Part 38

“Never Virginia,” she persisted.

“Very well, very well! Somehow you’ve admitted the rest, however.”

She began to smile.

“And next, Kings Port looks down on all the rest of South Carolina.”

She now laughed outright. “An up-country girl will not deny that, anyhow!”

“And finally, your aunts--”

“My aunts are Kings Port.”

“The whole of it?”

“If you mean the thirty thousand negroes--”

“No, there are other white people here--there goes your nose again!”

“I will not have you so impudent, sir!”

“A thousand pardons, I’m on my knees. But your aunts--” There was such a flash of war in her eye that I stopped.

“May I not even mention them?” I asked her.

And suddenly upon this she became serious and gentle. “I thought that you understood them. Would you take them from their seclusion, too? It is all they have left--since you burned the rest in 1865.”

I had made her say what I wanted! That “you” was what I wanted. Now I should presently have it out with her. But, for the moment, I did not disclaim the “you.” I said:--

“The burning in 1865 was horrible, but it was war.”

“It was outrage.”

“Yes, the same kind as England’s, who burned Washington in 1812, and whom you all so deeply admire.”

She had, it seemed, no answer to this. But we trembled on the verge of a real quarrel. It was in her voice when she said:--

“I think I interrupted you.”

I pushed the risk one step nearer the verge, because of the words I wished finally to reach. “In 1812, when England burned our White House down, we did not sit in the ashes; we set about rebuilding.”

And now she burst out. “That’s not fair, that’s perfectly inexcusable! Did England then set loose on us a pack of black savages and politicians to help us rebuild? Why, this very day I cannot walk on the other side of the river, I dare not venture off the New Bridge; and you who first beat us and then unleashed the blacks to riot in a new ‘equality’ that they were no more fit for than so many apes, you sat back at ease in your victory and your progress, having handed the vote to the negro as you might have handed a kerosene lamp to a child of three, and let us crushed, breathless people cope with the chaos and destruction that never came near you. Why, how can you dare--” Once again, admirably she pulled herself up as she had done when she spoke of the President. “I mustn’t!” she declared, half whispering, and then more clearly and calmly, “I mustn’t.” And she shook her head as if shaking something off. “Nor must you,” she finished, charmingly and quietly, with a smile.

“I will not,” I assured her. She was truly noble.

“But I did think that you understood us,” she said pensively.

“Miss La Heu, when you talked to me about the President and the White House, I said that you were hard to answer. Do you remember?”

“Perfectly. I said I was glad you found me so.’

“You helped me to understand you then, and now I want to be helped to further understanding. Last night I heard the ‘Ode for the Daughters of Dixie.’ I had a bad time listening to that.”

“Do you presume to criticise it? Do we criticise your Grand Army reunions, and your ‘Marching through Georgia,’ and your ‘John Brown’s Body,’ and your Arlington Museum? Can we not be allowed to celebrate our heroes and our glories and sing our songs?”