It was like meeting in a dream some one she had loved and who had turned into a stranger in a strange place.
Just as Charleston had dimmed Ireland in her mind as a bright light dims a lesser light, so had some influence come between her and the memory of her father. That memory was just as distinct as ever, but grief had died from it, as though Time had been at work on it for years and years.
The Phyl who had stepped out of the south-bound express and the girl of this morning were the same in mind and body, but in soul and outlook they had changed and were changing as though the air of the south had some magic in it, some food that had always been denied her and which was necessary for her full being.
Miss Pinckney returned from her wanderings amongst the graves and they turned to the gate.
“It used to seem strange to me coming here when I was a girl,” said she. “It always seemed as if I was come to visit people who could never come to see me. I used to pity them, but one gets older and one gets wiser, and I fancy it’s they that pity us, if they can see us at all, which isn’t often likely.”
“D’you think they come back?” said Phyl.
“My dear child, if I told you what I thought, you’d say I was plum crazy. But I’ll say this. What do you think the Almighty made folk for? to live a few years and then lie in a grave with folk heaping flowers on them? There’s no such laziness in nature. I don’t say there aren’t folk who live their lives like as if they were dead, covered with flowers and never moving a hand to help themselves like some of those N’York women—but they don’t count. They’re against nature and I guess when they die they die, for they haven’t ever lived.” Then, vehemently: “Of course, they come back, not as ghosts peekin’ about and making nuisances of themselves, but they come back as people—which is the sensible way and there’s nothing unsensible in nature. Mind you, I don’t say there aren’t ghosts, there are, for I’ve seen ’em; I saw Simon Pinckney, the one that died of drink, as plain as my hand same day he died, but he was a no account. He hadn’t the making of a man, so he couldn’t come back as a man, and he wasn’t a woman, so he couldn’t come back as a woman; so he came back as a ghost. He was always an uneasy creature, else I don’t suppose he’d have come back as anything. When a man wears out a suit of clothes he doesn’t die, he gets a new one, and when he wears out a body—which isn’t a bit more than a suit of clothes—he gets a new one. If he hasn’t piled up grit enough in life to pay for a new body, he goes about without one and he’s a ghost. That’s my way of thinking and I know—I know—n’matter.”
She put up her sunshade and they returned, driving through the warm spring weather. Phyl was silent, the day had taken possession of her. The scent of pink mimosa filled the air, the blue sky shewed here and there a few feather traces of white cloud and the wind from the sea seemed the very breath of the southern spring.
It seemed to Phyl as they drove that never before had she met or felt the loveliness of life, never till this moment when turning a corner the song of a bird from a garden met them with the perfume of jessamine.
Charleston is full of surprises like that, things that snatch you away from the present or catch you for a moment into the embrace of some old garden lurking behind a wrought iron gate, or tell you a love story no matter how much you don’t want to hear it—or tease you, if you are a practical business man, with some other futility which has nothing at all to do with “real” life.