CHAPTER XVI

LETTERS

From Mrs. Edwin Green to Mrs. Kent Brown, New York City.

MEETING STREET, CHARLESTON, S. C., April .., 19...

MY DEAREST JUDY:

No doubt you and Kent will be astonished to find that Edwin and I are actually on the long talked-of trip to this wonderful old city. Mother is taking care of little Mildred in our absence, and Dr. McLean is to be called if she sneezes or coughs or does anything in the least out of the way. She is such a blooming, rosy baby, and so thoroughly normal that I am sure it is perfectly safe to leave her. Mother says she is more like Kent than any of her babies.

Charleston is more delightful even than it has been pictured. We only got here yesterday morning, and already we love it as though we belonged here.

We went to a hotel for one night, but by rare good chance have found board in one of the real old Charleston homes.

You will laugh when I tell you that after an acquaintance of about twenty-four hours I find myself the chaperone of three girls about seventeen years old. I know you and Kent are grinning and saying to each other: "Some more of Molly's lame ducks!" but I can a.s.sure you they are as far from being that as any girls you ever saw.

They are the Tucker twins, Dum and Dee, otherwise known as Virginia and Caroline, and their friend, Page Allison--all from Virginia. They have come down here with Mr. Tucker, the father of the twins, a newspaper man from Richmond, but he has had to go to Columbia on his paper's business and I volunteered to look after the girls in his absence. He is a delightful man, and he and Edwin are already Greening and Tuckering each other, which means that they struck up quite a friendship. He is the most absurdly young person to be the father of these strapping twins. He looks younger than Edwin, but I fancy he must be a little older. You know Edwin's "high forehead"

makes him look older than he is.

The Tucker twins are bright, handsome, generous, original--everything you like to see in young girls. Their mother died when they were tiny babies and their young father has had the raising of them. A pretty good job he has made of it, too, although he declares he has done nothing toward bringing them up but just remove obstacles. They call their father Zebedee, because of the old joke about "Who's the father of Zebedee's children?"

They say n.o.body ever believes he is their father.

Dum is most artistic, wants to be a sculptor. She hopes to study in New York next winter. Dee is as fond of lame ducks as you used to say I was, and may make a trained nurse of herself, or perhaps a veterinary surgeon.

Their friend, Page Allison, is a delightful girl.

She is the daughter of a country doctor, and has been the twins' room-mate at boarding school. By the way, these girls had heard of you, and me too, from Mattie Ball, who has been teaching them English literature at Gresham. (Mattie had been most complimentary to us both, so they have an exalted idea of us.) Page is lots of fun. She is in for anything that is going, but at the same time acts as a kind of balance wheel for the twins, who are a harum-scarum pair. Page has a writing bee in her bonnet, which of course appeals to me. You would have been amused to see both of us whip out our notebooks to take down things that we did not want to forget. Mr. Tucker is evidently very much interested in this little girl, more interested than he knows himself, and she is perfectly unconscious of his feeling in any way differently from the way he feels for his own daughters. I may be mistaken, however. I know when one is so happily married as I am it is a great temptation to be constantly match-making.

I fancy you and Kent are wondering why I should go to as interesting a place as Charleston and then find nothing to write about but three schoolgirls. Charleston is thrilling indeed, but you know I always did think more of people than things. We are seeing the sights very thoroughly--have deciphered every inscription on the old tombstones in three cemeteries, and are going tomorrow to Magnolia Cemetery. They say there is the most wonderful old live oak tree there in the world.

Now that we are settled in a boarding-house, kept by two old befo'-the-war ladies, we may stay here quite a little while. Edwin needs this rest that the Easter recess fortunately offered him.

I wish I could picture these old ladies to you, but they are too wonderful to try to describe.

Whistler's mother does not belong in the frame in which her artist son placed her any more than these ladies belong in this old house. They hate boarders. You can see it in spite of their punctilious manners and old-world courtesy. I believe we are the first they have had, and if they only knew how much nicer we are than most boarders, I fancy they would not hate us quite so much. Mother always says that being a boarder changes one's whole nature--the gentlest and most generous becoming stern and exacting. At any rate, Edwin and I have not been boarders long enough to become very hateful, and these three girls could board forever and never become professionals in that line.

Please write to me soon. I am so glad Kent's firm won the compet.i.tion for that great hotel. Tell him it is too bad I can't be there to tell him where the closets ought to be and which way the doors should open. He and I never agree on these points, you remember. It is splendid that you keep up your painting. I have no patience with these persons who insist that a career and matrimony cannot go hand in hand. Of course my little Mildred is very engrossing, but I do not intend to let her take every moment of the day and night. I find if I am going to write, however, that I cannot sew, but you know sewing was never one of my strong points.

Giving it up is like Huck Finn's giving up stealing green persimmons. If occasionally, and only occasionally, I can persuade a magazine to see how worth printing one of my stories is, and I can make an honest penny that way, it is surely no extravagance to get someone to make Mildred's little clothes and to buy mine ready-made.

But Edwin is rearing and champing for me to go walking with him, and I must also look up these dear girls I am chaperoning, so good-by, my dear sister-in-law. My best love to "that 'ere Kent,"

as Aunt Mary used to call him. Poor old Aunt Mary!

How we shall miss her!

Yours with all the love in the world, MOLLY BROWN GREEN.

To Dr. James Allison, Milton, Va., from Page Allison.

MEETING STREET, CHARLESTON, S. C.

MY DEAREST FATHER:

I can't get over how good it was in you to let me go tripping with the Tuckers. It has been a wonderful experience, and we are having the most gorgeous time. Already, of course, we have plunged into adventures, as is always the case if you train with the Tucker twins. I am not going to tell you of these adventures until I come back to Bracken; they are too thrilling for mere pen and ink.

As you see by the above address, we have left the hotel and are now installed in a boarding-house on Meeting Street. It seems absurd to call such a place a boarding-house--indeed, a sacrilege. It has just become a boarding-house in the last twelve hours, as I am sure we are the first "paying guests" the poor Misses Laurens have ever had.

We are being chaperoned by a perfectly lovely young woman, a Mrs. Edwin Green. She and her husband were at the hotel and we sc.r.a.ped up an acquaintance with them, and as Mr. Tucker had to go over to Columbia on business she offered to look after us while he was away. Tweedles and I have not been chaperoned before to any great extent, as Miss c.o.x was our one experience, and we think chaperones are pretty nice, lots nicer than we had been led to expect. Certainly no one could be more charming than Miss c.o.x, unless it were this lovely Mrs. Green. In the first place, she is so sympathetic, then she is so kind, then she is so pretty, then she is so intelligent and so extremely well-bred,--on top of it all she has married one of the nicest men I ever saw; he really is almost as nice as Mr. Tucker and you. (I should have said you and Mr. Tucker, but you were an afterthought, as you well know!)

Afterthought or not, I do wish you were here, my dearest father. You would delight in the quaintness of this old city. I am getting all the postal cards I can find, which I will not send you, but will bring you, and make you sit down and listen to me while I tell you all about it. I am also going to bring you a volume of Henry Timrod's poetry, which you must duly appreciate, as it was difficult to find it. It seems that although the South Carolinians are very proud of him, none of them have seen fit to get out a new edition of his poetry, and the old editions are very expensive. This I was told by the very pleasant man who has opened a second-hand book shop here.

I found a book there I was crazy to get for you, but as it was a first edition, and that a limited one, I could not afford it. By an amusing chance it has since become my property. I will tell you about that some day. It is ent.i.tled "Purely Original Verse," by J. Gordon Coogler. He, too, was a South Carolinian, and such ridiculous stuff you have never imagined. The kind man who owned the shop let me copy a few of the poems before I dreamed of possessing the book. What do you think of these?

A COUPLET

Alas for the South, her books have grown fewer-- She was never much given to literature.

BYRON

Oh! thou immortal bard!

Men may condemn the song That issued from thy heart sublime, Yet alas! its music sweet Has left an echo that will sound Thro' the lone corridors of time.

Thou immortal Byron!

Thy inspired genius Let no man attempt to smother-- May all that was good within thee Be attributed to Heaven, All that was evil--to thy mother.

A PRETTY GIRL

On her beautiful face there are smiles of grace That linger in beauty serene, And there are no pimples encircling her dimples As ever, as yet, I have seen.

But, father dear, do not be too hard on this bard, or you will come under this ban:

Oh, jealous heart that seeks to belittle my gentle muse, And blow your d.a.m.nable bugle in my lonely ears; You'll lie some day in expressing your recognition Of this very song you disowned in other years.

Surely you must have sympathy for the person who could write the following stanza, especially when your only child goes tripping with the Tuckers when she ought to be down in the country with her old father:

I feel like some lone deserted lad, Standing on the sh.o.r.e of life's great ocean, Casting pebbles in its billows, as if to excite Some past emotion.

Please give Mammy Susan my dearest love. I wish she could see the flower gardens down here. They are very wonderful. Every house almost has porch-boxes, and no place is too poor or mean to have some bright flowers around it. We went through some real slummy parts yesterday where no one but darkies lived; beautiful old foreign-looking houses that have belonged in days gone by to the wealthy. I don't believe a single window was without flowers. They were growing in tomato cans and old broken jars and pots, but flowers don't mind what they are in just so the people who plant them love them and know how to attend to them. They seemed to me to be making a braver show than they do when they boast bra.s.s jardinieres.

I can't help thinking what Cousin Park Garnett would say if she knew that Mr. Tucker had left us alone in Charleston with a perfectly strange lady to chaperone us. I reckon she would throw about a million aristocratic fits.

I don't know how long we will be here. It will depend on Mr. Tucker. I think he needs a rest. He seems to me to be not quite himself. I have noticed that he is in a way irascible. That, you know, is not like him, as there never was but one better tempered man in all the world. You see, you were not an afterthought this time, but came first.

I must stop now without telling you about the dear ladies where we are boarding. They are like rare editions of old forgotten poetry, or odd pieces of china no one has used for generations but has kept in a cabinet until one has forgotten whether they are meant for tea or coffee. They are very dignified with us, but I have a notion that the Tucker twins will be able to limber 'em up by hook or crook. I saw the younger one almost smile when Dee took her cat in her arms.