“You do me surprising honor.”
“Oh, now, don’t begin like that! I suppose you never told a lie.”
“I’m telling the truth now when I say that I do not see why an entire
stranger should confess anything to me.”
“Oh, my goodness! Well, I told you a lie, anyhow; a great, successful,
deplorable lie.”
She opened her mouth under the shock of it, and I recited to her
unsparingly my deception; during this recital her mouth gradually
closed.
“Well, I declare, declare, declare!” she slowly and deliciously breathed
over the sum total; and she considered me at length, silently, before
her words came again, like a soft soliloquy. “I could never
have believed it in one who”--here gayety flashed in her eyes
suddenly--“parts his back hair so rigidly. Oh, I beg your pardon for
being personal!” And her gayety broke in ripples. Some habitual instinct
moved me to turn to the looking-glass. “Useless!” she cried, “you can’t
see it in that. But it’s perfectly splendid to-day.”
Nature has been kind to me in many ways--nay, prodigal; it is not every
man who can perceive the humor in a jest of which he is himself the
subject. I laughed with her. “I trust that I am forgiven,” I said.
“Oh, yes, you are forgiven! Come out, General, and give the gentleman
your right paw, and tell him that he is forgiven--if only for the sake
of Daddy Ben.” With these latter words she gave me a gracious nod of
understanding. They were all thanking me for the kettle-supporter! She
probably knew also the tale of John Mayrant, the cards, and the bedside.
The curly dog came out, and went through his part very graciously.
“I can guess his last name,” I remarked.
“General’s? How? Oh, you’ve heard it! I don’t believe in you any more.”
“That’s not a bit handsome, after my confession. No, I’m getting to
understand South Carolina a little. You came from the ‘up-country,’ you
call your dog General; his name is General Hampton!”
Her laughter assented. “Tell me some more about South Carolina,” she
added with her caressing insinuation.
“Well, to begin with--”
“Go sit down at your lunch-table first. Aunt Josephine would never
tolerate my encouraging gentlemen to talk to me over the counter.”
I went back obediently, and then resumed: “Well, what sort of people are
those who own the handsome garden behind Mrs. Trevise’s!”
“I don’t know them.”
“Thank you; that’s all I wanted.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re new people. I could tell it from the way you stuck your nose in
the air.”
“Sir!”
“Oh, if you talk about my hair, I can talk about your nose, I think.
I suspected that they were: ‘new people’ because they cleaned up their
garden immediately after the storm this morning. Now, I’ll tell you
something else: the whole South looks down on the whole North.”
She made her voice kind. “Do you mind it very much?”
I joined in her latent mirth. “It makes life not worth living! But more
than this, South Carolina looks down on the whole South.”
“Not Virginia.”
“Not? An ‘entire stranger,’ you know, sometimes notices things which
escape the family eye--family likenesses in the children, for instance.”
“Never Virginia,” she persisted.
“Very well, very well! Somehow you’ve admitted the rest, however.”
She began to smile.
“And next, Kings Port looks down on all the rest of South Carolina.”
She now laughed outright. “An up-country girl will not deny that,
anyhow!”
“And finally, your aunts--”
“My aunts are Kings Port.”
“The whole of it?”
“If you mean the thirty thousand negroes--”
“No, there are other white people here--there goes your nose again!”
“I will not have you so impudent, sir!”
“A thousand pardons, I’m on my knees. But your aunts--” There was such a
flash of war in her eye that I stopped.
“May I not even mention them?” I asked her.
And suddenly upon this she became serious and gentle. “I thought that
you understood them. Would you take them from their seclusion, too? It
is all they have left--since you burned the rest in 1865.”
I had made her say what I wanted! That “you” was what I wanted. Now I
should presently have it out with her. But, for the moment, I did not
disclaim the “you.” I said:--
“The burning in 1865 was horrible, but it was war.”
“It was outrage.”
“Yes, the same kind as England’s, who burned Washington in 1812, and
whom you all so deeply admire.”
She had, it seemed, no answer to this. But we trembled on the verge of a
real quarrel. It was in her voice when she said:--
“I think I interrupted you.”
I pushed the risk one step nearer the verge, because of the words I
wished finally to reach. “In 1812, when England burned our White House
down, we did not sit in the ashes; we set about rebuilding.”
And now she burst out. “That’s not fair, that’s perfectly inexcusable!
Did England then set loose on us a pack of black savages and politicians
to help us rebuild? Why, this very day I cannot walk on the other side
of the river, I dare not venture off the New Bridge; and you who first
beat us and then unleashed the blacks to riot in a new ‘equality’ that
they were no more fit for than so many apes, you sat back at ease in
your victory and your progress, having handed the vote to the negro as
you might have handed a kerosene lamp to a child of three, and let us
crushed, breathless people cope with the chaos and destruction that
never came near you. Why, how can you dare--” Once again, admirably she
pulled herself up as she had done when she spoke of the President.
“I mustn’t!” she declared, half whispering, and then more clearly and
calmly, “I mustn’t.” And she shook her head as if shaking something off.
“Nor must you,” she finished, charmingly and quietly, with a smile.
“I will not,” I assured her. She was truly noble.
“But I did think that you understood us,” she said pensively.
“Miss La Heu, when you talked to me about the President and the White
House, I said that you were hard to answer. Do you remember?”
“Perfectly. I said I was glad you found me so.’
“You helped me to understand you then, and now I want to be helped to
further understanding. Last night I heard the ‘Ode for the Daughters of
Dixie.’ I had a bad time listening to that.”
“Do you presume to criticise it? Do we criticise your Grand Army
reunions, and your ‘Marching through Georgia,’ and your ‘John Brown’s
Body,’ and your Arlington Museum? Can we not be allowed to celebrate our
heroes and our glories and sing our songs?”
She had helped me already! Still, still, the something I was groping
for, the something which had given me such pain during the ode, remained
undissolved, remained unanalyzed between us; I still had to have it out
with her, and the point was that it had to be with her, and not
simply with myself alone. We must thrash out together the way to an
understanding; an agreement was not in the least necessary--we could
agree to differ, for that matter, with perfect cordiality--but an
understanding we must reach. And as I was thinking this my light
increased, and I saw clearly the ultimate thing which lay at the bottom
of my own feeling, and which had been strangely confusing me all along.
This discovery was the key to the whole remainder of my talk; I never
let go of it. The first thing it opened for me was that Eliza La Heu
didn’t understand me, which was quite natural, since I had only just
this moment become clear to myself.
“Many of us,” I began, “who have watched the soiling touch of politics
make dirty one clean thing after another, would not be wholly desolated
to learn that the Grand Army of the Republic had gone to another world
to sing its songs and draw its pensions.”
She looked astonished, and then she laughed. Down in the South here she
was too far away to feel the vile uses to which present politics had
turned past heroism.
“But,” I continued, “we haven’t any Daughters of the Union banded
together and handing it down.”
“It?” she echoed. “Well, if the deeds of your heroes are not a sacred
trust to you, don’t invite us, please, to resemble you.”