“BUDDIE,” Lucy asked, in a cold tone, already prepared to resent it in case there were those who lacked the spirit, “would all you cadets enlist? I mean if it came to that.”
“They say all will.” He began to tell her of the various cadets from Louisiana and Mississippi families and what one or another of them had said or done.
“Noblesse oblige,” said Lucy, as if to say that to enlist was nothing, but not to enlist sheer white trash.
Edward had been home more than an hour, and the talking had not stopped for a moment. Everybody talked, as only a Southern family can, talking to each other for the love of all; whatever subjects of conversation there might be were knocked down like a feather.
“I certainly wouldn’t take any foolishness from Washington. Those new towels of Mamma’s, you might as well wipe your face with a sheet of wax!” Lucy had followed Edward to his room and sat on the bed while he washed his face and hands. “But Mamma likes this French damask and that fringe. Buddie, I thought my hair was fine enough, goodness knows, but yours is like a cloud of silk. Is that the way gentlemen of fashion in Alexandria must brush it now? It’s like General Beauregard in his pictures.”
Edward was always very susceptible to Lucy’s moods, and her happiness on seeing him again shone back to her from him. General Beauregard had visited his two sons at the military academy, he said laughing, and for weeks there were nothing but little Beauregards marching about.
“Well, isn’t he handsome!” said Lucy. “I always wanted to know what men think a handsome man is. Is that where you get that stock? Honestly, Buddie, I’d think it would choke you to death, but you look mighty sweet.”
This reminded him, Edward said, that he must go and speak to Mr. Munger and Mr. Trippler, their two convalescent guests, and the sewing mistress, Miss Whipple. Mr. Munger was in the vapors, said Lucy, at the thought of Mississippi seceding. His own State of Wisconsin a year ago had threatened to secede till the United States Government put a foot down; but this was different, the Southerners were rebels, by the living God, Mr. Munger had said, the other day when Mrs. Wilson came over from Rosalie with the present of one of the hams she took such pride in, and had declared that secession was nothing new. “Yes,” said Mr. Munger, “all men are brothers.”
“No doubt of it,” Mrs. Wilson said, “brothers and sisters.”
She made this reply solely because she saw, as everybody at Montrose had seen, that Mr. Munger had been a preacher and would go on repeating things long after it is obvious they will never be clear to any one.
Lucy searched a fresh linen handkerchief out of the portmanteau and handed it to Edward:
“Go on and see them, Buddie, and sober up, and then all will be left is the sweet memory of a welcome from Miss Whipple. She has another bundle of tracts from Massachusetts, so she’s calling us Mack Gee Hee again, and stuck a pin in me yesterday when we were fitting my blue silk Papa brought up from New Orleans and two brooches to go with it for my birthday, after Mamma and he’d already given me this necklace.” She tipped her chin up for him to see the necklace of amethysts, like little bunches of grapes capped with gold leaves. “Mamma says not, but I saw Mamma laughing, and don’t tell me about that pin, ’twas when I said no, Miss Whipple, McGehee rhymes with McFee. She said, which McFee? hold still.”
When Edward came downstairs the ladies were absent at their toilettes, and he and his father went out to look at the new camellias, which were blossoming this year for the first time, and at the three Arabians brought from the plantation in West Feliciana. Then they walked for half an hour up and down a path, where hedges of clipped althea divided the quince orchard from the garden.
“You and Uncle Edward at Woodville are antislavery men, aren’t you, Papa?” Edward said, “and so was Uncle John up in Panola.” He knew what anxiety his father had always felt about the mistreatment of the negroes belonging to him.
“There were plenty of antislavery men in this country till the northeast part of Mississippi was opened up, and later on the industrial North began to grow solid against us.”
When Hugh began to explain to his son the convictions that moved him, Edward himself replied with such point that his father was delighted. He was surprised also, as the older generation always is at the younger when it shows thought, and even accuracy, in a sober field and an argument close to preference and life. Evidently these young men at the military academy had not been devoted only to that artificial oratorical defense of states’ rights that Colonel Sherman had mentioned; they had made a check on history. Hugh McGehee could see the cadets, as Edward talked, informing and correcting one another in the historical facts. He listened, as parents do, with astonishment but with pride to his son saying things that people were accustomed to think of as better known to his elders.
Who did not know, Edward said, that in the Revolution it was the South that had led in the fight for freedom, and freedom, therefore, was beyond all price? It might be that one Union would be more profitable, economically, but what of that? If the State’s being sovereign would make it hard for any secession government of these States to organize into one central power, well, what of that? In a country that might take over territory of another, and plan at any moment to annex Cuba or Haiti or Mexico, imagine talking of the Union! But if union is so holy why plot to break up union in Mexico? Any one of these is annexed to the Union, and, presto, some holy unity has come upon it! And then to talk of a State seceding as if some crime were about to happen that had never been heard of before!
The sound of laughter and quarrelling, then an accordion, all together, came through the orchard trees from the quarters. Hugh, glancing up, saw his son smiling at him, and silence fell between them. His father understood. The young hear what the old say; it seems to be reason and to be exact cause, but it is not the point. To Edward, his son, though he had not got it expressed for himself, the movement toward war represented something larger.
The sounds at the quarters stopped, it was supper time there and all would be indoors, except for a boy’s voice, high and clear, which went on singing for a little, then left off; and Hugh McGehee, who had paused to hear it, for he loved all that children did, moved on. It was strange to be walking with his son and listening to him in the double light of an old affection and the new state of affairs that would be taking him away.
As Edward spoke of the plantation and some of the old negroes he had always known, and then of the journeys when he was a little boy with his father to the plantation in Parish Ascension, and the festival of the sugar cane, when they tied a ribbon on the stalk to be the last cut before the shouting and rum began, he felt a sense of going back to his own, and said to himself that this soil, on the soft, brief herbage of which his feet now moved, would last forever. These feelings, though he did not see his way to develop them into ideas, he knew were stirring in him and that they could carry him, through some sort of action, farther than he had ever been into himself. He was one of those blest natures, based on health, rightness and sense, who want always not to be different but finer in the qualities of the average man.
Paralee’s little grandson, Swamp, came out on to the gallery with the supper bell and rang it twice as long for Mr. Edward’s having come home; and at the supper table, loaded down with the white Roman hyacinths, spoonbread, and brandied peaches, the afternoon conversation went on as if it had never been interrupted. Miss Whipple, who, however thin, was a hearty eater, kept her eyes first on her plate, then on Edward, then on Lucy, as if wondering at this conversation like a cage of birds.
“Lucy, my child,” her mother said, “drink your milk, at least. You’ll be worse than Cousin Lizzie Boone.”
“If I may ask, Mrs. Mack Gee Hee,” said Miss Whipple, “who is Mistress Lizzie Boone?”
“Oh, she’s our cousin Lizzie Boone, in De Soto County.”
“I said to myself I wouldn’t go far wrong guessin’ it’s a cousin, norram I.”
“And, Miss Whipple, ever since the day I was born,” said Lucy, “I’ve had Cud’n Lizzie Boone thrown up to me, now haven’t I, Mamma?”
“The thinner Cousin Lizzie gets the less she eats.”
“Cud’n Betty Bullock when we were there always said Cud’n Lizzie wasn’t like that at all, she was a pantry nibbler.”
“Which is all moonshine,” said her father, laughing, “lock, stock, and barrel.”
“There, you see how ’tis, nobody in this family will ever let you say Cud’n Lizzie ever took a bite to eat in her life. Miss Whipple, you see?”
“I say a person has to eat, Miss Lucy, to keep the flesh on their bones.”
“You’re taller, Buddie,” said Lucy, looking at her brother with rapturous eyes.