If in the long summer days Kennedy Square was haunted by the idle and the weary, in the cool summer nights its dimly lighted paths were alive with the tread of flying feet, and its shadowy benches gay with the music of laughter and merry greetings.
With the going down of the sun, the sidewalks were sprinkled, and the whole street about the Square watered from curb to curb, to cool its sun-baked cobbles. The doors and windows of all the houses were thrown wide to welcome the fresh night-air, laden with the perfume of magnolia, jasmine, and sweet-smelling box. Easy-chairs and cushions were brought out and placed on the clean steps of the porches, and the wide piazzas covered with squares of china-matting to make ready for the guests of the evening.
These guests would begin to gather as soon as the twilight settled; the young girls in their pretty muslin frocks and ribbons, the young men in white duck suits and straw hats. They thronged the cool, well-swept paths, chattered in bunches under the big trees, or settled like birds on the stone seats and benches. Every few minutes some new group, fresh from their tea-tables, would emerge from one of the houses, poise like a flock of pigeons on the top step, listen to the guiding sound of the distant laughter, and then swoop down in mad frolic, settling in the midst of the main covey, under the big sycamores until roused at the signal of some male bird in a straw hat, or in answer to the call of some bare-headed songstress from across the Square, the whole covey would dash out one of the rickety gates, only to alight again on the stone steps of a neighbor's porch, where their chatter and pipings would last far into the night.
It was extraordinary how, from year to year, these young birds and even the old ones remembered the best perches about the Square. On Colonel Clayton's ample portico--big enough to shelter half a dozen covies behind its honeysuckles--both young and old would settle side by side; the younger bevy hovering about the Judge's blue-eyed daughter--a bird so blithe and of so free a wing, that the flock always followed wherever she alighted. On Judge Bowman's wide veranda only a few old cocks from the club could be found, and not infrequently, some rare birds from out of town perched about a table alive with the clink of glass and rattle of crushed ice, while next the church, on old Mrs. Pancoast's portico, with its tall Corinthian columns--Mr. Pancoast was the archdeacon of the Noah's ark church--one or two old grandmothers and a grave old owl of a family doctor were sure to fill the rocking-chairs.
As for Richard Horn's marble steps they were never free from stray young couples who flew in to rest on Malachi's chairs and cushions. Sometimes only one bird and her mate would be tucked away in the shadow of the doorway; sometimes only an old pair, like Mrs. Horn and Richard, would occupy its corners.
These porticoes and stone door-steps were really the open-air drawing-rooms of Kennedy Square in the soft summer nights. Here ices were served and cool drinks--sherbets for the young and juleps and sherry cobblers for the old. At the Horn house, on great occasions, as when some big melon that had lain for days on the cool cellar floor was cut (it was worth a day's journey to see Malachi cut a melon), the guests would not only crowd the steps, but all the hall and half up the slender staircase, where they would sit with plates in their laps, the young men serving their respective sweethearts.
This open-air night-life had gone on since Kennedy Square began; each door-step had its habitues and each veranda its traditions. There was but one single porch, in fact, facing its stately trees whereon no flocks of birds, old or young, ever alighted, and that belonged to Peter Skimmerton--the meanest man in town--who in a fit of parsimony over candles, so the girls said, had bared his porch of every protesting vine and had placed opposite his door-step a glaring street gas-lamp---a monstrous and never-to-be-forgotten affront.
And yet, free and easy as the life was, no stranger sat himself down on any one of these porches until his pedigree had been thoroughly investigated, no matter how large might be his bank-account nor how ambitious his soarings. No premeditated discourtesy ever initialed this exclusiveness and none was ever intended. Kennedy Square did not know the blood of the stranger--that was all--and not knowing it they could not trust him. And it would have been altogether useless for him to try to disguise his antecedents --especially if he came from their own State--or any State south of it. His record could be as easily reached and could be as clearly read as a title-deed. Even the servants knew. Often they acted as Clerks of the Rolls.
"Dat Mister Jawlins, did you ask 'bout?" Malachi would say. "Why you know whar he comes f'om.
He's one o' dem Anne Rundle Jawlinses. He do look mighty peart an' dey do say he's mighty rich, but he can't fool Malachi. I knowed his gran'pa," and that wise and politic darky, with the honor of the house before his eyes, would shake his head knowingly and with such an ominous look, that had you not known the only crime of the poor grandfather to have been a marriage with his overseer's daughter--a very worthy woman, by the way--instead of with some lady of quality, you would have supposed he had added the sin of murder to the crime of low birth. On the other hand, had you asked Malachi about some young aristocrat who had forgotten to count his toddies the night before, that Defender of the Faith would have replied:
"Lawd bress ye! Co'se dese young gemmens like to frolic--an' dey do git dat way sometimes--tain't nuthin'. Dem Dorseys was allers like dat--" the very tones of his voice carrying such convictions of the young man's respectability that you would have felt safe in keeping a place at your table for the delinquent, despite your knowledge of his habits.
