a gentleman, and control all such revelations? He might
smash the glasses, but he would not speak of his misgivings as to
Hortense Rieppe.
He began again, “Nor do I believe that a really nice girl would continue
to think as those few do, if she once got safe away from them. Why, my
dear sir,” he stretched out his hand in emphasis, “you do not have to
do anything untimely and extreme if you are in good earnest a dead game
sport. The time comes, and you meet the occasion as the duck swims.
There was one of them--the right kind.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Why--you’re leaning against her headstone!”
The little incongruity made us both laugh, but it was only for the
instant. The tender mood of the evening, and all that we had said,
sustained the quiet and almost grave undertone of our conference. My own
quite unconscious act of rising from the grave and standing before him
on the path to listen brought back to us our harmonious pensiveness.
“She was born in Kings Port, but educated in Europe. I don’t suppose
until the time came that she ever did anything harder than speak French,
or play the piano, or ride a horse. She had wealth and so had her
husband. He was killed in the war, and so were two of her sons. The
third was too young to go. Their fortune was swept away, but the
plantation was there, and the negroes were proud to remain faithful to
the family. She took hold of the plantation, she walked the rice-banks
in high boots. She had an overseer, who, it was told her, would possibly
take her life by poison or by violence. She nevertheless lived in that
lonely spot with no protector except her pistol and some directions
about antidotes. She dismissed him when she had proved he was cheating
her; she made the planting pay as well as any man did after the war;
she educated her last son, got him into the navy, and then, one evening,
walking the river-banks too late, she caught the fever and died.
You will understand she went with one step from cherished ease to
single-handed battle with life, a delicately nurtured lady, with no
preparation for her trials.”
“Except moral elegance,” I murmured.
“Ah, that was the point, sir! To see her you would never have guessed
it! She kept her burdens from the sight of all. She wore tribulation as
if it were a flower in her bosom. We children always looked forward
to her coming, because she was so gay and delightful to us, telling
us stories of the old times--old rides when the country was wild, old
journeys with the family and servants to the Hot Springs before the
steam cars were invented, old adventures, with the battle of New Orleans
or a famous duel in them--the sort of stories that begin with (for you
seem to know something of it yourself, sir) ‘Your grandfather, my
dear John, the year that he was twenty, got himself into serious
embarrassments through paying his attentions to two reigning beauties
at once.’ She was full of stories which began in that sort of pleasant
way.”
I said: “When a person like that dies, an impoverishment falls upon us;
the texture of life seems thinner.”
“Oh, yes, indeed! I know what you mean--to lose the people one has
always seen from the cradle. Well, she has gone away, she has taken
her memories out of the world, the old times, the old stories. Nobody,
except a little nutshell of people here, knows or cares anything about
her any more; and soon even the nutshell will be empty.” He paused, and
then, as if brushing aside his churchyard mood, he translated into his
changed thought another classic quotation: “But we can’t dawdle over
the ‘tears of things’; it’s Nature’s law. Only, when I think of the
rice-banks and the boots and the pistol, I wonder if the Newport ladies,
for all their high-balls, could do any better!”
The crimson had faded, the twilight was altogether come, but the little
noiseless breeze was blowing still; and as we left the quiet tombs
behind us, and gained Worship Street, I could not help looking back
where slept that older Kings Port about which I had heard and had said
so much. Over the graves I saw the roses, nodding and moving, as if in
acquiescent revery.