"Yes, suh--here we are at that old-time place!" And our dark driver drew
up his little victoria gently.
Through the open doorway, into a dim, cavernous, ruined house of New
Orleans we passed. The mildew and dirt, the dark denuded dankness of
that old hostel, rotting down with damp and time!
And our guide, the tall, thin, grey-haired dame, who came forward with
such native ease and moved before us, touching this fungused wall, that
rusting stairway, and telling, as it were, no one in her soft, slow
speech, things that any one could see--what a strange and fitting figure!
Before the smell of the deserted, oozing rooms, before that old creature
leading us on and on, negligent of all our questions, and talking to the
air, as though we were not, we felt such discomfort that we soon made to
go out again into such freshness as there was on that day of dismal heat.
Then realising, it seemed, that she was losing us, our old guide turned;
for the first time looking in our faces, she smiled, and said in her
sweet, weak voice, like the sound from the strings of a spinet long
unplayed on: "Don' you wahnd to see the dome-room: an' all the other
rooms right here, of this old-time place?"
Again those words! We had not the hearts to disappoint her. And as we
followed on and on, along the mouldering corridors and rooms where the
black peeling papers hung like stalactites, the dominance of our senses
gradually dropped from us, and with our souls we saw its soul--the soul
of this old-time place; this mustering house of the old South, bereft of
all but ghosts and the grey pigeons niched in the rotting gallery round a
narrow courtyard open to the sky.
"This is the dome-room, suh and lady; right over the slave-market it is.
Here they did the business of the State--sure; old-time heroes up therein
the roof--Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Davis, Lee--there they are!
All gone--now! Yes, suh!"
A fine--yea, even a splendid room, of great height, and carved grandeur,
with hand-wrought bronze sconces and a band of metal bordering, all
blackened with oblivion. And the faces of those old heroes encircling
that domed ceiling were blackened too, and scarred with damp, beyond
recognition. Here, beneath their gaze, men had banqueted and danced and
ruled. The pride and might and vivid strength of things still fluttered
their uneasy flags of spirit, moved disherited wings! Those old-time
feasts and grave discussions--we seemed to see them printed on the thick
air, imprisoned in this great chamber built above their dark foundations.
The pride and the might and the vivid strength of things--gone, all gone!
We became conscious again of that soft, weak voice.
"Not hearing very well, suh, I have it all printed, lady--beautifully
told here--yes, indeed!"
She was putting cards into our hands; then, impassive, maintaining ever
her impersonal chant, the guardian of past glory led us on.
"Now we shall see the slave-market--downstairs, underneath! It's wet for
the lady the water comes in now yes, suh!"
On the crumbling black and white marble floorings the water indeed was
trickling into pools. And down in the halls there came to us
wandering--strangest thing that ever strayed through deserted grandeur--a
brown, broken horse, lean, with a sore flank and a head of tremendous
age. It stopped and gazed at us, as though we might be going to give it
things to eat, then passed on, stumbling over the ruined marbles. For a
moment we had thought him ghost--one of the many. But he was not, since
his hoofs sounded. The scrambling clatter of them had died out into
silence before we came to that dark, crypt-like chamber whose marble
columns were ringed in iron, veritable pillars of foundation. And then
we saw that our old guide's hands were full of newspapers. She struck a
match; they caught fire and blazed. Holding high that torch, she said:
"See! Up there's his name, above where he stood. The auctioneer. Oh
yes, indeed! Here's where they sold them!"
Below that name, decaying on the wall, we had the slow, uncanny feeling
of some one standing there in the gleam and flicker from that paper
torch. For a moment the whole shadowy room seemed full of forms and
faces. Then the torch lied out, and our old guide, pointing through an
archway with the blackened stump of it, said:
"'Twas here they kept them indeed, yes!"
We saw before us a sort of vault, stone-built, and low, and long. The
light there was too dim for us to make out anything but walls and heaps
of rusting scrap-iron cast away there and mouldering own. But trying to
pierce that darkness we became conscious, as it seemed, of innumerable
eyes gazing, not at us, but through the archway where we stood;
innumerable white eyeballs gleaming out of blackness. From behind us
came a little laugh. It floated past through the archway, toward those
eyes. Who was that? Who laughed in there? The old South itself--that
incredible, fine, lost soul! That "old-time" thing of old ideals,
blindfolded by its own history! That queer proud blend of simple
chivalry and tyranny, of piety and the abhorrent thing! Who was it
laughed there in the old slave-market--laughed at these white eyeballs
glaring from out of the blackness of their dark cattle-pen? What poor
departed soul in this House of Melancholy? But there was no ghost when
we turned to look--only our old guide with her sweet smile.
"Yes, suh. Here they all came--'twas the finest hotel--before the
war-time; old Southern families--buyin' an' sellin' their property. Yes,
ma'am, very interesting! This way! And here were the bells to all the
rooms. Broken, you see--all broken!"
And rather quickly we passed away, out of that "old-time place"; where
something had laughed, and the drip, drip, drip of water down the walls
was as the sound of a spirit grieving.
1912.