I now burned to put many questions to the rest of the company. If,
through my foolish and outreaching slyness with the girl behind the
counter, the door of my comprehension had been shut, Juno had now opened
it sufficiently wide for a number of facts to come crowding in, so to
speak, abreast. Indeed, their simultaneous arrival was not a little
confusing, as if several visitors had burst in upon me and at once begun
speaking loudly, each shouting a separate and important matter which
demanded my intelligent consideration. John Mayrant worked in the
custom house, and Kings Port frowned upon this; not merely Kings Port in
general--which counted little with the boy, if indeed he noticed general
opinion at all--but the boy’s particular Kings Port, his severe old
aunts, and his cousins, and the pretty girl at the Exchange, and the
men he played cards with, all these frowned upon it, too; yet even this
condemnation one could disregard if some lofty personal principle, some
pledge to one’s own sacred honor, were at stake--but here was no such
thing: John Mayrant hated the position himself. The salary? No, the
salary would count for nothing in the face of such a prejudice as I had
seen glitter from his eye! A strong, clever youth of twenty-three, with
the world before him, and no one to support--stop! Hortense Rieppe!
There was the lofty personal principle, the sacred pledge to honor; he
was engaged presently to endow her with all his worldly goods; and to
perform this faithfully a bridegroom must not, no matter how little he
liked “taking orders from a negro,” fling away his worldly goods some
few days before he was to pronounce his bridegroom’s vow. So here, at
Mrs. Trevise’s dinner-table, I caught for one moment, to the full, a
vision of the unhappy boy’s plight; he was sticking to a task which he
loathed that he might support a wife whom he no longer desired. Such, as
he saw it, was his duty; and nobody, not even a soul of his kin or his
kind, gave him a word or a thought of understanding, gave him anything
except the cold shoulder. Yes; from one soul he had got a sign--from
aged Daddy Ben, at the churchyard gate; and amid my jostling surmises
and conclusions, that quaint speech of the old negro, that little act of
fidelity and affection from the heart of a black man, took on a
strange pathos in its isolation amid the general harshness of his white
superiors. Over this it was that I was pausing when, all in a second,
perplexity again ruled my meditations. Juno had said that the engagement
was broken. Well, if that were the case--But was it likely to be the
case? Juno’s agreeable habit, a habit grown familiar to all of us in the
house, was to sprinkle about, along with her vitriol, liberal quantities
of the by-product of inaccuracy. Mingled with her latest illustrations,
she had poured out for us one good dose of falsehood, the antidote for
which it had been my happy office to administer on the spot. If John
Mayrant wasn’t in bed from the wounds of combat, as she had given us to
suppose, perhaps Hortense Rieppe hadn’t released him from his plighted
troth, as Juno had also announced; and distinct relief filled me when I
reasoned this out. I leave others to reason out why it was relief, and
why a dull disappointment had come over me at the news that the match
was off. This, for me, should have been good news, when you consider
that I had been so lately telling myself such a marriage must not be,
that I must myself, somehow (since no one else would), step in and
arrest the calamity; and it seems odd that I should have felt this
blankness and regret upon learning that the parties had happily settled
it for themselves, and hence my difficult and delicate assistance was
never to be needed by them.
Did any one else now sitting at our table know of Miss Rieppe’s reported
act? What particulars concerning John’s fight had been given by Juno
before my entrance? It didn’t surprise me that her nephew was in bed
from Master Mayrant’s lusty blows. One could readily guess the manner
in which young John, with his pent-up fury over the custom house, would
“land” his chastisement all over the person of any rash critic! And what
a talking about it must be going on everywhere to-day! If Kings Port
tongues had been set in motion over me and my small notebook in a
library, the whole town must be buzzing over every bruise given and
taken in this evidently emphatic battle. I had hoped to glean some
more precise information from my fellow-boarders after Juno had
disembarrassed us of her sonorous presence; but even if they were
possessed of all the facts which I lacked, Mrs. Trevise in some masterly
fashion of her own banished the subject from further discussion. She
held us off from it chiefly, I think, by adopting a certain upright
posture in her chair, and a certain tone when she inquired if we wished
a second help of the pudding. After thirty-five years of boarders and
butchers, life held no secrets or surprises for her; she was a mature,
lone, disenchanted, able lady, and even her silence was like an arm of
the law.
An all too brief conversation, nipped by Mrs. Trevise at a stage even
earlier than the bud, revealed to me that perhaps my fellow-boarders
would have been glad to ask me questions, too.
It was the male honeymooner who addressed me. “Did I understand you to
say, sir, that Mr. Mayrant had received a bruise over his left eye?”
“Daphne!” called out Mrs. Trevise, “Mr. Henderson will take an orange.”
And so we finished our meal without further reference to eyes, or
noses, or anything of the sort. It was just as well, I reflected, when I
reached my room, that I on my side had been asked no questions, since I
most likely knew less than the others who had heard all that Juno had to
say; and it would have been humiliating, after my superb appearance of
knowing more, to explain that John Mayrant had walked with me all the
way from the Library, and never told me a word about the affair.
This reflection increased my esteem for the boy’s admirable reticence.
What private matter of his own had I ever learned from him? It was other
people, invariably, who told me of his troubles. There had been that
single, quickly controlled outbreak about his position in the Custom
House, and also he had let fall that touching word concerning his faith
and his liking to say his prayers in the place where his mother had said
them; beyond this, there had never yet been anything of all that must at
the present moment be intimately stirring in his heart.
Should I “like to take orders from a negro?” Put personally, it came to
me now as a new idea came as something which had never entered my mind
before, not even as an abstract hypothesis I didn’t have to think before
reaching the answer though; something within me, which you ma call what
you please--convention, prejudice, instinct--something answered most
prompt and emphatically in the negative. I revolved in my mind as I
tried to pack into a box a number of objects that I had bought in one
or to “antique” shops. They wouldn’t go in, the objects; they were of
defeating and recalcitrant shapes, and of hostile materials--glass and
brass--and I must have a larger box made, and in that case I would buy
this afternoon the other kettle-supporter (I forget its right name) and
have the whole lot decently packed. Take orders from a colored man? Have
him give you directions, dictate you letters, discipline you if you were
unpunctual? No, indeed! And if such were my feeling, how must this young
Southerner feel? With this in my mind, I made sure that the part in my
back hair was right, and after that precaution soon found myself on my
way, in a way somewhat roundabout, to the kettle-supporter sauntering
northward along High Walk, and stopping often; the town, and the water,
and the distant shores all were so lovely, so belonged to one another,
so melted into one gentle impression of wistfulness and tenderness!
I leaned upon the stone parapet and enjoyed the quiet which every
surrounding detail brought to my senses. How could John Mayrant endure
such a situation? I continued to wonder; and I also continued to assure
myself it was absurd to suppose that the engagement was broken.
The shutting of a front door across the street almost directly behind
me attracted my attention because of its being the first sound that had
happened in noiseless, empty High Walk since I had been strolling there;
and I turned from the parapet to see that I was no longer the solitary
person in the street. Two ladies, one tall and one diminutive, both
in black and with long black veils which they had put back from their
faces, were evidently coming from a visit. As the tall one bowed to me
I recognized Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and took off my hat. It was not
until they had crossed the street and come up the stone steps near where
I stood on High Walk that the little lady also bowed to me; she was Mrs.
Weguelin St. Michael, and from something in her prim yet charming manner
I gathered that she held it to be not perfectly well-bred in a lady to
greet a gentleman across the width of a public highway, and that she
could have wished that her tall companion had not thus greeted me, a
stranger likely to comment upon Kings Port manners. In her eyes, such
free deportment evidently went with her tall companion’s method of
speech: hadn’t the little lady informed me during our first brief
meeting that Kings Port at times thought Mrs. Gregory St. Michael’s
tongue “too downright”?
The two ladies having graciously granted me permission to join them
while they took the air, Mrs. Gregory must surely have shocked Mrs.
Weguelin by saying to me, “I haven’t a penny for your thoughts, but I’ll
exchange.”
“Would you thus bargain in the dark, madam?”
“Oh, I’ll risk that; and, to say truth, even your back, as we came out
of that house, was a back of thought.”
“Well, I confess to some thinking. Shall I begin?”
It was Mrs. Weguelin who quickly replied, smiling: “Ladies first, you
know. At least we still keep it so in Kings Port.”
“Would we did everywhere!” I exclaimed devoutly; and I was quite aware
that beneath the little lady’s gentle smile a setting down had lurked, a
setting down of the most delicate nature, administered to me not in
the least because I had deserved one, but because she did not like Mrs.
Gregory’s “downright” tongue, and could not stop her.
Mrs. Gregory now took the prerogative of ladies, and began. “I was
thinking of what we had all just been saying during our visit across the
way--and with which you are not going to agree--that our young people
would do much better to let us old people arrange their marriages for
them, as it Is done in Europe.”
“O dear!”
“I said that you would not agree; but that is because you are so young.”
“I don’t know that twenty-eight is so young.”
“You will know it when you are seventy-three.” This observation again
came from Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, and again with a gentle and
attractive smile. It was only the second time that she had spoken; and
throughout the talk into which we now fell as we slowly walked up
and down High Walk, she never took the lead; she left that to the
“downright” tongue--but I noticed, however, that she chose her moments
to follow the lead very aptly. I also perceived plainly that what we
were really going to discuss was not at all the European principle of
marriage-making, but just simply young John and his Hortense; they were
the true kernel of the nut with whose concealing shell Mrs. Gregory was
presenting me, and in proposing an exchange of thoughts she would get
back only more thoughts upon the same subject. It was pretty evident how
much Kings Port was buzzing over all this! They fondly believed they
did not like it; but what would they have done without it? What, indeed,
were they going to do when it was all over and done with, one way or
another? As a matter of fact, they ought to be grateful to Hortense for
contributing illustriously to the excitement of their lives.
“Of course, I am well aware,” Mrs. Gregory pursued, “that the young
people of to-day believe they can all ‘teach their grandmothers to suck
eggs,’ as we say in Kings Port.”
“We say it elsewhere, too,” I mildly put in.
“Indeed? I didn’t know that the North, with its pest of Hebrew and other
low immigrants, had retained any of the good old homely saws which we
brought from England. But do you imagine that if the control of marriage
rested in the hands of parents and grandparents (where it properly
belongs), you would be witnessing in the North this disgusting spectacle
of divorce?”
“But, Mrs. St. Michael--”
“We didn’t invite you to argue when we invited you to walk!” cried the
lady, laughing.
“We should like you to answer the question,” said Mrs. Weguelin St.
Michael.
“And tell us,” Mrs. Gregory continued, “if it’s your opinion that a boy
who has never been married is a better judge of matrimony’s pitfalls
than his father.”
“Or than any older person who has bravely and worthily gone through with
the experience,” Mrs. Weguelin added.
“Ladies, I’ve no mind to argue. But we’re ahead of Europe; we don’t need
their clumsy old plan.”
Mrs. Gregory gave a gallant, incredulous snort. “I shall be interested
to learn of anything that is done better here than in Europe.”
“Oh, many things, surely! But especially the mating of the fashionable
young. They don’t need any parents to arrange for them; it’s much better
managed through precocity.”
“Through precocity? I scarcely follow you.”
And Mrs. Weguelin softly added, “You must excuse us if we do not follow
you.” But her softness nevertheless indicated that if there were any one
present needing leniency, it was myself.
“Why, yes,” I told them, “it’s through precocity. The new-rich American
no longer commits the blunder of keeping his children innocent. You’ll
see it beginning in the dancing-class, where I heard an exquisite little
girl of six say to a little boy, ‘Go away; I can’t dance with you,
because my mamma says your mamma only keeps a maid to answer the
doorbell.’ When they get home from the dancing-class, tutors in poker
and bridge are waiting to teach them how to gamble for each other’s
little dimes. I saw a little boy in knickerbockers and a wide collar
throw down the evening paper--”
“At that age? They read the papers?” interrupted Mrs. Gregory.
“They read nothing else at any age. He threw it down and said, ‘Well, I
guess there’s not much behind this raid on Steel Preferred.’ What need
has such a boy for parents or grandparents? Presently he is travelling
to a fashionable boarding-school in his father’s private car. At college
all his adolescent curiosities are lavishly gratified. His sister at
home reads the French romances, and by eighteen she, too, knows (in her
head at least) the whole of life, so that she can be perfectly trusted;
she would no more marry a mere half-millionaire just because she loved
him than she would appear twice in the same ball-dress. She and her
ball-dresses are described in the papers precisely as if she were an
animal at a show--which indeed is what she has become; and she’s eager
to be thus described, because she and her mother--even if her mother
was once a lady and knew better--are haunted by one perpetual, sickening
fear, the fear of being left out. And if you desire to pay correct
ballroom compliments, you no longer go to her mother and tell her she’s
looking every bit as young as her daughter; you go to the daughter and
tell her she’s looking every bit as old as her mother, for that’s what
she wishes to do, that’s what she tries for, what she talks, dresses,
eats, drinks, goes to indecent plays and laughs for. Yes, we manage
it through precocity, and the new-rich American parent has achieved at
least one new thing under the sun, namely, the corruption of the child.”
My ladies silently consulted each other’s expressions, after which,
in equal silence, their gaze returned to me; but their equally
intent scrutiny was expressive of quite different things. It was with
expectancy that Mrs. Gregory looked at me--she wanted more. Not so Mrs.
Weguelin; she gave me disapproval; it was shadowed in her beautiful,
lustrous eyes that burned dark in her white face with as much fire
as that of youth, yet it was not of youth, being deeply charged with
retrospection.
In what, then, had I sinned? For the little lady’s next words, coldly
murmured, increased in me an uneasiness, as of sin:--
“You have told us much that we are not accustomed to hear in Kings
Port.”
“Oh, I haven’t begun to tell you!” I exclaimed cheerily.
“You certainly have not told us,” said Mrs. Gregory, “how your
‘precocity’ escapes this divorce degradation.”
“Escape it? Those people think it is--well, provincial--not to have been
divorced at least once!”
Mrs. Gregory opened her eyes, but Mrs. Weguelin shut her lips.
I continued: “Even the children, for their own little reasons, like
it. Only last summer, in Newport, a young boy was asked how he enjoyed
having a father and an ex-father.”
“Ex-father!” said Mrs. Gregory. “Vice-father is what I should call him.”
“Maria!” murmured Mrs. Weguelin, “how can you jest upon such topics?”
“I am far from jesting, Julia. Well, young gentleman, and what answer
did this precious Newport child make?”
“He said (if you will pardon my giving you his little sentiment in his
own quite expressive idiom), ‘Me for two fathers! Double money birthdays
and Christmases. See?’ That was how he saw divorce.”
Once again my ladies consulted each other’s expressions; we moved along
High Walk in such silence that I heard the stiff little rustle which
the palmettos were making across the street; even these trees, you might
have supposed, were whispering together over the horrors that I had
recited in their decorous presence.
It was Mrs. Gregory who next spoke. “I can translate that last boy’s
language, but what did the other boy mean about a ‘raid on Steel
Preferred’--if I’ve got the jargon right?”
While I translated this for her, I felt again the disapproval in Mrs.
Weguelin’s dark eyes; and my sins--for they were twofold--were presently
made clear to me by this lady.
“Are such subjects as--as stocks” (she softly cloaked this word in scorn
immeasurable)--“are such subjects mentioned in your good society at the
North?”