The lady paused over my reply. “I am afraid you must feel us to be very
old-fashioned in, Kings Port,” she then said.
“But I rejoice in it!”
She ignored my not wholly dexterous compliment. “And some subjects,” she
pursued, “seem to us so grave that if we permit ourselves to speak of
them at all we cannot speak of them lightly.”
No, they couldn’t speak of them lightly! Here, then, stood my two sins
revealed; everything I had imparted, and also my tone of imparting it,
had displeased Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, not with the thing, but with
me. I had transgressed her sound old American code of good manners,
a code slightly pompous no doubt, but one in which no familiarity was
allowed to breed contempt. To her good taste, there were things in
the world which had, apparently, to exist, but which one banished from
drawing-room discussion as one conceals from sight the kitchen and
outhouses; one dealt with them only when necessity compelled, and never
in small-talk; and here had I been, so to speak, small-talking them in
that glib, modern, irresponsible cadence with which our brazen age rings
and clatters like the beating of triangles and gongs. Not triangles and
gongs, but rather strings and flutes, had been the music to which Kings
Port society had attuned its measured voice.
I saw it all, and even saw that my own dramatic sense of Mrs. Weguelin’s
dignity had perversely moved me to be more flippant than I actually
felt; and I promised myself that a more chastened tone should forthwith
redeem me from the false position I had got into.
“My dear,” said Mrs. Gregory to Mrs. Weguelin, “we must ask him to
excuse our provincialism.”
For the second time I was not wholly dexterous. “But I like it so much!”
I exclaimed; and both ladies laughed frankly.
Mrs. Gregory brought in a fable. “You’ll find us all ‘country mice’
here.”
This time I was happy. “At least, then, there’ll be no cat!” And this
caused us all to make little bows.
But the word “cat” fell into our talk as does a drop of some acid into
a chemical solution, instantly changing the whole to an unexpected new
color. The unexpected new color was, in this instance, merely what had
been latently lurking in the fluid of our consciousness all through and
now it suddenly came out.
Mrs. Gregory stared over the parapet at the harbor. “I wonder if anybody
has visited that steam yacht?”
“The Hermana?” I said. “She’s waiting, I believe, for her owner, who is
enjoying himself very much on land.” It was a strong temptation to add,
“enjoying himself with the cat,” but I resisted it.
“Oh!” said Mrs. Gregory. “Possibly a friend of yours?”
“Even his name is unknown to me. But I gather that he may be coming to
Kings Port--to attend Mr. John Mayrant’s wedding next Wednesday week.”
I hadn’t gathered this; but one is at times driven to improvising. I
wished so much to know if Juno was right about the engagement being
broken, and I looked hard at the ladies as my words fairly grazed the
“cat.” This time I expected them to consult each other’s expressions,
and such, indeed, was their immediate proceeding.
“The Wednesday following, you mean,” Mrs. Weguelin corrected.
“Postponed again? Dear me!”
Mrs. Gregory spoke this time. “General Rieppe. Less well again, it
seems.”
It would be like Juno to magnify a delay into a rupture. Then I had a
hilarious thought, which I instantly put to the ladies. “If the
poor General were to die completely, would the wedding be postponed
completely?”
“There would not be the slightest chance of that,” Mrs. Gregory
declared. And then she pronounced a sentence that was truly oracular:
“She’s coming at once to see for herself.”
To which Mrs. Weguelin added with deeper condemnation than she had so
far employed at all: “There is a rumor that she is actually coming in an
automobile.”
My silence upon these two remarks was the silence of great and sudden
interest; but it led Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael to do my perceptions
a slight injustice, and she had no intention that I should miss the
quality of her opinion regarding the vehicle in which Hortense was
reported to be travelling.
“Miss Rieppe has the extraordinary taste to come here in an automobile,”
said Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, with deepened severity.
Though I understood quite well, without this emphasizing, that the
little lady would, with her unbending traditions, probably think it more
respectable to approach Kings Port in a wheelbarrow, I was absorbed
by the vague but copious import of Mrs. Gregory’s announcement. The
oracles, moreover, continued.
“But she is undoubtedly very clever to come and see for herself,” was
Mrs. Weguelin’s next comment.
Mrs. Gregory’s face, as she replied to her companion, took on a
censorious and superior expression. “You’ll remember, Julia, that I told
Josephine St. Michael it was what they had to expect.”
“But it was not Josephine, my dear, who at any time approved of taking
such a course. It was Eliza’s whole doing.”
It was fairly raining oracles round me, and they quite resembled, for
all the help and light they contained, their Delphic predecessors.
“And yet Eliza,” said Mrs. Gregory, “in the face of it, this very
morning, repeated her eternal assertion that we shall all see the
marriage will not take place.”
“Eliza,” murmured Mrs. Weguelin, “rates few things more highly than her
own judgment.”
Mrs. Gregory mused. “Yet she is often right when she has no right to be
right.”
I could not bear it any longer, and I said, “I heard to-day that Miss
Rieppe had broken her engagement.”
“And where did you hear that nonsense?” asked Mrs. Gregory.
My heart leaped, and I told her where.
“Oh, well! you will hear anything in a boarding-house. Indeed, that
would be a great deal too good to be true.”
“May I ask where Miss Rieppe is all this while?”
“The last news was from Palm Beach, where the air was said to be
necessary for the General.”
“But,” Mrs. Weguelin repeated, “we have every reason to believe that she
is coming here in an automobile.”
“We shall have to call, of course,” added Mrs. Gregory to her, not to
me; they were leaving me out of it. Yes, these ladies were forgetting
about me in their using preoccupation over whatever crisis it was that
now hung over John Mayrant’s love affairs--a preoccupation which was
evidently part of Kings Port’s universal buzz to-day, and which my
joining them in the street had merely mitigated for a moment. I did
not wish to be left out of it; I cannot tell you why--perhaps it was
contagious in the local air--but a veritable madness of craving to know
about it seized upon me. Of course, I saw that Miss Rieppe was, almost
too grossly and obviously, “playing for time”; the health of people’s
fathers did not cause weekly extensions of this sort. But what was
it that the young lady expected time to effect for her? Her release,
formally, by her young man, on the ground of his worldly ill fortune? Or
was it for an offer from the owner of the Hermana that she was waiting,
before she should take the step of formally releasing John Mayrant? No,
neither of these conjectures seemed to furnish a key to the tactics
of Miss Rieppe and the theory that each of these affianced parties was
strategizing to cause the other to assume the odium of breaking their
engagement, with no result save that of repeatedly countermanding a
wedding-cake, struck me as belonging admirably to a stage-comedy in
three acts, but scarcely to life as we find it. Besides, poor John
Mayrant was, all too plainly, not strategizing; he was playing as
straight a game as the honest heart of a gentleman could inspire. And
so, baffled at all points, I said (for I simply had to try something
which might lead to my sharing in Kings Port’s vibrating secret):--
“I can’t make out whether she wants to marry him or not.”
Mrs. Gregory answered. “That is just what she is coming to see for
herself.”
“But since her love was for his phosphates only--!” was my natural
exclamation.
It caused (and this time I did not expect it) my inveterate ladies to
consult each other’s expressions. They prolonged their silence so much
that I spoke again:--
“And backing out of this sort of thing can be done, I should think,
quite as cleverly, and much more simply, from a distance.”
It was Mrs. Weguelin who answered now, or, rather, who headed me off.
“Have you been able to make out whether he wants to marry her or not?”
“Oh, he never comes near any of that with me!”
“Certainly not. But we all understand that he has taken a fancy to you,
and that you have talked much with him.”
So they all understood this, did they? This, too, had played its
little special part in the buzz? Very well, then, nothing of my private
impressions should drop from my lips here, to be quoted and misquoted
and battledored and shuttlecocked, until it reached the boy himself (as
it would inevitably) in fantastic disarrangement. I laughed. “Oh, yes!
I have talked much with him. Shakespeare, I think, was our latest
subject.”
Mrs. Weguelin was plainly watching for something to drop. “Shakespeare!”
Her tone was of surprise.
I then indulged myself in that most delightful sort of impertinence,
which consists in the other person’s not seeing it. “You wouldn’t be
likely to have heard of that yet. It occurred only before dinner to-day.
But we have also talked optimism, pessimism, sociology, evolution--Mr.
Mayrant would soon become quite--” I stopped myself on the edge of
something very clumsy.
But sharp Mrs. Gregory finished for me. “Yes, you mean that if he didn’t
live in Kings Port (where we still have reverence, at any rate), he fit
would imbibe all the shallow quackeries of the hour and resemble all the
clever young donkeys of the minute.”
“Maria!” Mrs. Weguelin murmurously expostulated.
Mrs. Gregory immediately made me a handsome but equivocal apology.
“I wasn’t thinking of you at all!” she declared gayly; and it set me
doubting if perhaps she hadn’t, after all, comprehended my impertinence.
“And, thank Heaven!” she continued, “John is one of us, in spite of his
present stubborn course.”
But Mrs. Weguelin’s beautiful eyes were resting upon me with that
disapproval I had come to know. To her, sociology and evolution and all
“isms” were new-fangled inventions and murky with offense; to touch them
was defilement, and in disclosing them to John Mayrant I was a corrupter
of youth. She gathered it all up into a word that was radiant with a
kind of lovely maternal gentleness:--
“We should not wish John to become radical.”
In her voice, the whole of old Kings Port was enshrined: hereditary
faith and hereditary standards, mellow with the adherence of generations
past, and solicitous for the boy of the young generation. I saw her eyes
soften at the thought of him; and throughout the rest of our talk to its
end her gaze would now and then return to me, shadowed with disapproval.
I addressed Mrs. Gregory. “By his ‘present stubborn course’ I suppose
you mean the Custom House.”
“All of us deplore his obstinacy. His Aunt Eliza has strongly but vainly
expostulated with him. And after that, Miss Josephine felt obliged to
tell him that he need not come to see her again until he resigned a
position which reflects ignominy upon us all.”
I suppressed a whistle. I thought (as I have said earlier) that I
had caught a full vision of John Mayrant’s present plight. But my
imagination had not soared to the height of Miss Josephine St. Michael’s
act of discipline. This, it must have been, that the boy had checked
himself from telling me in the churchyard. What a character of sterner
times was Miss Josephine! I thought of Aunt Carola, but even she was not
quite of this iron, and I said so to Mrs. Gregory. “I doubt if there
be any old lady left in the North,” I said, “capable of such antique
severity.”
But Mrs. Gregory opened my eyes still further. “Oh, you’d have them
if you had the negro to deal with as we have him. Miss Josephine,” she
added, “has to-day removed her sentence of banishment.”
I felt on the verge of new discoveries. “What!” I exclaimed, “and did
she relent?”
“New circumstances intervened,” Mrs. Gregory loftily explained.
“There was an occurrence--an encounter, in fact--in which John Mayrant
fittingly punished one who had presumed. Upon hearing of it, this
morning, Miss Josephine sent a message to John that he might resume
visiting her.
“But that is perfectly grand!” I cried in my delight over Miss Josephine
as a character.
“It is perfectly natural,” returned Mrs. Gregory, quietly. “John has
behaved with credit throughout. He was at length made to see that
circumstances forbade any breach between his family and that of
the other young man. John held back--who would not, after such an
insult?--but Miss Josephine was firm, and he has promised to call and
shake hands. My cousin, Doctor Beaugarcon, assures me that the
young man’s injuries are trifling--a week will see him restored and
presentable again.”
“A week? A mere nothing!” I answered “Do you know,” I now suggested,
“that you have forgotten to ask me what I was thinking about when we
met?”
“Bless me, young gentleman! and was it so remarkable?”
“Not at all, but it partly answers what Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael asked
me. If a young man does not really wish to marry a young woman there are
ways well known by which she can be brought to break the engagement.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Gregory, “of course; gayeties and irregularities--”
“That is, if he’s not above them,” I hastily subjoined.
“Not always, by any means,” Mrs. Gregory returned. “Kings Port has been
treated to some episodes--”
Mrs. Weguelin put in a word of defence. “It is to be said, Maria,
that John’s irregularities have invariably been conducted with perfect
propriety.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Gregory, “no Mayrant was ever known to be gross!”
“But this particular young lady,” said Mrs. Weguelin, “would not be
estranged by an masculine irregularities and gayeties. Not many.”
“How about infidelities?” I suggested. “If he should flagrantly lose his
heart to another?”
Mrs. Weguelin replied quickly. “That answers very well where hearts are
in question.”
“But,” said I, “since phosphates are no longer--?”
There was a pause. “It would be a new dilemma,” Mrs. Gregory then said
slowly, “if she turned out to care for him, after all.”
Throughout all this I was getting more and more the sense of how a
total circle of people, a well-filled, wide circle of interested people,
surrounded and cherished John Mayrant, made itself the setting of which
he was the jewel; I felt in it, even stronger than the manifestation
of personal affection (which certainly was strong enough), a collective
sense of possession in him, a clan value, a pride and a guardianship
concentrated and jealous, as of an heir to some princely estate, who
must be worthy for the sake of a community even before he was worthy
for his own sake. Thus he might amuse himself--it was in the code that
princely heirs so should pour se deniaiser, as they neatly put it in
Paris--thus might he and must he fight when his dignity was assailed;
but thus might he not marry outside certain lines prescribed, or depart
from his circle’s established creeds, divine and social, especially to
hold any position which (to borrow Mrs. Gregory’s phrase) “reflected
ignominy” upon them all. When he transgressed, their very value for him
turned them bitter against him. I know that all of us are more or less
chained to our community, which is pleased to expect us to walk its way,
and mightily displeased when we please ourselves instead by breaking
the chain and walking our own way; and I know that we are forgiven very
slowly; but I had not dreamed what a prisoner to communal criticism a
young American could be until I beheld Kings Port over John Mayrant.
And to what estate was this prince heir? Alas, his inheritance was all
of it the Past and none of it the Future; was the full churchyard and
the empty wharves! He was paying dear for his princedom! And then, there
was yet another sense of this beautiful town that I got here completely,
suddenly crystallized, though slowly gathering ever since my arrival:
all these old people were clustered about one young one. That was it;
that was the town’s ultimate tragic note: the old timber of the forest
dying and the too sparse new growth appearing scantily amid the tall,
fine, venerable, decaying trunks. It had been by no razing to the ground
and sowing with salt that the city had perished; a process less violent
but more sad had done away with it. Youth, in the wake of commerce, had
ebbed from Kings Port, had flowed out from the silent, mourning houses,
and sought life North and West, and wherever else life was to be found.
Into my revery floated a phrase from a melodious and once favorite song:
O tempo passato perche non ritorni?
And John Mayrant? Why, then, had he tarried here himself? That is a hard
saying about crabbed age and youth, but are not most of the sayings
hard that are true? What was this young man doing in Kings Port with
his brains, and his pride, and his energetic adolescence? If the Custom
House galled him, the whole country was open to him; why not have tried
his fortune out and away, over the hills, where the new cities lie, all
full of future and empty of past? Was it much to the credit of such a
young man to find himself at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four,
sound and lithe of limb, yet tied to the apron strings of Miss
Josephine, and Miss Eliza, and some thirty or forty other elderly female
relatives?
With these thoughts I looked at the ladies and wondered how I might lead
them to answer me about John Mayrant, without asking questions which
might imply something derogatory to him or painful to them. I could not
ever say to them a word which might mean, however indirectly, that I
thought their beautiful, cherished town no place for a young man to go
to seed in; this cut so close to the quick of truth that discourse must
keep wide away from it. What, then, could I ask them? As I pondered,
Mrs. Weguelin solved it for me by what she was saying to Mrs. Gregory,
of which, in my preoccupation, I had evidently missed a part:--
“--if he should share the family bad taste in wives.”
“Eliza says she has no fear of that.”
“Were I Eliza, Hugh’s performance would make me very uneasy.”
“Julia, John does not resemble Hugh.”
“Very decidedly, in coloring, Maria.”
“And Hugh found that girl in Minneapolis, Julia, where there was
doubtless no pick for the poor fellow. And remember that George chose a
lady, at any rate.”
Mrs. Weguelin gave to this a short assent. “Yes.” It portended
something more behind, which her next words duly revealed. “A lady; but
do--any--ladies ever seem quite like our own?
“Certainly not, Julia.”
You see, they were forgetting me again; but they had furnished me with a
clue.
“Mr. John Mayrant has married brothers?”
“Two,” Mrs. Gregory responded. “John is the youngest of three children.”
“I hadn’t heard of the brothers before.”
“They seldom come here. They saw fit to leave their home and their
delicate mother.”
“Oh!”
“But John,” said Mrs. Gregory, “met his responsibility like a Mayrant.”
“Whatever temptations he has yielded to,” said Mrs. Weguelin, “his
filial piety has stood proof.”
“He refused,” added Mrs. Gregory, “when George (and I have never
understood how George could be so forgetful of their mother) wrote
twice, offering him a lucrative and rising position in the railroad
company at Roanoke.”
“That was hard!” I exclaimed.
She totally misapplied my sympathy. “Oh, Anna Mayrant,” she corrected
herself, “John’s mother, Mrs. Hector Mayrant, had harder things than
forgetful sons to bear! I’ve not laid eyes on those boys since the
funeral.”
“Nearly two years,” murmured Mrs. Weguelin. And then, to me, with
something that was almost like a strange severity beneath her gentle
tone: “Therefore we are proud of John, because the better traits in his
nature remind us of his forefathers, whom we knew.”
“In Kings Port,” said Mrs. Gregory, “we prize those who ring true to the
blood.”
By way of response to this sentiment, I quoted some French to her. “Bon
chien chasse de race.”
It pleased Mrs. Weguelin. Her guarded attitude toward me relented. “John
mentioned your cultivation to us,” she said. “In these tumble-down
days it is rare to meet with one who still lives, mentally, on the
gentlefolks’ plane--the piano nobile of intelligence!”
I realized how high a compliment she was paying me, and I repaid it with
a joke. “Take care. Those who don’t live there would call it the piano
snobile.”
“Ah!” cried the delighted lady, “they’d never have the wit!”
“Did you ever hear,” I continued, “the Bostonian’s remark--‘The mission
of America is to vulgarize the world’?”
“I never expected to agree so totally with a Bostonian!” declared Mrs.
Gregory.
“Nothing so hopeful,” I pursued, “has ever been said of us. For
refinement and thoroughness and tradition delay progress, and we are
sweeping them out of the road as fast as we can.”
“Come away, Julia,” said Mrs. Gregory. “The young gentleman is getting
flippant again, and we leave him.”
The ladies, after gracious expressions concerning the pleasure of their
stroll, descended the steps at the north end of High Walk, where the
parapet stops, and turned inland from the water through a little street.
I watched them until they went out of my sight round a corner; but the
two silent, leisurely figures, moving in their black and their veils
along an empty highway, come back to me often in the pictures of my
thoughts; come back most often, indeed, as the human part of what my
memory sees when it turns to look at Kings Port. For, first, it sees
the blue frame of quiet sunny water, and the white town within its frame
beneath the clear, untainted air; and then it sees the high-slanted
roofs, red with their old corrugated tiles, and the tops of leafy
enclosures dipping below sight among quaint and huddled quadrangles;
and, next, the quiet houses standing in their separate grounds, their
narrow ends to the street and their long, two-storied galleries open
to the south, but their hushed windows closed as if against the prying,
restless Present that must not look in and disturb the motionless
memories which sit brooding behind these shutters; and between all these
silent mansions lie the narrow streets, the quiet, empty streets, along
which, as my memory watches them, pass the two ladies silently, in their
black and their veils, moving between high, mellow-colored garden walls
over whose tops look the oleanders, the climbing roses, and all the
taller flowers of the gardens.
And if Mrs. Gregory and Mrs. Weguelin seemed to me at moments as narrow
as those streets, they also seemed to me as lovely as those serene
gardens; and if I had smiled at their prejudices, I had loved their
innocence, their deep innocence, of the poisoned age which has succeeded
their own; and if I had wondered this day at their powers for cruelty, I
wondered the next day at the glimpse I had of their kindness. For during
a pelting cold rainstorm, as I sat and shivered in a Royal Street car,
waiting for it to start upon its north-bound course, the house-door
opposite which we stood at the end of the track opened, and Mrs.
Weguelin’s head appeared, nodding to the conductor as she sent her black
servant out with hot coffee for him! He took off his hat, and smiled,
and thanked her; and when we had started and I, the sole passenger in
the chilly car, asked him about this, he said with native pride: “The
ladies always watches out for us conductors in stormy weather, sir.
That’s Mistress Weguelin St. Michael, one of our finest.” And then he
gave me careful directions how to find a shop that I was seeking.
Think of this happening in New York! Think of the aristocracy of that
metropolis warming up with coffee the--but why think of it, or of a New
York conductor answering your questions with careful directions! It is
not New York’s fault, it is merely New York’s misfortune: New York is in
a hurry; and a world of haste cannot be a world either of courtesy or
of kindness. But we have progress, progress, instead; and that is a
tremendous consolation.