Part 1 (1/2)
Lady Baltimore.
by Owen Wister.
I: A Word about My Aunt
Like Adam, our first conspicuous ancestor, I must begin, and lay the blame upon a woman; I am glad to recognize that I differ from the father of my s.e.x in no important particular, being as manlike as most of his sons. Therefore it is the woman, my Aunt Carola, who must bear the whole reproach of the folly which I shall forthwith confess to you, since she it was who put it into my head; and, as it was only to make Eve happy that her husband ever consented to eat the disastrous apple, so I, save to please my relative, had never aspired to become a Selected Salic Scion. I rejoice now that I did so, that I yielded to her temptation.
Ours is a wide country, and most of us know but our own corner of it, while, thanks to my Aunt, I have been able to add another corner. This, among many other enlightenments of navel and education, do I owe her; she stands on the threshold of all that is to come; therefore I were lacking in deference did I pa.s.s her and her Scions by without due mention,--employing no English but such as fits a theme so stately.
Although she never left the threshold, nor went to Kings Port with me, nor saw the boy, or the girl, or any part of what befell them, she knew quite well who the boy was. When I wrote her about him, she remembered one of his grandmothers whom she had visited during her own girlhood, long before the war, both in Kings Port and at the family plantation; and this old memory led her to express a kindly interest in him. How odd and far away that interest seems, now that it has been turned to cold displeasure!
Some other day, perhaps, I may try to tell you much more than I can tell you here about Aunt Carola and her Colonial Society--that apple which Eve, in the form of my Aunt, held out to me. Never had I expected to feel rise in me the appet.i.te for this particular fruit, though I had known such hunger to exist in some of my neighbors. Once a worthy dame of my town, at whose dinner-table young men and maidens of fas.h.i.+on sit constantly, asked me with much sentiment if I was aware that she was descended from Boadicea. Why had she never (I asked her) revealed this to me before? And upon her informing me that she had learned it only that very day, I exclaimed that it was a great distance to have descended so suddenly. To this, after a look at me, she a.s.sented, adding that she had the good news from the office of The American Almanach de Gotha, Union Square, New York; and she recommended that publication to me. There was but a slight fee to pay, a matter of fifty dollars or upwards, and for this trifling sum you were furnished with your rightful coat-of-arms and with papers clearly tracing your family to the Druids, the Vestal Virgins, and all the best people in the world. Therefore I felicitated the Boadicean lady upon the ill.u.s.trious progenitrix with whom the Almanach de Gotha had provided her for so small a consideration, and observed that for myself I supposed I should continue to rest content with the thought that in our enlightened Republic every American was himself a sovereign. But that, said the lady, after giving me another look, is so different from Boadicea! And to this I perfectly agreed. Later I had the pleasure to hear in a roundabout way that she had p.r.o.nounced me one of the most agreeable young men in society, though sophisticated. I have not cherished this against her; my gift of humor puzzles many who can see only my refinement and my scrupulous attention to dress.
Yes, indeed, I counted myself proof against all Boadiceas. But you have noticed--have you not?--how, whenever a few people gather together and style themselves something, and choose a president, and eight or nine vice-presidents, and a secretary and a treasurer, and a committee on elections, and then let it be known that almost n.o.body else is qualified to belong to it, that there springs up immediately in hundreds and thousands of b.r.e.a.s.t.s a fiery craving to get into that body? You may try this experiment in science, law, medicine, art, letters, society, farming, I care not what, but you will set the same craving afire in doctors, academicians, and dog breeders all over the earth. Thus, when my Aunt--the president, herself, mind you!--said to me one day that she thought, if I proved my qualifications, my name might be favorably considered by the Selected Salic Scions--I say no more; I blush, though you cannot see me; when I am tempted, I seem to be human, after all.
At first, to be sure, I met Aunt Carola's suggestion in the way that I am too ready to meet many of her remarks; for you must know she once, with sincere simplicity and good-will, told my Uncle Andrew (her husband; she is only my Aunt by marriage) that she had married beneath her; and she seemed unprepared for his reception of this candid statement: Uncle Andrew was unaffectedly merry over it. Ever since then all of us wait hopefully every day for what she may do or say next.
She is from old New York, oldest New York; the family manor is still habitable, near Cold Spring; she was, in her youth, handsome, I am a.s.sured by those whose word I have always trusted; her appearance even to-day causes people to turn and look; she is not tall in feet and inches--I have to stoop considerably when she commands from me the familiarity of a kiss; but in the quality which we call force, in moral stature, she must be full eight feet high. When rebuking me, she can p.r.o.nounce a single word, my name, ”Augustus!” in a tone that renders further remark needless; and you should see her eye when she says of certain newcomers in our society, ”I don't know them.” She can make her curtsy as appalling as a natural law; she knows also how to ”take umbrage,” which is something that I never knew any one else to take outside of a book; she is a highly p.r.o.nounced Christian, holding all Unitarians wicked and all Methodists vulgar; and once, when she was talking (as she does frequently) about King James and the English religion and the English Bible, and I reminded her that the Jews wrote it, she said with displeasure that she made no doubt King James had--”well, seen to it that all foreign matter was expunged”--I give you her own words. Unless you have moved in our best American society (and by this I do not at all mean the lower cla.s.ses with dollars and no grandfathers, who live in palaces at Newport, and look forward to every-thing and back to nothing, but those Americans with grandfathers and no dollars, who live in boarding-houses, and look forward to nothing and back to everything)--unless you have known this haughty and improving milieu, you have never seen anything like my Aunt Carola.
Of course, with Uncle Andrew's money, she does not live in a boarding-house; and I shall finish this brief attempt to place her before you by adding that she can be very kind, very loyal, very public-spirited, and that I am truly attached to her.
”Upon your mother's side of the family,” she said, ”of course.”
”Me!” I did not have to feign amazement.
My Aunt was silent. ”Me descended from a king?”
My Aunt nodded with an indulgent stateliness. ”There seems to be the possibility of it.”
”Royal blood in my veins, Aunt?”
”I have said so, Augustus. Why make me repeat it?”
It was now, I fear, that I met Aunt Carola in that unfitting spirit, that volatile mood, which, as I have said already, her remarks often rouse in me.
”And from what sovereign may I hope that I--?”
”If you will consult a recent admirable compilation, ent.i.tled The American Almanach de Gotha, you will find that Henry the Seventh--”
”Aunt, I am so much relieved! For I think that I might have hesitated to trace it back had you said--well--Charles the Second, for example, or Elizabeth.”
At this point I should have been wise to notice my Aunt's eye; but I did not, and I continued imprudently:--
”Though why hesitate? I have never heard that there was anybody present to marry Adam and Eve, and so why should we all make such a to-do about--”
”Augustus!”
She uttered my name in that quiet but prodigious tone to which I have alluded above.
It was I who was now silent.