CHAPTER X
THE HEAVENLY VISION
That little park in the heart of Charleston is a very delightful spot. It is a tiny park, but every inch of it seems teeming with interest, historical and poetical. In the center is the shaft erected by the Washington Light Infantry to their dead in '61-'65. The obelisk is in three sections of granite, representing the three companies. On the steps of the square pedestal are cut the twelve great battles of the war.
Zebedee dared us to recite them, but we fell down most woefully, except Dum, who named all but Secessionville.
Little darkies were playing on the steps, running around the shaft and shouting with glee as they bumped their hard heads together and rolled down the steps.
"Black rascals!" exclaimed Zebedee. "If it had not been for you, that monument need never have been erected."
But the little imps kept up their game with renewed glee, hoping to attract the attention of the tourists. Tourists were simply made of pennies, in the minds of the Charleston pickaninnies. Seeing we had noticed them, they flocked to where we had settled ourselves on some benches facing the monument and began in their peculiar South Carolina lingo to demand something of us—what it was it took some penetration to discover. There were five of them, about the raggedest little monkeys I ever saw. Their clothes stayed on by some miracle of modesty, but every now and then a streak of shiny black flesh could be glimpsed through the interstices. (I got that word from Professor Green, which I put down in my notebook for safekeeping.)
"Do' white fo'ks wan' we-all sin' li'l' song?"
"What?" from all of us.
"Sin' li'l' song! La, la, la, tim chummy loo!" and the blackest and sassiest and most dilapidated of them all opened his big mouth with its gleaming teeth and let forth a quaint chant.
"Oh, sing us a little song?" and we laughed aloud.
"Why, yes, we do," assented Professor Green, "but don't get too close. The acoustics would be better from a short distance, I am sure."
"Edwin is enough of a Yankee not to like darkies coming too close," laughed Mrs. Green. "You know a Northerner's interest in the race is purely theoretical. When it comes right down to it, we Southerners are the only ones who really understand them. I remember what one of the leaders of the negroes said: 'A Northerner loves the negro but has no use for a nigger, while a Southerner can't stand the negro but will do anything on earth for a nigger.'"
"That's right, I believe," said Zebedee; "but I must say I agree with Doctor Green, and think under the circumstances that a short distance will help the acoustics."
The five song birds formed a half-circle a few feet from us, and, led by the sassy black one, poured forth their souls in melody. The leader seemed to be leader because he was the only one with shoes on. His shoes were ladies' buttoned shoes, much too long and on the wrong feet, which gave their proud possessor a peculiar twisted appearance. Having good black legs of his own, he needed no stockings.
"It must be a great convenience to be born with black legs," sighed Dee. "You can go bare-legged when you've a mind to, and if you should be so prissy as to wear stockings, when they get holes in them they wouldn't show."
The following is the song that the little boys sang, choosing it evidently from a keen sense of humor and appreciation of fun:
"How yer git on wid yer washin'?
'Berry well,' yer say?
Better charge dem Yankee big price
Fo' dey gits away.
Dey is come hyar fer de wedder,
Pockets full ob money.
Some one got ter do dey washin',
Glad it's me, my honey.
Wen I ca'y in de basket,
Eb'y week I laff
Des ter see dem plunkin' out
Dollah an' a ha'f.
Co'se I ain't cha'ge home fo'ks dat,
Eben cuff an' collah,
Tro' in wid dey udder clo's—
All wash fer a dollah.
Soon de Yankees will be gone,
An' jes de po' fo'ke here;
Cha'ge dem, honey, all yer kin
Ter las' yer trou' de year."
When they finished this song, which was given in a high, peculiar, chanting tune, the little boy of the shoes began to dance, cutting the pigeon wing as well as it had ever been done on a vaudeville stage, I am sure, while the other four patted with such spirit and in such excellent time that Zebedee got up and danced a little pas seul, and Mrs. Green declared it was all she could do to keep from joining him.
"I learned to jig long before I did to waltz," she said, "and I find myself returning to the wild when I hear good patting."
"So did I," I said; "Tweedles can pat as well as a darky. We will have a dancing match some day, too."
The minstrels were remunerated beyond their dreams of avarice, and cantered off joyfully to buy groun'-nut cakes from the old mauma on the corner, where she sat with her basket of goodies on her lap, waving her palmetto fan, between dozes, to scare away the flies.
"Who's the old cove over there with the Venus de Milo effect of arms?" asked Zebedee, pointing to a much-mutilated statue near the Meeting Street entrance of the park.
"Why, that's William Pitt. Louis Gaillard told me we would find it here," explained Dee. "He said it was erected in seventeen-sixty-nine by the citizens of Charleston in honor of his promoting the repeal of the Stamp Act. His arm got knocked off by a cannon ball in the siege of Charleston."
"This over here is Valentine's bust of Henry Timrod," called Dum from a very interesting-looking bronze statue that had attracted her artistic eye all the time the little nigs were singing.
"Timrod! Oh, Edwin, he is the one I am most interested in in all South Carolina," and Mrs. Green joined Dum to view the bust from all angles. Of course, all of us followed.
"'Through clouds and through sunshine, in peace and in war, amid the stress of poverty and the storm of civil strife, his soul never faltered,'" read Mrs. Green from the inscription on the monument of one of the truest poets of the South. "'To his poetic mission he was faithful to the end. In life and in death he was "Not disobedient unto the heavenly vision."'"
I whipped out my little notebook and began feverishly to copy the tribute. I found Mrs. Green doing the same thing in a similar little book.
"'Not disobedient to the heavenly vision'! I should like to have such a thing on my monument. I used to think that just so I could make a lot of money I wouldn't mind what kind of stuff I wrote; but now I do want to live up to an ideal," she exclaimed to me. "Do you feel that way?"
"I don't know whether I do or not. I don't believe I could stand the stress of having my manuscript rejected time after time and the storm of returning it again and again. I am afraid I'd be willing to have written the Elsie books just to have made as much money as they say the author of them has made. I know that sounds pretty bad, but——"
"I understand, my dear. I fancy my feeling as I do is something that has come to me just because the making of money is not of as much importance to me as it used to be. There was a time in my girlhood when I would have written Elsie books or even worse with joy just to make the money."
"I can't quite believe it. You look so spirituelle, and I believe you have always been obedient to the heavenly vision."
"Look on this side," said my new friend, laughing and blushing in such a girlish way that it seemed ridiculous to talk of her girlhood as though it had passed. "This inscription is more utilitarian:
"'This memorial has been erected with the proceeds of the recent sale of a very large edition of the author's poems, by the Timrod Memorial Association, of South Carolina.'
"and then:
"'Genius, like Egypt's Monarch, timely wise,
Erects its own memorial ere it dies.'
"Oh, Edwin, look! Here is the ode that mother sings to little Mildred, here on the back of the monument. Mildred is my baby, you know," she said, in explanation to us, "and mother sings the most charming things to her."
"Please read it to us, Molly; I didn't bring my glasses."
That is what Professor Green said, but when we had known him longer we found out he was not so very dependent on glasses that he could not read an inscription carved in one-inch letters, but that he always made his wife read aloud when he could. When she read poetry, it was music, indeed. It seems he first realized what he felt for her when she read the "Blessed Damosel" in his class at college. He had been her instructor, as he had Miss Ball's.
"This ode of Timrod's was sung for the first time on the occasion of decorating the graves of the Confederate dead at Magnolia Cemetery, here in Charleston, in sixty-seven, so I am told."
No wonder Professor Edwin wanted his Molly to read the poem! Her voice was the most wonderfully sympathetic and singularly fitted to the reading of poetry that I have ever heard. I longed for my father to hear her read. He could make me weep over poetry when I would go dry-eyed through all kinds of trouble, and now Mrs. Green had the same power:
"'Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.
"'In seeds of laurel in the earth
The blossom of your fame is blown,
And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
The shaft is in the stone!
"'Meanwhile, behalf the tardy years
Which keep in trust your storied tombs,
Behold! your sisters bring their tears,
And these memorial blooms.
"'Small tributes! but your shades will smile
More proudly on these wreaths today,
Than when some cannon-moulded pile
Shall overlook this bay.
"'Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies,
By mourning beauty crowned!'"
We were all very quiet for a moment and then St. Michael's bells rang out six-thirty o'clock, and in spite of poetical emotions we knew the pangs of hunger were due and it was time for dinner.
We were to sit together at a larger table that evening at dinner, to the satisfaction of all of us.
"It is a mutual mash," declared Dee, when we went to our room to don dinner clothes. "The Greens seem to like us, and don't we just adore the Greens, though!"
"I believe I like him as much as I do her," said Dum. "Of course, he is not so paintable. She makes me uncertain whether I want to be a sculptor or a painter. I have been thinking how she would look in marble, and while she has good bones, all right, and would show up fine in marble, she would certainly lose out if she had to be pure white and could not have that lovely flush and those blue, blue eyes and that red-gold hair."
"I don't see why you talk about Mrs. Green's bones!" exclaimed Dee, rather indignantly. "I can't see that her bones are the least bit prominent."
"Well, goose, I mean her proportions. Beauty, to my mind, does not amount to a row of pins if it is only skin deep; it's got to go clean through to the bones."
"Well, I don't believe it. I bet you Mrs. Green's skeleton would look just like yours or mine or Miss Plympton's or anybody else's."
"You flatter yourself."
"Well, girls," I cried, feeling that pacific intervention was in order, "there's no way to prove or disprove except by X-ray photography so long as we have Mrs. Green on this mundane sphere. I certainly would not have a row over it. Mrs. Green's bones are very pleasingly covered, to my way of thinking."
"They are beautiful bones, or their being well covered would not make any difference. Just see here"—and Dum began rapidly sketching a skull and then piling up hair on it and putting in a nose and lips, etc.—"can't you see if the skull is out of proportion with a jimber jaw and a bulging forehead that all the pretty skin on earth with hair like gold in the sunset would not make it beautiful?"
"Well, I know one thing," put in Dee: "I know you could take a hunk of clay and start to make a mouse and then change your mind and keep on piling clay on, and shaping it, and patting it, and moulding it until you had turned it into a cat. If you can do that much, I should like to know why the Almighty couldn't do the same thing. Couldn't He start with chunky bones, and then fill them out and mould the flesh, pinching in here and plumping out there until He had made a tall and slender person?"
"Dee, you make me tired—you argue like a Sunday School superintendent who is thinking about turning into a preacher. The idea of the Almighty's changing His mind to start out with! Don't you know that from the very beginning of everything the Almighty has planned our proportions, such as they are, and He would no more put a little on here and pull a little off there than He would start to make a mouse and turn it into a cat?"
"All right, if you think a beauty doctor can do more than the Almighty, then I think your theology needs looking after."
"I know one thing," I said: "I know it is after seven and you will keep your father waiting for his dinner when we already kept him waiting for his luncheon. The Greens are to have dinner with us, and it is mighty rude to keep them waiting."
Tweedles hurriedly got into their dinner dresses and were only ten minutes late, after all.
"What made you girls so late?" demanded Zebedee, when we were seated around the table, encouraging our appetites with soup, which is what the domestic science lecturers say is all that soup does.
"We were having a discussion, Dum and I. Page was the Dove of Peace, or we would be going it yet."
"Tell us what the discussion was about and we will forgive you," said Professor Green.
"It was about Mrs. Green's bones," blurted out Dum.
"My bones! I thought I had them so well covered that casual observers would not be conscious of them," laughed the beautiful skeleton, who was radiant in a gray-blue crêpe de chine dress that either gave the selfsame color to her eyes or borrowed it from them, one could never make out which.
"Oh, we did not mean you were skinny," and Dum explained what the trend of the argument had been, much to the amusement of the owner of the bones in question and also of her husband and Zebedee.
"Miss Dum's argument reminds me of something that Du Maurier says in that rather remarkable little book, 'Trilby,'" said Professor Green. "He says that Trilby's bones were beautiful, and even when she was in the last stages of a wasting disease, the wonderful proportion of her bones kept her beautiful."
"There now, Dee, consider yourself beaten!" and Dee acknowledged her defeat by helping Dum to the heart of the celery.
We had a merry dinner and found our new friends as interesting as they seemed to find us. We discussed everything from Shakespeare to the movies. Professor Green was not a bit pedagogic, which was a great comfort. Persons who teach so often work out of hours—teach all the time. If preachers and teachers would join a union and make a compact for an eight-hour workday, what a comfort it would be to the community at large!
"Edwin, Miss Allison——"
"Please call me Page!"
"Well, then, Page—it certainly does come more trippingly on my tongue—Page is meaning to write, and she, too, is putting things down in a notebook."
"I advised that," said Mr. Tucker. "It seems to me that if from the beginning I had only started a notebook, I would have a valuable possession by now. As I get older my memory is not so good."
When Zebedee talked about getting older it always made people laugh. He sounded somehow as little boys do when they say what they are going to do when they put on long pants. I fancy he and Professor Green were about the same age, but he certainly looked younger. He must have been born looking younger than ever a baby looked before, and eternal youth was his.
"I know a man in New York, newspaper man, who began systematically keeping a scrap-book when he was a youth. He indexed it and compiled it with much care, and now that he is quite an old man he actually gets his living—and a very good living at that—out of that scrap-book," declared Zebedee. "He has information at hand for almost any subject, and the kind of intimate information one would not find in an encyclopedia. He will get up an article on any subject the editors demand, and that kind of handy man commands good pay."
"It is certainly a good habit to form if you want to do certain kinds of writing, but it takes a very strong will for a writer of fiction who runs a notebook not to be coerced by that notebook. I mean in this way: make the characters do certain things or say certain things just to lead up to some anecdote that the author happens to have heard and jotted down in his notebook. Anecdotes in books should happen just as naturally as they do in life: come in because there is some reason for them. The author who deliberately makes a setting for some good story that has no bearing on the subject-matter is a bore just as the chronic joke-teller is. If you can see the writer leading up to a joke, can see the notebook method too plainly, it is bad art. I'd rather have puns—they are at least spontaneous."
"Please lend me your pencil, Zebedee," I entreated.
"What are you going to do with it?"
"Write down what Professor Green has just said in my notebook. I think some day it may come in handy."
"You mean as a warning to all young authors?" questioned the professor.
"Oh, no, I think I may have my characters all sitting around a table at a hotel in Charleston and gradually work up to the point and have some one get it off."
And Mrs. Green, also an advocate of the notebook system as a memory jogger, applauded me for my sauciness to her wise husband.