Lady Baltimore
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Owen Wister >> Lady Baltimore
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21 LADY BALTIMORE
BY OWEN WISTER
To
S. Weir Mitchell
With the Affection and Memories of All My Life
To the Reader
You know the great text in Burns, I am sure, where he wishes he could see
himself as others see him. Well, here lies the hitch in many a work of
art: if its maker--poet, painter, or novelist--could but have become its
audience too, for a single day, before he launched it irrevocably upon
the uncertain ocean of publicity, how much better his boat would often
sail! How many little touches to the rigging he would give, how many
little drops of oil to the engines here and there, the need of which he
had never suspected, but for that trial trip! That's where the
ship-builders and dramatists have the advantage over us others: they can
dock their productions and tinker at them. Even to the musician comes
this useful chance, and Schumann can reform the proclamation which opens
his B-flat Symphony.
Still, to publish a story in weekly numbers previously to its appearance
as a book does sometimes give to the watchful author an opportunity to
learn, before it is too late, where he has failed in clearness; and it
brings him also, through the mails, some few questions that are pleasant
and proper to answer when his story sets forth united upon its journey of
adventure among gentle readers.
How came my hero by his name?
If you will open a book more valuable than any I dare hope to write, and
more entertaining too, The Life of Paul Jones, by Mr. Buell, you will
find the real ancestor of this imaginary boy, and fall in love with John
Mayrant the First, as did his immortal captain of the Bon Homme Richard.
He came from South Carolina; and believing his seed and name were
perished there to-day, I gave him a descendant. I have learned that the
name, until recently, was in existence; I trust it will not seem taken in
vain in these pages.
Whence came such a person as Augustus?
Our happier cities produce many Augustuses, and may they long continue to
do so! If Augustus displeases any one, so much the worse for that one,
not for Augustus. To be sure, he doesn't admire over heartily the
parvenus of steel or oil, whose too sudden money takes them to the
divorce court; he calls them the 'yellow rich'; do you object to that?
Nor does he think that those Americans who prefer their pockets to their
patriotism, are good citizens. He says of such people that 'eternal
vigilance cannot watch liberty and the ticker at the same time.' Do you
object to that? Why, the young man would be perfect, did he but attend
his primaries and vote more regularly,--and who wants a perfect young
man?
What would John Mayrant have done if Hortense had not challenged him as
she did?
I have never known, and I fear we might have had a tragedy.
Would the old ladies really have spoken to Augustus about the love
difficulties of John Mayrant?
I must plead guilty. The old ladies of Kings Port, like American
gentlefolk everywhere, keep family matters sacredly inside the family
circle. But you see, had they not told Augustus, how in the world could I
have told--however, I plead guilty.
Certain passages have been interpreted most surprisingly to signify a
feeling against the colored race, that is by no means mine. My only wish
regarding these people, to whom we owe an immeasurable responsibility, is
to see the best that is in them prevail. Discord over this seems on the
wane, and sane views gaining. The issue sits on all our shoulders, but
local variations call for a sliding scale of policy. So admirably
dispassionate a novel as The Elder Brother, by Mr. Jervey. forwards the
understanding of Northerners unfamiliar with the South, and also that
friendliness between the two places, which is retarded chiefly by
tactless newspapers.
Ah, tact should have been one of the cardinal virtues; and if I didn't
possess a spice of it myself, I should here thank by name certain two
members of the St. Michael family of Kings Port for their patience with
this comedy, before ever it saw the light. Tact bids us away from many
pleasures; but it can never efface the memory of kindness.
LADY BALTIMORE
I: A Word about My Aunt
Like Adam, our first conspicuous ancestor, I must begin, and lay the
blame upon a woman; I am glad to recognize that I differ from the father
of my sex in no important particular, being as manlike as most of his
sons. Therefore it is the woman, my Aunt Carola, who must bear the whole
reproach of the folly which I shall forthwith confess to you, since she
it was who put it into my head; and, as it was only to make Eve happy
that her husband ever consented to eat the disastrous apple, so I, save
to please my relative, had never aspired to become a Selected Salic
Scion. I rejoice now that I did so, that I yielded to her temptation.
Ours is a wide country, and most of us know but our own corner of it,
while, thanks to my Aunt, I have been able to add another corner. This,
among many other enlightenments of navel and education, do I owe her; she
stands on the threshold of all that is to come; therefore I were lacking in
deference did I pass her and her Scions by without due mention,--employing
no English but such as fits a theme so stately. Although she never left
the threshold, nor went to Kings Port with me, nor saw the boy, or the
girl, or any part of what befell them, she knew quite well who the boy
was. When I wrote her about him, she remembered one of his grandmothers
whom she had visited during her own girlhood, long before the war, both
in Kings Port and at the family plantation; and this old memory led her
to express a kindly interest in him. How odd and far away that interest
seems, now that it has been turned to cold displeasure!
Some other day, perhaps, I may try to tell you much more than I can tell
you here about Aunt Carola and her Colonial Society--that apple which
Eve, in the form of my Aunt, held out to me. Never had I expected to feel
rise in me the appetite for this particular fruit, though I had known
such hunger to exist in some of my neighbors. Once a worthy dame of my
town, at whose dinner-table young men and maidens of fashion sit
constantly, asked me with much sentiment if I was aware that she was
descended from Boadicea. Why had she never (I asked her) revealed this to
me before? And upon her informing me that she had learned it only that
very day, I exclaimed that it was a great distance to have descended so
suddenly. To this, after a look at me, she assented, adding that she had
the good news from the office of The American Almanach de Gotha, Union
Square, New York; and she recommended that publication to me. There was
but a slight fee to pay, a matter of fifty dollars or upwards, and for
this trifling sum you were furnished with your rightful coat-of-arms and
with papers clearly tracing your family to the Druids, the Vestal Virgins,
and all the best people in the world. Therefore I felicitated the
Boadicean lady upon the illustrious progenitrix with whom the Almanach de
Gotha had provided her for so small a consideration, and observed that
for myself I supposed I should continue to rest content with the thought
that in our enlightened Republic every American was himself a sovereign.
But that, said the lady, after giving me another look, is so different
from Boadicea! And to this I perfectly agreed. Later I had the pleasure
to hear in a roundabout way that she had pronounced me one of the most
agreeable young men in society, though sophisticated. I have not
cherished this against her; my gift of humor puzzles many who can see
only my refinement and my scrupulous attention to dress.
Yes, indeed, I counted myself proof against all Boadiceas. But you have
noticed--have you not?--how, whenever a few people gather together and
style themselves something, and choose a president, and eight or nine
vice-presidents, and a secretary and a treasurer, and a committee on
elections, and then let it be known that almost nobody else is qualified
to belong to it, that there springs up immediately in hundreds and
thousands of breasts a fiery craving to get into that body? You may try
this experiment in science, law, medicine, art, letters, society,
farming, I care not what, but you will set the same craving afire in
doctors, academicians, and dog breeders all over the earth. Thus, when
my Aunt--the president, herself, mind you!--said to me one day that she
thought, if I proved my qualifications, my name might be favorably
considered by the Selected Salic Scions--I say no more; I blush, though
you cannot see me; when I am tempted, I seem to be human, after all.
At first, to be sure, I met Aunt Carola's suggestion in the way that I am
too ready to meet many of her remarks; for you must know she once, with
sincere simplicity and good-will, told my Uncle Andrew (her husband; she
is only my Aunt by marriage) that she had married beneath her; and she
seemed unprepared for his reception of this candid statement: Uncle
Andrew was unaffectedly merry over it. Ever since then all of us wait
hopefully every day for what she may do or say next.
She is from old New York, oldest New York; the family manor is still
habitable, near Cold Spring; she was, in her youth, handsome, I am
assured by those whose word I have always trusted; her appearance even
to-day causes people to turn and look; she is not tall in feet and
inches--I have to stoop considerably when she commands from me the
familiarity of a kiss; but in the quality which we call force, in moral
stature, she must be full eight feet high. When rebuking me, she can
pronounce a single word, my name, "Augustus!" in a tone that renders
further remark needless; and you should see her eye when she says of
certain newcomers in our society, "I don't know them." She can make her
curtsy as appalling as a natural law; she knows also how to "take
umbrage," which is something that I never knew any one else to take
outside of a book; she is a highly pronounced Christian, holding all
Unitarians wicked and all Methodists vulgar; and once, when she was
talking (as she does frequently) about King James and the English
religion and the English Bible, and I reminded her that the Jews wrote
it, she said with displeasure that she made no doubt King James had--
"well, seen to it that all foreign matter was expunged"--I give you her
own words. Unless you have moved in our best American society (and by
this I do not at all mean the lower classes with dollars and no
grandfathers, who live in palaces at Newport, and look forward to every-
thing and back to nothing, but those Americans with grandfathers and no
dollars, who live in boarding-houses, and look forward to nothing and
back to everything)--unless you have known this haughty and improving
milieu, you have never seen anything like my Aunt Carola. Of course, with
Uncle Andrew's money, she does not live in a boarding-house; and I shall
finish this brief attempt to place her before you by adding that she can
be very kind, very loyal, very public-spirited, and that I am truly
attached to her.
"Upon your mother's side of the family," she said, "of course."
"Me!" I did not have to feign amazement.
My Aunt was silent. "Me descended from a king?"
My Aunt nodded with an indulgent stateliness. "There seems to be the
possibility of it."
"Royal blood in my veins, Aunt?"
"I have said so, Augustus. Why make me repeat it?"
It was now, I fear, that I met Aunt Carola in that unfitting spirit, that
volatile mood, which, as I have said already, her remarks often rouse in
me.
"And from what sovereign may I hope that I--?"
"If you will consult a recent admirable compilation, entitled The
American Almanach de Gotha, you will find that Henry the Seventh--"
"Aunt, I am so much relieved! For I think that I might have hesitated to
trace it back had you said--well--Charles the Second, for example, or
Elizabeth."
At this point I should have been wise to notice my Aunt's eye; but I did
not, and I continued imprudently:--
"Though why hesitate? I have never heard that there was anybody present
to marry Adam and Eve, and so why should we all make such a to-do
about--"
"Augustus!"
She uttered my name in that quiet but prodigious tone to which I have
alluded above.
It was I who was now silent.
"Augustus, if you purpose trifling, you may leave the room."
"Oh, Aunt, I beg your pardon. I never meant--"
"I cannot understand what impels you to adopt such a manner to me, when I
am trying to do something for you."
I hastened to strengthen my apologies with a manner becoming the possible
descendant of a king toward a lady of distinction, and my Aunt was
pleased to pass over my recent lapse from respect. She now broached her
favorite topic, which I need scarcely tell you is genealogy, beginning
with her own.
"If your title to royal blood," she said, "were as plain as mine (through
Admiral Bombo, you know), you would not need any careful research."
She told me a great deal of genealogy, which I spare you; it was not one
family tree, it was a forest of them. It gradually appeared that a
grandmother of my mother's grandfather had been a Fanning, and there were
sundry kinds of Fannings, right ones and wrong ones; the point for me
was, what kind had mine been? No family record showed this. If it was
Fanning of the Bon Homme Richard variety, or Fanning of the Alamance,
then I was no king's descendant.
"Worthy New England people, I understand," said my Aunt with her nod of
indulgent stateliness, referring to the Bon Homme Richard species, "but
of entirely bourgeois extraction--Paul Jones himself, you know, was a
mere gardener's son--while the Alamance Fanning was one of those infamous
regulators who opposed Governor Tryon. Not through any such cattle could
you be one of us," said my Aunt.
But a dim, distant, hitherto uncharted Henry Tudor Fanning had fought in
some of the early Indian wars, and the last of his known blood was
reported to have fallen while fighting bravely at the battle of Cowpens.
In him my hope lay. Records of Tarleton, records of Marion's men, these
were what I must search, and for these I had best go to Kings Port. If I
returned with Kinship proven, then I might be a Selected Salic Scion, a
chosen vessel, a royal seed, one in the most exalted circle of men and
women upon our coasts. The other qualifications were already mine:
ancestors colonial and bellicose upon land and sea--
"--besides having acquired," my Aunt was so good as to say, "sufficient
personal presentability since your life in Paris, of which I had rather
not know too much, Augustus. It is a pity," she repeated, "that you will
have so much research. With my family it was all so satisfactorily clear
through Kill-devil Bombo--Admiral Bombo's spirited, reckless son."
You will readily conceive that I did not venture to betray my ignorance
of these Bombos; I worked my eyebrows to express a silent and timeworn
familiarity.
"Go to Kings Port. You need a holiday, at any rate. And I," my Aunt
handsomely finished, "will make the journey a present to you."
This generosity made me at once, and sincerely, repentant for my
flippancy concerning Charles the Second and Elizabeth. And so, partly
from being tempted by this apple of Eve, and partly because recent
overwork had tired me, but chiefly for her sake, and not to thwart at the
outset her kindly-meant ambitions for me, I kissed the hand of my Aunt
Carola and set forth to Kings Port.
"Come back one of us," was her parting benediction.
II: I Vary My Lunch
Thus it was that I came to sojourn in the most appealing, the most
lovely, the most wistful town in America; whose visible sadness and
distinction seem also to speak audibly, speak in the sound of the quiet
waves that ripple round her Southern front, speak in the church-bells on
Sunday morning, and breathe not only in the soft salt air, but in the
perfume of every gentle, old-fashioned rose that blooms behind the high
garden walls of falling mellow-tinted plaster: Kings Port the
retrospective, Kings Port the belated, who from her pensive porticoes
looks over her two rivers to the marshes and the trees beyond, the
live-oaks, veiled in gray moss, brooding with memories! Were she my city,
how I should love her!
But though my city she cannot be, the enchanting image of her is mine to
keep, to carry with me wheresoever I may go; for who, having seen her,
could forget her? Therefore I thank Aunt Carola for this gift, and for
what must always go with it in my mind, the quiet and strange romance
which I saw happen, and came finally to share in. Why it is that my Aunt
no longer wishes to know either the boy or the girl, or even to hear
their names mentioned, you shall learn at the end, when I have finished
with the wedding; for this happy story of love ends with a wedding, and
begins in the Woman's Exchange, which the ladies of Kings Port have
established, and (I trust) lucratively conduct, in Royal Street.
Royal Street! There's a relevance in this name, a fitness to my errand;
but that is pure accident.
The Woman's Exchange happened to be there, a decorous resort for those
who became hungry, as I did, at the hour of noon each day. In my very
pleasant boarding-house, where, to be sure, there was one dreadful
boarder, a tall lady, whom I soon secretly called Juno--but let
unpleasant things wait--in the very pleasant house where I boarded (I had
left my hotel after one night) our breakfast was at eight, and our dinner
not until three: sacred meal hours in Kings Port, as inviolable, I fancy,
as the Declaration of Independence, but a gap quite beyond the stretch of
my Northern vitals. Therefore, at twelve, it was my habit to leave my
Fanning researches for a while, and lunch at the Exchange upon chocolate
and sandwiches most delicate in savor. As, one day, I was luxuriously
biting one of these, I heard his voice and what he was saying. Both the
voice and the interesting order he was giving caused me, at my small
table, in the dim back of the room, to stop and watch him where he stood
in the light at the counter to the right of the entrance door. Young he
was, very young, twenty-two or three at the most, and as he stood, with
hat in hand, speaking to the pretty girl behind the counter, his head and
side-face were of a romantic and high-strung look. It was a cake that he
desired made, a cake for a wedding; and I directly found myself curious
to know whose wedding. Even a dull wedding interests me more than other
dull events, because it can arouse so much surmise and so much prophecy;
but in this wedding I instantly, because of his strange and winning
embarrassment, became quite absorbed. How came it he was ordering the
cake for it? Blushing like the boy that he was entirely, he spoke in a
most engaging voice: "No, not charged; and as you don't know me, I had
better pay for it now."
Self-possession in his speech he almost had; but the blood in his cheeks
and forehead was beyond his control.
A reply came from behind the counter: "We don't expect payment until
delivery."
"But--a--but on that morning I shall be rather particularly engaged." His
tones sank almost away on these words.
"We should prefer to wait, then. You will leave your address. In
half-pound boxes, I suppose?"
"Boxes? Oh, yes--I hadn't thought--no--just a big, round one. Like this,
you know!" His arms embraced a circular space of air. "With plenty of
icing."
I do not think that there was any smile on the other side of the counter;
there was, at any rate, no hint of one in the voice. "And how many
pounds?"
He was again staggered. "Why--a--I never ordered one before. I want
plenty--and the very best, the very best. Each person would eat a pound,
wouldn't they? Or would two be nearer? I think I had better leave it all
to you. About like this, you know." Once more his arms embraced a
circular space of air.
Before this I had never heard the young lady behind the counter enter
into any conversation with a customer. She would talk at length about all
sorts of Kings Port affairs with the older ladies connected with the
Exchange, who were frequently to be found there; but with a customer,
never. She always took my orders, and my money, and served me, with a
silence and a propriety that have become, with ordinary shopkeepers, a
lost art. They talk to one indeed! But this slim girl was a lady, and
consequently did the right thing, marking and keeping a distance between
herself and the public. To-day, however, she evidently felt it her
official duty to guide the hapless young, man amid his errors. He now
appeared to be committing a grave one.
"Are you quite sure you want that?" the girl was asking.
"Lady Baltimore? Yes, that is what I want."
"Because," she began to explain, then hesitated, and looked at him.
Perhaps it was in his face; perhaps it was that she remembered at this
point the serious difference between the price of Lady Baltimore (by my
small bill-of-fare I was now made acquainted with its price) and the cost
of that rich article which convention has prescribed as the cake for
weddings; at any rate, swift, sudden delicacy of feeling prevented her
explaining any more to him, for she saw how it was: his means were too
humble for the approved kind of wedding cake! She was too young, too
unskilled yet in the world's ways, to rise above her embarrassment; and so
she stood blushing at him behind the counter, while he stood blushing at
her in front of it.
At length he succeeded in speaking. "That's all, I believe.
Good-morning."
At his hastily departing back she, too, murmured: "Good-morning."
Before I knew it I had screamed out loudly from my table: "But he hasn't
told you the day he wants it for!"
Before she knew it she had flown to the door--my cry had set her going,
as if I had touched a spring--and there he was at the door himself,
rushing back. He, too, had remembered. It was almost a collision, and
nothing but their good Southern breeding, the way they took it, saved it
from being like a rowdy farce.
"I know," he said simply and immediately. "I am sorry to be so careless.
It's for the twenty-seventh."
She was writing it down in the order-book. "Very well. That is Wednesday
of next week. You have given us more time than we need." She put
complete, impersonal business into her tone; and this time he marched off
in good order, leaving peace in the Woman's Exchange.
No, not peace; quiet, merely; the girl at the counter now proceeded to
grow indignant with me. We were alone together, we two; no young man, or
any other business, occupied her or protected me. But if you suppose that
she made war, or expressed rage by speaking, that is not it at all. From
her counter in front to my table at the back she made her displeasure
felt; she was inaudibly crushing; she did not do it even with her eye,
she managed it--well, with her neck, somehow, and by the way she made her
nose look in profile. Aunt Carola would have embraced her--and I should
have liked to do so myself. She could not stand the idea of my having,
after all these days of official reserve that she had placed between us,
startled her into that rush to the door annihilated her dignity at a
blow. So did I finish my sandwiches beneath her invisible but eloquent
fire. What affair of mine was the cake? And what sort of impertinent,
meddlesome person was I, shrieking out my suggestions to people with whom
I had no acquaintance? These were the things that her nose and her neck
said to me the whole length of the Exchange. I had nothing but my own
weakness to thank; it was my interest in weddings that did it, made me
forget my decorum, the public place, myself, everything, and plunge in.
And I became more and more delighted over it as the girl continued to
crush me. My day had been dull, my researches had not brought me a whit
nearer royal blood; I looked at my little bill-of-fare, and then I
stepped forward to the counter, adventurous, but polite.
"I should like a slice, if you please, of Lady Baltimore," I said with
extreme formality.
I thought she was going to burst; but after an interesting second she
replied, "Certainly," in her fit Regular Exchange tone; only, I thought
it trembled a little.
I returned to the table and she brought me the cake, and I had my first
felicitous meeting with Lady Baltimore. Oh, my goodness! Did you ever
taste it? It's all soft, and it's in layers, and it has nuts--but I can't
write any more about it; my mouth waters too much.
Delighted surprise caused me once more to speak aloud, and with my mouth
full. "But, dear me, this Is delicious!"
A choking ripple of laughter came from the counter. "It's I who make
them," said the girl. "I thank you for the unintentional compliment."
Then she walked straight back to my table. "I can't help it," she said,
laughing still, and her delightful, insolent nose well up; "how can I
behave myself when a man goes on as you do?" A nice white curly dog
followed her, and she stroked his ears.
"Your behavior is very agreeable to me," I remarked.
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