CHAPTER IV
Phyl awoke to the early morning sunlight and the sounds of Charleston.
The chimes of St. Michael's were striking six and through the summerysunlit air carried by the sea wind stirring the curtains came the cries ofthe streets and the rumbling of early morning carts.
Oh, those negro cries! the cry of the crab-seller, the orange vendor, theman who sells "monkey meat" dolorous, long drawn out, lazy, you do notknow the South till you have heard them.
The sound of a mat being shaken and beaten on the piazza, adjoining thaton which her window opened came now, and two voices in dispute.
"Mistress Pinckney she told me to tell you--she mos' sholey did."
"Go wash yo' face, yo' coloured trash, cummin' here wid yo' orders--skipout o' my piazza--'clar' to goodness I dunno what's cummin' to niggersdese days."
Then Miss Pinckney's voice as from an upper window:
"Dinah! Seth! what's that I hear? Get on with your work the pair of youand stop your chattering. You hear me?"
When Phyl came down Richard Pinckney was in the garden smoking a cigaretteand gathering some carnations.
"They're for aunt," said he, "to propitiate her for my being late lastnight. I wasn't in till one. I'm worse even than you, you see, and thenext time you are out till eleven and I let you in and grumble at you, youcan hit back. Have a flower."
He gave her the finest in his bunch and Phyl put it in her belt. If shehad any doubt as to the sincerity of his welcome his manner this morningought to have set her mind at rest.
She stood looking at him as he tied the stalks of the flowers together andhe was worth looking at, a fresh, bright figure, the very incarnation ofyouth and health and one might almost say innocence. Clear eyed,well-groomed, good to look upon.
"I generally pick a flower and put it on her plate," said he, "but thismorning she shall have a whole bunch--hope you slept all right?"
"Rather," said Phyl, "I never sleep much the first night in a newplace--but somehow--oh, I don't know how to express it--but nothing hereseems new."
"Nothing is," said he laughing, "it's all as old as the hills--you likeit, don't you?"
"It's not a question of liking--of course I like it, who could help likingit--it's more than that. It's a feeling I have that I will either love itor hate it, and I don't know which yet, all sorts of things come back tome here, you see, my mother knew the place--do people remember what theirmothers and fathers knew, I wonder? But, if you understood me, it's not somuch remembering as feeling. All yesterday it seemed to me that I had onlyto turn some corner and come upon something waiting for me, something Iknew quite well, and the smells and sounds and things are always remindingme of something--you know how it is when you have forgotten a name andwhen it's lying just at the back of your mind--that's how I feel here,about nearly everything--strange, isn't it?"
"Oh, I don't know," said the practical Pinckney. "This place is awfullyEnglish for one thing, sure to remind you of a lot of things in Irelandand England, and then there's of course the fact that you are partlyAmerican, but I don't see why you should ever hate it."
"_Indeed_, I didn't mean that," said she flushing up at the thought thatin trying to express herself she had made such a blunder. "I meant--Imeant, that this something about the place that is always reminding me ofitself might make me hate _it_."
"Or love it?"
"Yes, but I can't explain--the place itself no one could hate, you musthave thought me rude."
"Not a bit--not the least little bit in the world. Well, I believe you'llcome to love it, not hate it."
"It," said Phyl. "I don't know that, because I don't know what it is--thissomething that is always peeping round corners at me yet hiding itself."
"_Richard_!" came Miss Pinckney's voice from the piazza where she had justappeared, "smoking cigarettes before breakfast, how often have I told youI won't have you smoking before breakfast--why, God bless my soul, whatare you doing with all those carnations?"
He flung the cigarette-end away, but she refused to kiss him on account ofthe tobacco fumes, though she took the flowers.
Cigarettes, like telephones, automobiles, and the memory of Edgar AllanPoe, formed a subject upon which once started Miss Pinckney was hard tocheck, and whilst she poured out the tea, she pursued it.
"Dr. Cotton it was who told me, the one who used to live in Tradd Street,he was a relative of Dr. Garden the man that gave his name to that flowerthey call the gardenia--had it sent him from somewhere in the South, butI'm sure I don't know where--New Orleans, I think, but it doesn't matter.I was saying about Dr. Cotton, _old_ Dr. Cotton of Tradd Street, he toldme that the truth about young William Pringle's death was that he wasblack when he died, from cigarette smoking, black as a crow. Used to smokebefore breakfast, used to smoke all day, used to smoke in his sleep, Ib'lieve. Couldn't get rid of the pesky habit and died clinging to it,black as a crow. I can't abide the things. Your father used to smoke BullDurham in a corn cob, or a cigar, he'd a' soon have smoked one of thosecigarettes of yours as soon as he'd have been caught doing tatting. Don'ttell me, there's no manhood in them, it's just vice in thimble-fulls. I'dmuch sooner see a man lying healthily under the table once in a way thanalways half fuddled, and I'd sooner be poisoned out by a green cigar nowand then, than always having that nasty sickly cigarette smell round theplace."
"But good gracious, Aunt, I'm not a cigarette smoker, only once and awayand at odd times."
"I wasn't talking about you so much as the young men of to-day, and theyoung women, they're the worst, for they encourage the others to makefools of themselves, and if they're not smoking themselves they're suckingcandy. Candy sucking and cigarette smoking is the ruin of the States.Those Rhett girls _live_ on candy, and they look it--pasty faces."
"Why!" said he, "what grudge have you got against the Rhetts now,Aunt--it's as bad to take a girl's complexion away as a man'scharacter--what have the Rhetts been doing to you?"
Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear the question for a moment, then shesaid, speaking as if to some invisible person:
"That Frances Rhett may be reckoned the belle of Charleston, that's what Iheard old Mr. Outhwaite call her, but she's a belle I wouldn't care tohave tied round my neck. Belle! She's no more a belle than I am, there arehundreds of prettier girls between here and the Battery, but she's one ofthose sort that have the knack of setting young men against each other andmaking them fight for her; she's labelled herself as a prize, which sheisn't. I declare to goodness the world frightens me at times, the way Isee fools going about labelled as clever men, and women your grandfatherswouldn't have cast an eye at going about labelled as beauties. I dobelieve if I was to give myself out as a beauty to-morrow I'd have halfthe young idiots in Charleston after me, believing me."
"They're after you already," said Pinckney, "only yesterday I heard youngReggy Calhoun saying--"
"I know," said Miss Pinckney, "and I want no more of your impudence. Nowtake yourself off if you've finished your breakfast, for Phyl and I havework to do."
He got up and went off laughing by way of the piazza and they could hearhis cheery voice in the garden talking to the old negro gardener.
Miss Pinckney's eyes softened. She was fiddling with a spoon and when shespoke she seemed speaking to it, turning it about as if to examine itspattern all the time.
"I don't know what mothers with boys feel like, but I do want to see thatboy safe and married before I go. He's just the sort to be landed inunhappiness; he is, most surely; well, I don't know, there's no use inwarning young folk, you may spank 'em for stealing the jam but you can'tspank 'em from fooling with the wrong sort of girl."
Miss Pinckney had talked the night before of Phyl's father and hadproposed taking her this morning to the Magnolia cemetery to see thegrave. She broke off the conversation suddenly as this fact strayed intoher mind, and, rising up, invited Phyl to follow her to the kitchenpremises where she had orders to give before starting.
"I always look after
my own house," said she, "and always will. Fineladies nowadays sit in their drawing-rooms and ring their bells for theservants to rob them and they aren't any more respected. That's what makesthe Charleston negro the impudentest lump of blackness under the sun, thatand knowing they're emancipated. They've got to look on themselves as partof the Heavenly Host. Well, I'll have no emancipated rubbish in my house,and the consequence is I never lose a servant and I never get impudence.They'll all get a pension when they're too old to work, and good food andgood pay whilst they're working, and I've said to them 'you're no moreemancipated than I am, we're all slaves to our duty and the onlydifference between now and the old days is I can't sell you--and if youwere idle enough to make me want to sell you there's no one would buy suchrubbish nowadays.' Half the trouble is that people these times don't knowhow to talk to coloured folk, and the other half is that they don't wantto talk to them."
She led the way down passages to the great kitchen, stonebuilt, clean andfull of sunlight. The door was open on to the yard and through an openside door one could get a glimpse of the scullery, the great washing upsink, generations old, and worn with use, and above it the dryingdresser.
There were no new-fangled cooking inventions at Vernons, everything wasdone at an open range of the good old fashion still to be found in many anEnglish country house.
Miss Pinckney objected to "baked meat" and the joints at Vernons wereroast, swinging from a clockwork Jack and basted all the time with a longmetal ladle.
By the range this morning was seated an old coloured woman engaged incutting up onions. This was Prue the oldest living thing in Vernons andperhaps in Charleston; she had been kitchen maid before Miss Pinckney wasborn, then cook, and now, long past work, she was just kept on.Twenty-five years ago she had been offered a pension and a cottage forherself but she refused both. She wanted to die where she was, so shesaid. So they let her stay, doing odd jobs and bossing the others just asthough she were still mistress of the kitchen--as in fact she was. She hadbecome a legend and no one knew her exact age, she was creepin' close to ahundred, and her memory which carried her back to the slave days wasmarvellous in its retentiveness.
She had cooked a dinner for Jeff Davis when he was a guest at Vernons, shecould still hear the guns of the Civil War, so she said, and the Mascarenefamily history was her Bible.
She looked down on the Pinckneys as trash beside the Mascarenes, andinterlopers, and this attitude and point of view though well known to MissPinckney was not in the least resented by her.
But during the last few years this old lady's intellect had been steadilycoming under eclipse; still insisting on doing little jobs in a futilesort of way, silence had been creeping upon her so that she rarely spokenow, and when she did, by chance, her words revealed the fact that hermind was dwelling in the past.
Rachel, the cook, a sturdy coloured woman with her head bound up in anisabelle-coloured handkerchief was standing by the kitchen table on whichshe was resting the fore-finger of her left hand, whilst with the rightshe was turning over some fish that had just been sent in from thefishmonger's. She seemed in a critical mood, but what she said to MissPinckney was lost to Phyl whose attention was attracted by a chucklingsound from near the range.
It was Prue.
The old woman at sight of Phyl had dropped the knife and the onion onwhich she had been engaged. She was now seated, hands on knees, chucklingand nodding to the girl, then, scarcely raising her right hand from herknee, she made a twiddling movement with the fore-finger as if to say,"come here--come here--I have something to tell you."
Phyl glanced at Miss Pinckney who was so taken up with what Rachel wassaying about the fish that she noticed nothing. Then she looked again atPrue and, unable to resist the invitation, came towards her. The old womancaught her by the arm so that she had to bend her head.
"Miss Julie," whispered Prue, "Massa Pinckney told me tell yo' he be at degate t'night same time 'slas' night. Done you let on 's I told yo'," shegave the arm a pinch and relapsed into herself chuckling whilst Phyl stoodwith a little shiver, half of relief at her escape from that bony clutch,half of dread--a vague dread as though she had come in contact withsomething uncanny.
She came to the table again and stood without looking at Prue, whilst MissPinckney completed her orders, then, that lady, having finished herbusiness and casting an eye about the place on the chance of finding anydirt or litter, saw Prue and asked how she was doing.
"Well, miss, she's doin' fa'r," replied Rachel, "but I'm t'inking she'snot long fore de new Jerusalem. Sits didderin' dere 'n' smokin' her pipe,'n' lays about her wid her stick times, fancyin' there'er dogs comin' intode kitchen."
"A dog bit her once way back in the '60's," said Miss Pinckney; "they usedto keep dogs here then. She don't want for anything?"
"Law no, miss, _she_ done want for nothin'; look at her now laffin' toherself. Haven't seen her do that way dis long time. Hi, Prue, what yo'laffin' at?"
Prue, instead of answering leant further forward hiding her face withoutchecking her merriment.
"Crazy," said Miss Pinckney, "but it's better to be laughing crazy thancrying crazy like some folk--here's a quarter and get her some candy."
She put the coin on the table and marched off followed by Phyl.
"She wanted to tell me something," said Phyl as they were driving to thecemetery; "she beckoned me to her and took hold of my arm and whisperedsomething."
"What did she say?"
Phyl, somehow, could not bring herself to betray that crazy confidence.
"I don't know, exactly, but she called me Miss Julie."
"Oh--she called you Miss Julie," said the other. Then she relapsed intothought and nothing more was said till they reached their destination.
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