John March, Southerner Part 7

But the General's celerity was resented. He boarded at the St. Charles, and, famous, sociable, and fond of politics, came at once into personal contact with the highest Federal authorities in New Orleans. The happy dead earnest with which he "accepted the situation" and "harmonized"

with these men sorely offended his old friends and drew the fire of the newspapers. Even Judge March demurred.

"President Garnet," John heard the beloved voice in front of him say, "gentlemen may cry Peace, Peace, but there can be too much peace, sir!"

The General came out in an open letter, probably not so sententiously as we condense it here, but in substance to this effect: "The king never dies; citizens.h.i.+p never ceases; a bereaved citizens.h.i.+p has no right to put on expensive mourning, and linger through a dressy widowhood before it marries again.... There are men who, when their tree has been cut down even with the ground, will try to sit in the shade of the stump....

Such men are those who, now that slavery is gone, still cling to a civil order based on the old plantation system.... They are like a wood-sawyer robbed of his saw-horse and trying to saw wood in his lap."

All these darts struck and stung, but a little soft mud, such as any editor could supply, would soon have drawn out the sting--but for an additional line or two, which gave poisonous and mortal offense.

Blackland and Clearwater replied in a storm of indignation. The Suez Courier bade him keep out of Dixie on peril of his life. He came, nevertheless, canva.s.sing for business, and was not molested, but got very few s.h.i.+pments. What he mainly secured were the flippant pledges of such as required the largest possible advances indefinitely ahead of the least possible cotton. Also a few Yankees s.h.i.+pped to him.

"Gen'l Halliday, howdy, sah?" It was dusk of the last day of this tour.

The voice came from a dark place on the sidewalk in Suez. "Don't you know me, Gen'l? You often used to see me an' Majo' Gyarnet togetheh; yes, sah. My name's Cornelius Leggett, sah."

"Why, Cornelius, to be sure! I thought I smelt whiskey. What can I do for you?"

"Gen'l, I has the honor to espress to you, sah, my thanks faw the way you espress yo'self in yo' letteh on the concerns an' prospec's o' we'

colo'ed people, sah. An likewise, they's thousands would like to espress the same espressions, sah."

"Oh, that's all right."

"Gen'l, I represents a quant.i.ty of ow people what's move' down into Blackland fum Rosemont and other hill places. They espress they'se'ves to me as they agent that they like to confawm some prearrangement with you, sah."

"Are you all on one plantation?"

"Oh, no, sah, they ain't ezac'ly on no plantation. Me? Ob, I been a-goin' to the Freedman' Bureau school in Pulaski City as they agent.

"Sah? Ya.s.s, sah, at they espenses--p-he!

"They? They mos'ly strowed round in the woods in pole cabins an' bresh arbors.--Sah?

"Yaas, sah, livin' on game an' fish.--Sah?

"Yaas, sah.

"But they espress they doubts that the Gove'ment ain't goin' to give 'em no fahms, an' they like to comprise with you, Gen'l, ef you please, sah, to git holt o' some fahms o' they own, you know; sawt o' payin' faw'm bes' way they kin; ya.s.s, sah. As you say in yo' letteh, betteh give 'm lan's than keep 'em vagabones; ya.s.s, sir. Betteh no terms than none at all; ya.s.s, sah." And so on.

From this colloquy resulted the Negro farm-village of Leggettstown. In 1866-68 it grew up on the old Halliday place, which had reverted to the General by mortgage. Neatest among its whitewashed cabins, greenest with gourd-vines, and always the nearest paid for, was that of the Reverend Leviticus Wisdom, his wife, Virginia, and her step-daughter, Johanna.

In the fall of 1869 General Halliday came back to Suez to live. His wife, a son, and daughter had died, two daughters had married and gone to the Northwest, others were here and there. A daughter of sixteen was with him--they two alone. The ebb-tide of the war values had left him among the shoals; his black curls were full of frost, his bank box was stuffed with plantation mortgages, his notes were protested. He had come to operate, from Suez as a base, several estates surrendered to him by debtors and entrusted to his management by his creditors. This he wished to do on what seemed to him an original plan, of which Leggettstown was only a clumsy sketch, a plan based on his belief in the profound economic value of--"villages of small freeholding farmers, my dear sir!"

"It's the natural crystal of free conditions!" John heard him say in the post-office corner of Weed & Usher's drug-store.

Empty words to John. He noted only the n.o.ble air of the speaker and his hearers. Every man of the group had been a soldier. The General showed much more polish than the others, but they all had the strong graces of hors.e.m.e.n and masters, and many a subtle sign of civilization and cult heated and hammered through centuries of search for good government and honorable fortune. John stopped and gazed.

"Come on, son," said Judge March almost sharply. John began to back away. "There!" exclaimed the father as his son sat down suddenly in a box of sawdust and cigar stumps. He led him away to clean him off, adding, "You hadn't ought to stare at people as you walk away fum them, my son."

With rare exceptions, the General's daily hearers were silent, but resolute. They did not a.n.a.lyze. Their motives were their feelings; their feelings were their traditions, and their traditions were back in the old entrenchments. The time for large changes had slipped by. Haggard, of the _Courier_, thought it "Equally just and d.a.m.ning" to reprint from the General's odiously remembered letter of four years earlier, "If we can't make our Negroes white, let us make them as white as we can," and sign it "Social Equality Launcelot." Parson Tombs, sweet, aged, and beloved, prayed from his pulpit--with the preface, "Thou knowest thy servant has never mixed up politics and religion"--that "the machinations of them who seek to join together what G.o.d hath put asunder may come to naught."

Halliday laughed. "Why, I'm only a private citizen trying to retrieve my private fortunes." But--

"These are times when a man can't choose whether he'll be public or private!" said Garnet, and the _Courier_ made the bankrupt cotton factor public every day. It quoted constantly from the unpardonable letter, and charged him with "inflaming the basest cupidity of our Helots," and so on, and on. But the General, with his silver-shot curls dancing half-way down his shoulders, a six-shooter under each skirt of his black velvet coat, and a knife down the back of his neck, went on pus.h.i.+ng his private enterprise.

"Private enterprise!" cried Garnet. "His jackals will run him for Congress." And they did--against Garnet.

The times were seething. Halliday, viewing matters impartially in the clear, calm light of petroleum torches, justified Congress in acts which Garnet termed "the spume of an insane revenge;" while Garnet, with equal calmness of judgment, under other petroleum torches, gloried in the "masterly inactivity" of Dixie's whitest and best--which Launcelot denounced as a foolish and wicked political strike. All the corruptions bred by both sides in a gigantic war--and before it in all the crudeness of the country's first century--were pouring down and spouting up upon Dixie their rain of pitch and ashes. Negroes swarmed about the polls, elbowed their masters, and challenged their votes. Ragged negresses talked loudly along the sidewalk of one another as "ladies," and of their mistresses as "women." White men of fortune and station were masking, night-riding, whipping and killing; and blue cavalry rattled again through the rocky streets of Suez.

Such was life when das.h.i.+ng Fannie Halliday joined the choir in Parson Tombs's church, becoming at once its leading spirit, and John March suddenly showed a deep interest in the Scriptures. He joined her Sunday-school cla.s.s.

X.

FANNIE

Was sixteen--she said; had black eyes--the dilating kind--was pretty, and seductively subtle. Jeff-Jack liked her much. They met at Rosemont, where he found her spending two or three days, on perfect terms with Barbara, and treated with noticeable gravity, though with full kindness, by Mrs. Garnet, whom she called, warmly, "Cousin Rose."

Ravenel had pushed forward only two or three p.a.w.ns of conversation when she moved at one step from news to politics. She played with the ugly subject girlishly, even frivolously, though not insipidly--at least to a young man's notion--riding its winds and waves like a sea-bird.

Politics, she said, seemed to her a kind of human weather, no more her business and no less than any other kind. She never blamed the public, or any party for this or that; did he? And when he said he did not, her eyes danced and she declared she disliked him less.

"Why, we might as well scold the rain or the wind as the public," she insisted. "What publics do, or think, or say, or want--are merely--I don't know--sort o' chemical values. What makes you smile that way?"

"Did I smile? You're deep," he said.

"You're smiling again," she replied, and, turning, asked Garnet a guileless question on a certain fierce matter of the hour. He answered it with rash confidence, and her next question was a checkmate.

"Oh, understand," he cried, in reply; "we don't excuse these dreadful practices."

"Yes, you do. You-all don't do anything else--except Mr. Ravenel; he approves them barefaced."

Garnet tried to retort, but she laughed him down. When she was gone, "She's as rude as a roustabout," he said to his wife.

For all this she was presently the belle of Suez. She invaded its small and ill-a.s.sorted society and held it, a restless, but conquered province. John's father marked with joy his son's sudden regularity in Sunday-school. If his wife was less pleased it was because to her all punctuality was a personal affront; it was some time before she discovered the cause to be Miss Fannie Halliday. By that time half the young men in town were in love with Fannie, and three-fourths of them in abject fear of her wit; yet, in true Southern fas.h.i.+on, casting themselves in its way with Hindoo abandon.

Her father and she had apartments in Tom Hersey's Swanee Hotel. Mr.

Ravenel called often. She entered Montrose Academy "in order to remain sixteen," she told him. This inst.i.tution was but a year or two old. It had been founded, at Ravenel's suggestion, "as a sort o' little sister to Rosemont." Its princ.i.p.al, Miss Kinsington, with her sister, belonged to one of Dixie's best and most unfortunate families.

"You don't bow down to Mrs. Grundy," something prompted Ravenel to say, as he and Fannie came slowly back from a gallop in the hills.

"Yes, I do. I only love to tease her now and then. I go to the races, play cards, waltz, talk slang, and read novels. But when I do bow down to her I bow away down. Why, at Montrose, I actually talk on serious subjects!"

"Do you touch often on religion? You never do to the gentlemen I bring to see you."

"Why, Mr. Ravenel, I don't understand you. What should I know about religion? You seem to forget that I belong to the choir."