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Nathaniel Hawthorne - "Grandfather's Chair"

Frank R. Stockton - "The Lady, or the Tiger?"

Henrik Ibsen - "An Enemy of the People"

those who wish to do so. To be sure you have an - "Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen"

Lady Baltimore

O >> Owen Wister >> Lady Baltimore




"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.



XI: Daddy Ben and His Seed

But what was Hortense Rieppe coming to see for herself?

Many dark things had been made plain to me by my talk with the two
ladies; yet while disclosing so much, they had still left this important
matter in shadow. I was very glad, however, for what they had revealed.
They had showed me more of John Mayrant's character, and more also of the
destiny which had shaped his ends, so that my esteem for him had
increased; for some of the words that they had exchanged shone like
bright lanterns down into his nature upon strength and beauty lying
quietly there--young strength and beauty, yet already tempered by manly
sacrifice. I saw how it came to pass through this, through renunciation
of his own desires, through performance of duties which had fallen upon
him not quite fairly, that the eye of his spirit had been turned away
from self; thus had it grown strong-sighted and able to look far and
deep, as his speech sometimes revealed, while still his flesh was of his
youthful age, and no saint's flesh either. This had the ladies taught me
during the fluttered interchange of their reminders and opinions, and by
their eager agreements and disagreements, I was also grateful to them in
that I could once more correct Juno. The pleasure should be mine to tell
them in the public hearing of our table that Miss Rieppe was still
engaged to John Mayrant.

But what was this interesting girl coming to see for herself?

This little hole in my knowledge gave me discomfort as I walked along
toward the antiquity shop where I was to buy the other kettle-supporter.
The ladies, with all their freedom of comment and censure, had kept
something from me. I reviewed, I pieced together, their various remarks,
those oracles, especially, which they had let fall, but it all came back
to the same thing. I did not know, and they did, what Hortense Rieppe was
coming to see for herself. At all events, the engagement was not broken,
the chance to be instrumental in having it broken was still mine; I might
still save John Mayrant from his deplorable quixotism; and as this
reflection grew with me I took increasing comfort in it, and I stepped
onward toward my kettle-supporter, filled with that sense of moral
well-being which will steal over even the humblest of us when we feel
that we are beneficently minding somebody else's business.

Whenever the arrangement did not take me too widely from my course, I so
mapped out my walks and errands in Kings Port that I might pass by the
churchyard and church at the corner of Court and Worship streets. Even if
I did not indulge myself by turning in to stroll and loiter among the
flowers, it was enough pleasure to walk by that brick-wall. If you are
willing to wander curiously in our old towns, you may still find in many
of them good brick walls standing undisturbed, and equal in their color
and simple excellence to those of Kings Port; but fashion has pushed
these others out of its sight, among back streets and all sorts of
forgotten purlieus and abandoned dignity, and takes its walks to-day amid
cold, expensive ugliness; while the old brick walls of Kings Port
continually frame your steps with charm. No one workman famous for his
skill built them so well proportioned, so true to comeliness; it was the
general hand of their age that could shape nothing wrong, as the hand of
to-day can shape nothing right, save by a rigid following of the old.

I gave myself the pleasure this afternoon of walking by the churchyard
wall; and when I reached the iron gate, there was Daddy Ben. So full was
I of my thoughts concerning John Mayrant, and the vicissitudes of his
heart, and the Custom House, that I was moved to have words with the old
man upon the general topic.

"Well," I said, "and so Mr. John is going to be married."

No attempt to start a chat ever failed more signally. He assented with a
manner of mingled civility and reserve that was perfection, and after the
two syllables of which his answer consisted, he remained as impenetrably
respectful as before. I felt rather high and dry, but I tried it again:--

"And I'm sure, Daddy Ben, that you feel as sorry as any of the family
that the phosphates failed."

Again he replied with his two syllables of assent, and again he stood
mute, respectful, a little bent with his great age; but now his good
manners--and better manners were never seen--impelled him to break
silence upon some subject, since he would not permit himself to speak
concerning the one which I had introduced. It was the phosphates which
inspired him.

"Dey is mighty fine prostrate wukks heah, sah."

"Yes, I've been told so, Daddy Ben."

"On dis side up de ribber an' tudder side down de ribber 'cross de new
bridge. Wuth visitin' fo' strangers, sah."

I now felt entirely high and dry. I had attempted to enter into
conversation with him about the intimate affairs of a family to which he
felt that he belonged; and with perfect tact he had not only declined to
discuss them with me, but had delicately informed me that I was a
stranger and as such had better visit the phosphate works among the other
sights of Kings Port. No diplomat could have done it better; and as I
walled away from him I knew that he regarded me as an outsider, a
Northerner, belonging to a race hostile to his people; he had seen Mas'
John friendly with me, but that was Mas' John's affair. And so it was
that if the ladies had kept something from me, this cunning, old, polite,
coal-black African had kept everything from me.

If all the negroes in Kings Port were like Daddy Ben, Mrs. Gregory St.
Michael would not have spoken of having them "to deal with," and the girl
behind the counter would not have been thrown into such indignation when
she alluded to their conceit and ignorance. Daddy Ben had, so far from
being puffed up by the appointment in the Custom House, disapproved of
this. I had heard enough about the difference between the old and new
generations of the negro of Kings Port to believe it to be true, and I
had come to discern how evidently it lay at the bottom of many things
here: John Mayrant and his kind were a band united by a number of strong
ties, but by nothing so much as by their hatred of the modern negro in
their town. Yes, I was obliged to believe that the young Kings Port
African left to freedom and the ballot, was a worse African than his
slave parents; but this afternoon brought me a taste of it more pungent
than all the assurances in the world.

I bought my kettle-supporter, and learned from the robber who sold it to
me (Kings Port prices for "old things" are the most exorbitant that I
know anywhere) that a carpenter lived not far from Mrs. Trevise's
boarding-house, and that he would make for me the box in which I could
pack my various purchases.

"That is, if he's working this week," added the robber.

"What else would he be doing?"

"It may be his week for getting drunk on what he earned the week before."
And upon this he announced with as much bitterness as if he had been John
Mayrant or any of his aunts, "That's what Boston philanthropy has done
for him."

I dared up at this. "I suppose that's a Southern argument for
reestablishing slavery."

"I am not Southern; Breslau is my native town, and I came from New York
here to live five years ago. I've seen what your emancipation has done
for the black, and I say to you, my friend, honest I don't know a fool
from a philanthropist any longer."

He had much right upon his side; and it can be seen daily that
philanthropy does not always walk hand-in-hand with wisdom. Does anything
or anybody always walk so? Moreover, I am a friend to not many
superlatives, and have perceived no saying to be more true than the one
that extremes meet: they meet indeed, and folly is their meeting-place.
Nor could I say in the case of the negro which folly were the more
ridiculous;--that which expects a race which has lived no one knows how
many thousand years in mental nakedness while Confucius, Moses, and
Napoleon were flowering upon adjacent human stems, should put on suddenly
the white man's intelligence, or that other folly which declares we can
do nothing for the African, as if Hampton had not already wrought
excellent things for him. I had no mind to enter into all the
inextricable error with this Teuton, and it was he who continued:--

"Oh, these Boston philanthropists; oh, these know-it-alls! Why don't they
stay home? Why do they come down here to worry us with their ignorance?
See here, my friend, let me show you!"

He rushed about his shop in a search of distraught eagerness, and with a
multitude of small exclamations, until, screeching jubilantly once, he
pounced upon a shabby and learned-looking volume. This he brought me,
thrusting it with his trembling fingers between my own, and shuffling the
open pages. But when the apparently right one was found, he exclaimed,
"No, I have better! and dashed away to a pile of pamphlets on the floor,
where he began to plough and harrow. Wondering if I was closeted with a
maniac, I looked at the book in my passive hand, and saw diagrams of
various bones to me unknown, and men's names of which I was equally
ignorant--Mivart, Topinard, and more,--but at last that of Huxley. But
this agreeable sight was spoiled at once by the quite horrible words
Nycticebidoe, platyrrhine, catarrhine, from which I raised my eyes to see
him coming at me with two pamphlets, and scolding as he came.

"Are you educated, yes? Have been to college, yes? Then perhaps you will
understand."

Certainly I understood immediately that he and his pamphlets were as bad
as the book, or worse, in their use of a vocabulary designed to cause
almost any listener the gravest inconvenience. Common Eocene ancestors
occurred at the beginning of his lecture; and I believed that if it got
no stronger than this, I could at least preserve the appearance of
comprehending him; but it got stronger, and at sacro-iliac notch I may
say, without using any grossly exaggerated expression, that I became
unconscious. At least, all intelligence left me. When it returned, he was
saying.--

"But this is only the beginning. Come in here to my crania and jaws."

Evidently he held me hypnotized, for he now hurried me unresisting
through a back door into a dark little where he turned up the gas, and I
saw shelves as in a museum, to one of which he led me. I suppose that it
was curiosity that rendered me thus sheep-like. Upon the shelf were a
number of skulls and jaws in admirable condition and graded arrangement,
beginning to the left with that flat kind of skull which one associates
with gorillas. He resumed his scolding harangue, and for a few brief
moments I understood him. Here, told by themselves, was as much of the
story of the skulls as we know, from manlike apes through glacial man to
the modern senator or railroad president. But my intelligence was
destined soon to die away again.

"That is the Caucasian skull: your skull," he said, touching a specimen
at the right.

"Interesting," I murmured. "I'm afraid I know nothing about skulls."

"But you shall know someding before you leave," he retorted, wagging his
head at me; and this time it was not the book, but a specimen, that he
pushed into my grasp. He gave it a name, not as bad as platyrrhine, but I
feared worse was coming; then he took it away from me, gave me another
skull, and while I obediently held it, pronounced something quite beyond
me.

"And what is the translation of that?" he demanded excitedly.

"Tell me," I feebly answered.

He shouted with overweening triumph: "The translation of that is South
Carolina nigger. Notice well this so egcellent specimen. Prognathous,
megadont, platyrrhine."

"Ha! Platyrrhine!" I saluted the one word I recognized as I drowned.

"You have said it yourself!" was his extraordinary answer;--for what had
I said? Almost as if he were going to break into a dance for joy, he took
the Caucasian skull and the other two, and set the three together by
themselves, away from the rest of the collection. The picture which they
thus made spoke more than all the measurements and statistics which he
now chattered out upon me, reading from his book as I contemplated the
skulls. There was a similarity of shape, a kinship there between the
three, which stared you in the face; but in the contours of vaulted
skull, the projecting jaws, and the great molar teeth--what was to be
seen? Why, in every respect that the African departed from the Caucasian,
he departed in the direction of the ape! Here was zoology mutely but
eloquently telling us why there had blossomed no Confucius, no Moses, no
Napoleon, upon that black stem; why no Iliad, no Parthenon, no Sistine
Madonna, had ever risen from that tropic mud.

The collector touched my sleeve. "Have you now learned someding about
skulls, my friend? Will you invite those Boston philanthropists to stay
home? They will get better results in civilization by giving votes to
monkeys than teaching Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to riggers."

Retaliation rose in me. "Haven't you learned to call them negroes?" I
remarked. But this was lost upon the Teuton. I was tempted to tell him
that I was no philanthropist, and no Bostonian, and that he need not
shout so loud, but my more dignified instincts restrained me. I withdrew
my sleeve from his touch (it was this act of his, I think, that had most
to do with my displeasure), and merely bidding him observe that the
enormous price of the kettle-supporter had been reduced for me by his
exhibition to a bagatelle, I left the shop of the screaming anatomist--or
Afropath, or whatever it may seem most fitting that he should be called.

I bore the kettle-supporter with me, tied up objectionably in newspaper,
and knotted with ungainly string; and it was this bundle which prevented
my joining the girl behind the counter, and ending by a walk with a young
lady the afternoon that had begun by a walk with two old ones. I should
have liked to make my confession to her. She was evidently out for the
sake of taking the air, and had with her no companion save the big curly
white dog; confession would have been very agreeable; but I looked again
at my ugly newspaper bundle, and turned in a direction that she was not
herself pursuing.

Twice, as I went, I broke into laughter over my interview in the shop,
which I fear has lost its comical quality in the relating. To enter a
door and come serenely in among dingy mahogany and glass objects, to
bargain haughtily for a brass bauble with the shopkeeper, and to have a
few exchanged remarks suddenly turn the whole place into a sort of bedlam
with a gibbering scientist dashing skulls at me to prove his fixed idea,
and myself quite furious--I laughed more than twice; but, by the time I
had approached the neighborhood of the carpenter's shop, another side of
it had brought reflection to my mind. Here was a foreigner to whom
slavery and the Lost Cause were nothing, whose whole association with the
South had begun but five years ago; and the race question had brought his
feelings to this pitch! He had seen the Kings Port negro with the eyes of
the flesh, and not with the eyes of theory, and as a result the reddest
rag for him was pale beside a Boston philanthropist!

Nevertheless, I have said already that I am no lover of superlatives, and
in doctrine especially is this true. We need not expect a Confucius from
the negro, nor yet a Chesterfield; but I am an enemy also of that blind
and base hate against him, which conducts nowhere save to the
de-civilizing of white and black alike. Who brought him here? Did he
invite himself? Then let us make the best of it and teach him, lead him,
compel him to live self-respecting, not as statesman, poet, or financier,
but by the honorable toil of his hand and sweat of his brow. Because "the
door of hope" was once opened too suddenly for him is no reason for
slamming it now forever in his face.

Thus mentally I lectured back at the Teuton as I went through the streets
of Kings Port; and after a while I turned a corner which took me
abruptly, as with one magic step, out of the white man's world into the
blackest Congo. Even the well-inhabited quarter of Kings Port (and I had
now come within this limited domain) holds narrow lanes and recesses
which teem and swarm with negroes. As cracks will run through fine
porcelain, so do these black rifts of Africa lurk almost invisible among
the gardens and the houses. The picture that these places offered, tropic,
squalid, and fecund, often caused me to walk through them and watch the
basking population; the intricate, broken wooden galleries, the rickety
outside stair cases, the red and yellow splashes of color on the clothes
lines, the agglomerate rags that stuffed holes in decaying roofs or hung
nakedly on human frames, the small, choked dwellings, bursting open at
doors and windows with black, round-eyed babies as an overripe melon
bursts with seeds, the children playing marbles in the court, the parents
playing cards in the room, the grandparents smoking pipes on the porch,
and the great-grandparents stairs gazing out at you like creatures from
the Old Testament or the jungle. From the jungle we had stolen them,
North and South had stolen them together, long ago, to be slaves, not to
be citizens, and now here they were, the fruits of our theft; and for
some reason (possibly the Teuton was the reason) that passage from the
Book of Exodus came into my head: "For I the Lord thy God am a jealous
God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children."

These thoughts were interrupted by sounds as of altercation. I had nearly
reached the end of the lane, where I should again emerge into the White
man's world, and where I was now walking the lane spread into a broader
space with ells and angles and rotting steps, and habitations mostly too
ruinous to be inhabited. It was from a sashless window in one of these
that the angry voices came. The first words which were distinct aroused
my interest quite beyond the scale of an ordinary altercation:--

"Calls you'self a reconstuckted niggah?"

This was said sharply and with prodigious scorn. The answer which it
brought was lengthy and of such a general sullen incoherence that I could
make out only a frequent repetition of "custom house," and that somebody
was going to take care of somebody hereafter.

Into this the first voice broke with tones of highest contempt and
rapidity:--

"President gwine to gib brekfus' an' dinnah an suppah to de likes ob you
fo' de whole remaindah oh youh wuthless nat'ral life? Get out ob my
sight, you reconstuckted niggah. I come out oh de St. Michael."

There came through the window immediately upon this sounds of scuffling
and of a fall, and then cries for help which took me running into the
dilapidated building. Daddy Ben lay on the floor, and a thick, young
savage was kicking him. In some remarkable way I thought of the solidity
of their heads, and before the assailant even knew that he had a witness,
I sped forward, aiming my kettle-supporter, and with its sharp brass edge
I dealt him a crack over his shin with astonishing accuracy. It was a
dismal howl that he gave, and as he turned he got from me another crack
upon the other shin. I had no time to be alarmed at my deed, or I think
that I should have been very much so; I am a man above all of peace, and
physical encounters are peculiarly abhorrent to me; but, so far from
assailing me, the thick, young savage, with the single muttered remark,
"He hit me fuss," got himself out of the house with the most agreeable
rapidity.

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