Katherine Anne Porter (110 page)

They are ample and their subtle proportions give them stateliness not accounted for in terms of actual size. They are placed in relation to the south wind and the morning sun. Their ceilings are high, because high ceilings are right for this kind of architecture, and this kind of architecture is right for a hot climate. Their fireplaces are beautiful, well placed, in harmony with the rooms, and meant for fine log fires in the brief winters. Their windows are many, tall and rightly spaced for light and air, as well as for the view outward. All of them, from “Live Oak,” built in 1779, to “The Myrtles,” built in the 1840’s, have in common the beauty and stability of cypress, blue poplar, apparently indestructible brick made especially for the chimneys and foundations, old methods of mortising and pinning, hand-forged nails.

“Live Oak” stands on a green knoll, and, from the front door, one looks straight through the central room to the
rolling meadow bordered with iris in profuse bloom. This house is really tired, worn down to the bare grain, the furniture just what might have been left from some remote disaster, but it is beautiful, a place to live in, with its wide, double porches and outside staircase in the early style of the Spanish in Louisiana, its dark paneling, and its air of gentle remoteness.

“Waverly” is another sort of thing altogether, a bright place full of color, where the old furniture is set off with gaily flowered rugs, and the heavy old Louisiana four-poster beds—of a kind to be found nowhere else—are dressed sprucely in fresh curtains. The white pillars of “Waverly” are flat and slender, and the graceful fan-lights of the front door are repeated on the second floor, with an especially airy effect. The vestiges of the old boxwood maze are being coaxed back to life there, and gardenias grow in hedges, as they should.

At “The Myrtles,” the flowery iron grille of the long veranda sets the Victorian tone; the long dining-room still wears, between the thin moldings, its French wallpaper from 1840—sepia-colored panels from floor to ceiling of game birds and flowers. The cypress floor is honey-colored, the Italian marble mantelpiece was that day banked with branches of white dogwood. All the rooms are long, full of the softest light lying upon the smooth surfaces of old fruitwood and mahogany. From the back veranda, an old-fashioned back yard, full of country living, lay in the solid shade of grape arbors and trees rounded like baskets of flowers. Chickens roamed and picked there; there was a wood-pile with a great iron wash-pot upended against it, near the charred spot where the fire is still built to heat the water.

At “Virginia,” we saw George Washington’s account-book, made, I believe, at Valley Forge, with all the detailed outlay of that troublesome episode. “Virginia” is by way of being an inn now—that is to say, if travelers happen along they will be put up in tall, canopied beds under fine old quilted coverlets. The large silver spoons in the dining-room came from an ancestor of the Fisher family—Baron de Würmser, who had them as a gift from Frederick the Great. Generous-sized ladles they are, too, paper-thin and flexible. Like so many old coin silver spoons, they appear to have been chewed, and they have been.
A thin silver spoon was once considered the ideal object for an infant to cut his teeth upon. But there were dents in a de Würmser soup ladle which testified that some Fisher infant must have been a saber-toothed tiger. “Surely no teething child did that,” I remarked. “No,” said the hostess, a fleeting shade of severity on her brow. “It was thrown out with the dishwater once, and the pigs got it.” Here is the French passport for a Fisher grandfather, dated 1836. It was then he brought back the splendid flowered wallpaper, even now fresh in its discreet colors, the hand-painted mauve linen window-shades on rollers, then so fashionable, replacing the outmoded Venetian blinds; the ornate, almost morbidly feminine drawing-room chairs and sofas.

At “Greenwood,” the host was engaged with a group of oil prospectors, for, beneath their charming, fruitful surfaces, the Felicianas are suspected of containing the dark, the sinister new treasure more powerful than gold. If so, what will become of the oaks and the flourishing fields and the gentle cattle? What will become of these lovely houses? “They make syrup and breed cattle here,” said our guide; “that keeps ‘Greenwood’ going very well. Some people [she named them] wanted Mr. Percy to make a dude ranch of this place, but he wouldn’t hear of it.”

We mentioned our premonitions about St. Francisville if oil should be discovered. Our guide spoke up with the quiet recklessness of faith. “It wouldn’t do any harm,” she said. “The Feliciana people have had what money can buy, and they have something money can’t buy, and they know it. They have nothing to sell. Tourists come here from all over and offer them thousands of dollars for their little things, just little things they don’t need and hardly ever look at, but they won’t sell them.”

“Greenwood” is the typical Southern mansion of too many songs, too many stories—with the extravagant height of massive, round pillar, the too-high ceiling, the gleaming sweep of central hall, all in the 1830 Greek, gilded somewhat, but lightly. There is bareness; space dwarfing the human stature and breathing a faint bleakness. Yet the gentle groves and small hills are framed with overwhelming effect between those columns;
effect grandiose beyond what the measuring eye knows is actually there.

It seems now that the builders should have known that this house was the end, never the beginning. It is quite improbable that anyone should again build a house like “Greenwood” to live in. But there it is, with the huge beams of the gallery being replaced, oil prospectors roaming about, and the hostess sitting in her drawing-room with the green-and-gold chairs, the lace curtains fine as bride veils drifting a little; the young girls in jodhpurs are going out to ride. Here, as everywhere else, there were no radios or gramophones going, no telephones visible or ringing; and it seemed to me suddenly that this silence, the silence of a house in order, of people at home, the silence of leisure, is the most desirable of all things we have lost.

At “Highland,” descendants in the fourth generation stand in the shade of the oaks planted, as the old House Book records, in January, 1832. The house is older. It has its share of drum tables, fiddle-backed chairs, carved door-frames and wainscoting, but its real beauty lies in the fall of light into the ample, square rooms, the rise of the stair tread, the energy and firmness of its structure. The paneled doors swing on their hand-forged hinges as they did the day they were hung there; the edge of the first doorstep—an immense log of cypress square-hewn—is as sharp as though feet had not stepped back and forth over it for one hundred and forty years.

“Rosedown” is more formal, with its fish pool and eighteenth-century statuary set along the
allée
, and in a semicircle before the conventionally planted garden. The office still stands there, and the “slave bell” in its low wooden frame. The “slave bell” was the dinner-bell for the whole plantation. Above all, at “Rosedown,” the Ancestors still rule, still lend their unquenchable life to a little world of fabulous old ladies and a strange overgrowth of knickknacks sprouting like small, harmless fungi on a tree-trunk. Their portraits—Sully seems to have been the preferred painter—smile at you, or turn their attentive heads toward one another; as handsome and as gallant and elegantly dressed a set of young men and women as you would be apt to find blood-kin under one roof. “My great-greatgrandfather,” said the old, old lady, smiling back again at the high-headed, smooth-cheeked young beau in the frilled
shirt-bosom and deep blue, sloping-shouldered coat. His eyes are the same bright hazel as her own. This was the only house in which the past lay like a fine dust in the air.

Steamboats brought wealth and change to St. Francisville once, and oil may do it again. In that case, we are to suppose that new grand pianos would replace the old, square, black Steinways of 1840, as they had in turn replaced the harpsichords. There would be a great deal of shoring up, replacement, planting, pruning, and adding. There would be travel again, and humanistic education. The young people who went away cannot, alas, come back young, but the young there now would not have to go away.

And what else would happen to this place, so occupied, so self-sufficient, so reassuringly solid and breathing? St. Francisville is not a monument, nor a decor, nor a wailing-wall for mourners for the past. It is a living town, moving at its own pace in a familiar world. But it was comforting to take a last glance backward as we turned into the main highway, at Audubon’s Happy Land, reflecting that, for the present, in the whole place, if you except the fruits of the earth and the picture postcards at “Rosedown,” there was nothing, really nothing, for sale.

1939

Rose, O pure contradiction, bliss

To be the sleep of no one under so many eyelids.

RAINER
MARIA
RILKE
:
Epitaph

I
TS
beginnings were obscure, like that of the human race whose history it was destined to adorn. The first rose was small as the palm of a small child’s hand, with five flat petals in full bloom, curling in a little at the tips, the color red or white, perhaps even pink, and maybe sometimes streaked. It was a simple disk or wheel around a cup of perfume, a most intoxicating perfume, like that of no other flower. This perfume has been compared to that of many fruits: apricot, peach, melon; to animal substance: musk, ambergris; to honey (which has also many perfumes), to other flowers, to crushed leaves of the tea plant—this from China, naturally—and perhaps this is the secret of its appeal: it offers to the individual sense of smell whatever delights it most. For me, a rose smells like a rose, no one exactly like another, but still a rose and it reminds me of nothing else.

This rose grew everywhere in Africa and Asia, and it may have had many names, but they are lost.

This shall be a mere glimpse at some aspects of the life of the rose; it keeps the best company in the world, and the worst, and also the utterly mediocre: all with the same serenity, knowing one from the other; and all by name, but making, in the natural world, no difference between individuals, like any saint: which perhaps is a sign of its true greatness. In working miracles, as we shall see, it exercises the most scrupulous discrimination between one thing and another.

It was, and is, thorny by nature, for it detests the proximity of any other kind of plant, and serious botanists have deduced seriously that the rose was given its thorns as a weapon against other crowding vegetation. With such a perfume as it has, it needs more than thorns for its protection. It has no honey, yet even the bees and wasps who rob its generous pollen for food, get silly-drunk on the perfume, and may sometimes be seen swooping hilariously away at random, buzzing wildly and
colliding with each other in air. For the sake of this perfume other great follies of extravagance have been committed. The Romans with their genius for gluttony devoured the roses of Egypt by the shipload, covering their beds and floors and banquet tables with petals; rose leaves dropped in their wine helped to prevent, or at least delay, drunkenness; heroes were crowned with them; and they were at last forced to bloom out of season by being grown in a network of hot water pipes.

The debasement of the rose may be said to have begun with this Roman invention of the hot house. After a long period in Europe when the rose fell into neglect, there came a gradual slow return in its popularity; and for the past century or so, in Europe and America, the rose has been cultivated extravagantly, crossbred almost out of recognition, growing all the time larger, showier. The American Beauty Rose—in the 1900’s the rose of courtship, an expensive florist’s item, hardly ever grown in good private gardens—in its hugeness, its coarse texture and vulgar color, its inordinate length of cane, still stands I believe as the dreariest example of what botanical experiment without wisdom or taste can do even to the rose. In other varieties it has been deprived of its thorns, one of its great beauties, and—surely this can never have been intended—its very perfume, the true meaning of the rose, has almost vanished. Yet they are all children of that precious first five-petaled rose which we call the Damask, the first recorded name of a rose.

It has been popularly supposed that the Crusaders brought the rose and the name back with them to Europe from Damascus, where they saw it for the first time. Rosarians argue back and forth, saying,
not
so, the Damask Rose was known in France and by that name many centuries before the Crusades. It is very likely, for the Christian penitential pilgrimages to Rome, to the tombs and shrines of saints, and to the Holy Sepulchre, had begun certainly as early as the eighth century. The most difficult and dangerous and meritorious of these pilgrimages was, of course, to the Holy Land, and the rose may very well have been among the dear loot in the returning pilgrim’s scrip, along with water from the Jordan, bits of stone from the Sepulchre, fragments of the True Cross, Sacred Nails, and a few Thorns; and, judging by medieval European music, he had got a strange tune or two fixed in his head, also. We
know that more than this came into Europe through long traffic and negotiation with the East, the great threatening power which encroached steadily upon the New World and above all, upon the new religion.

By the time of the troubadours, the rose was a familiar delight. In Richard Lion-heart’s day, Raoul, Sire de Coucy, a famous poet, singer, soldier, nobleman, was writing poems full of nightingales, morning dew, roses, lilies, and love to his lady, the Dame de Fayel. He went with Richard on the Third Crusade, and was killed by the Saracens at the battle of St. Jean d’Acres, in 1191. The whole tone of his glittering little songs, their offhand ease of reference, makes it clear that roses and all those other charming things had long been the peculiar property of European poets. De Coucy names no species. “When the rose and lily are born,” he sings blithely, knowing and caring nothing about Rosa Indica, Rosa Gallica, Rosa Centifolia, Eglantina; no, for the troubadour a rose was a rose. It was beautiful to look at, especially with morning dew on it, a lily nearby and a nightingale lurking in the shrubbery, all ready to impale his bosom on the thorn; it smelled sweet and reminded him of his lady, as well as of the Blessed Virgin, though never, of course, at the same moment. That would have been sacrilege, and the knight was nothing if not pious. Sacred and profane love in the Western World had by then taken their places at opposite poles, where they have remained to this day; the rose was the favorite symbol of them both.