CHAPTER V
Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery like everything else about Charleston shows the touch of the War. Here the soldiers lie who fought so bravely under Wade Hampton and here lies the general himself.
Go south, go north, and you will not find a place touched by the War where you will not find noble memories, echoes of heroic deeds, legends of brave men.
Miss Pinckney was by no means a peace party and this thought was doubtless in her head as she stood surveying the confederate graves. There were relations here and men whom she had known as a child.
“That’s the War,” said she, “and people abuse war as if it was the worst thing in the world, insulting the dead. ’Clare to goodness it makes me savage to hear the pasty-faces talking of war and making plans to abolish it. It’s like hearing a lot of children making plans to abolish thunder storms. Where would America be now without the War, and where’d her history be? You tell me that. It’d just be the history of a big canning factory. These men aren’t dead, they’re still alive and fighting—fighting Chicago; fighting pork, and wheat, and cotton and railway-stock and everything else that’s abolishing the soul of the nation.
“There’s Matt Carey’s grave. He had everything he wanted, and he wasn’t young. Now-a-days he’d have been driving in his automobile killing old women and chickens, or tarpoon fishing down ’n Florida letting the world go rip, or full of neur—what do they call it—that thing that gets on their nerves and makes crazy old men of them at forty—I’ve forgotten. He didn’t. He took up a gun and died like a lion, and he was a middle-aged business man. No one remembers him, I do believe, except, maybe me, clean forgotten—and yet he helped to put a brick into the only monument worth ten cents that America has got—The War.
“And some northern people would say ‘nice sort of brick, seeing he was fighting on the wrong side.’ Wrong side or right side he was fighting for something else than his own hand. That’s the point.”
She closed up her lips and they went on. Phyl found her father’s grave in a quiet spot where the live-oaks stood, the long grey moss hanging from their branches.
Miss Pinckney, having pointed out the grave, strayed off, leaving the girl to herself.
The gloomy, strange-looking trees daunted Phyl, and the grave, too young yet to have a headstone, drew her towards it, yet repelled her.