IX

OLD SWEET AND WHITE SULFUR

The days went by at the White Sulphur on the wings of incessant gayety.  Literally the nights were filled with music, and the only cares that infested the day appeared in the anxious faces of the mothers as the campaign became more intricate and uncertain.  King watched this with the double interest of spectator and player.  The artist threw himself into the melee with abandon, and pacified his conscience by an occasional letter to Miss Lamont, in which he confessed just as many of his conquests and defeats as he thought it would be good for her to know.

The colored people, who are a conspicuous part of the establishment, are a source of never-failing interest and amusement.  Every morning the mammies and nurses with their charges were seated in a long, shining row on a part of the veranda where there was most passing and repassing, holding a sort of baby show, the social consequence of each one depending upon the rank of the family who employed her, and the dress of the children in her charge.  High-toned conversation on these topics occupied these dignified and faithful mammies, upon whom seemed to rest to a considerable extent the maintenance of the aristocratic social traditions.  Forbes had heard that while the colored people of the South had suspended several of the ten commandments, the eighth was especially regarded as nonapplicable in the present state of society.  But he was compelled to revise this opinion as to the White Sulphur.  Nobody ever locked a door or closed a window.  Cottages most remote were left for hours open and without guard, miscellaneous articles of the toilet were left about, trunks were not locked, waiters, chambermaids, porters, washerwomen, were constantly coming and going, having access to the rooms at all hours, and yet no guest ever lost so much as a hairpin or a cigar.  This fashion of trust and of honesty so impressed the artist that he said he should make an attempt to have it introduced elsewhere.  This sort of esprit de corps among the colored people was unexpected, and he wondered if they are not generally misunderstood by writers who attribute to them qualities of various kinds that they do not possess.  The negro is not witty or consciously humorous, or epigrammatic.  The humor of his actions and sayings lies very much in a certain primitive simplicity.  Forbes couldn’t tell, for instance, why he was amused at a remark he heard one morning in the store.  A colored girl sauntered in, looking about vacantly.  “You ain’t got no cotton, is you?” “Why, of course we have cotton.”  “Well” (the girl only wanted an excuse to say something), “I only ast, is you?”

Sports of a colonial and old English flavor that have fallen into disuse elsewhere varied the life at the White.  One day the gentlemen rode in a mule-race, the slowest mule to win, and this feat was followed by an exhibition of negro agility in climbing the greased pole and catching the greased pig; another day the cavaliers contended on the green field surrounded by a brilliant array of beauty and costume, as two Amazon baseball nines, the one nine arrayed in yellow cambric frocks and sun-bonnets, and the other in bright red gowns—­the whiskers and big boots and trousers adding nothing whatever to the illusion of the female battle.