Chapter 11

But a liberal allowance of hot corn-bread and sorghum are not conducive to murderous zeal. Slowly, almost painfully, the child got down from her high-chair. She went faster down the steep house steps; but as she neared the stone fort by the paling fence she halted, all but paralyzed by the audacity which was being committed under her very eyes.

Somebody was stooping down outside the fence, with a hand through the broken place, putting something--_two round, pinky somethings!_--on top of the stone fort, putting them exactly where the two spent shots had been.

"Oh!" ejaculated Hope Carolina; and, reaching the fence with a rush, she stared down lovingly. For they were peaches, real, live, human peaches--the kind that you buy for five cents apiece, which was a great price in the hired house.

The form outside the fence straightened up then, and two oldish gray eyes looked over it into hers--the Radical Judge's eyes. "No more stones, please," they seemed to say, with a trace of embarrassment at being caught.

Hope Carolina nodded back with a lovely courtesy, as if to say in return: "Sholy not."

For this was no moment for politics. Besides, something in the watching eyes--a wistful something which spoke louder than words--had awakened all the lady in her; and there was more of it, I can tell you, than you may be inclined to believe.

Silently, with eyes still meeting eyes, they stood there for a moment; the great Radical almost shrinkingly, the fiery little Democrat with a new, sweet feeling which made her seem, for the instant, the bigger, stronger one of the two. Then, still silent, he was gone; and snatching the peaches with another ecstatic "Oh!" Hope Carolina did the thing she had dumbly promised. She kicked down the stone fort.

After she was in bed, she explained the deed to herself; for there, with reflection, had come some of the pangs that must pierce the breast of the traitor in any decent camp. You can't take peaches and throw stones too, no, not even if Democrats would almost want to hang you for not doing it!

She had come to the pits by now, and these, after more rapturous suckings, she put under her pillow for planting; for when you are six you plant everything. She did not know that another and more wonderful seed had already put forth a green shoot in her own so piteously hardened little heart.

Hope Carolina slept in a marvelous bed, almost the only thing of value, in fact, left in the hired house. Ma would not use it herself, she told dear friends, because of its memories; but as the child of the house had no recollections of other times, it seemed to her always a downy and restful nest. There were carved pineapples at the top of the high mahogany posts, and four more at the bottom of them; and when Hope Carolina lay in it in the morning, she could see everything that was going on in the Radical Judge's garden--that lovely paradise of peacocks and poplars and magnolias which had once been the dear Prestons'.

Sometimes, even before the truce of peaches, she had felt a little regret that the decencies barred out all acquaintance with Radical families. For always on the hot mornings--long, long before it was time for her to get up--there were the Radical Judge and the little crippled Grace going about among the shrubs and flowers as if they were the nicest people. And always the little pale, laughing child presented a very pretty picture in the wheeled chair, which her father pushed so patiently; forever turning back to kiss him, with her hands full of flowers, and with the peacocks trailing beside as if they had forgotten the dear Prestons entirely.

Then, the Radical Judge seemed to know bushels and bushels of fairy-stories; and when they came near the boxwood hedge, Hope Carolina would sometimes hear him begin a new one. They always began in the right way, "Once upon a time," and that seemed very remarkable, for how could a Radical Judge know the right sort of fairy-stories?

When they moved away again, the child in the enemy house would feel her throat gulp sometimes. She knew it was wrong, but oh, she would have loved to hear the end!

One morning, weeks and weeks after the peaches, when the peacocks had been gone for days,--they made too much noise, Hope Carolina knew,--when all the empty, sunburned garden seemed to say weepingly, "There will be no more fairy-tales," she woke with the morning star, and, sitting bolt up in bed, blinked wonderingly, a little painfully, in the direction of the Radical Judge's front door. It was too dark to see the knob yet, but she knew the thing must be there, the long, angelically sweet drop of white ribbon and flowers--the poetic and wistful mourning which is only hung for little dead children.

A great doctor had come down from Baltimore and gone again; and the Radical Judge's wife was still taking things to forget.

* * * * *

The heart of six is full of mystery. All that first morning, with a piteous earnestness, a piteous heartlessness, Hope Carolina played funeral in the front yard, in the place where the stone fort had once been and where the peach-pits were now planted. Every now and then she would stop patting the little mounds of earth--mounds of earth covered with sweet flowers, in a place as beautiful as any garden, were the chief thing in her idea of funerals--and, standing tiptoe, she would stare over the paling fence, hoping the Radical Judge would come by. At last, late in the forenoon, her dogged vigilance was rewarded; and in a moment, bonnetless, an untidy midget in low-necked pink calico which even had a hole behind--there she was out of the gate, following closely at his heels. She couldn't tell exactly why she followed him; she only knew she wanted to--perhaps to see if he thought, too, as everybody said, that the little crippled Grace was better off up in the sky. She fancied maybe he didn't, he was so different, somehow--not like the old, fierce Radical Judge at all. And when really nice white gentlemen--_Democrats_, who had never noticed him before--stood respectfully aside with _their_ beaver hats off, he walked still down the middle of the dirt sidewalk, and did not seem to see them at all.

Once when her brass-toed shoe kicked his heel by the railroad,--along which, the littlest distance away, was the historic spot where Uncle John had got the bullet,--she said "Thank you" aloud.

She meant it for the peaches, for she had just remembered that it wasn't very polite not to thank people for things. But still he seemed not to see, not to hear; and directly, in this blind, groping way, as if he were falling to pieces somehow, there he was turning into Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham's store, where they only sold lady things.

Hope Carolina waited outside, openly and shamelessly watching to see what he was going to do. She never peeped secretly; that wouldn't be respectable.

In a minute she said, "Oh!" her eyes stretched wide with delighted wonder; for he was _buying_ lady things--fairy lace, shimmering satin, narrow doll-baby ribbon, as lovely as heaven! When he went out, quickly, as if he were almost running, Hope Carolina still waited, wondering what Miss Sally and Miss Polly, the two old-maid sisters, who were Democrats and very nice people themselves, were going to do with the splendor which still lay upon the counter.

But they did not tell. They told something else--a thing so full of wonder, so dreadful, that, with another exclamation, one which drew four astonished maiden eyes to her suddenly blanched cheeks, the child took to her heels and fled as if pursued by a thousand terrors.

She thought of it all the time she was eating more hot corn-bread and sorghum at dinner--the thing Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham had said to each other; the thing which seemed so new, so strange, so _loud and awful_, like the hellfire things Baptist ministers talked about.

Then, after supper, she fell asleep in the pineapple bed, still thinking of it; and all the next day, still playing funeral by the paling fence, she thought of it again. And that night, when once more she lay in the pineapple bed, there it was again, the strange loud thing Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham had said to each other--said in a soft, _crying_ way.

All at once she had a waked-up feeling; she sat bolt upright in bed and thought, "Comp'ny." There were voices coming across the passageway from the parlor. A light streamed, too; and when she stood faintly bathed in its glow, she saw that Mrs. Preston was there--Mrs. Preston, in the deep mourning she had vowed never to put off as long as her beloved State lay with her head in the dust. But something in her lap brightened it now, this shabby, soldier-widow black: a slim cross, divine with green and white, as daintily delicate, with its tremulous myrtle stars, as had been the lady things in Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham's store.

Mrs. Preston was saying that she was going to send it "anonymously." Then she asked Ma if she knew that _he_ had had to attend to all the arrangements himself. "Even the dress," went on Mrs. Preston, crying a little; and Uncle John coughed in the deep, growly way gentlemen always cough when they are ashamed to cry themselves.

Then they all began talking about funerals, saying to each other they would like to go, but how _could_ they? Uncle John saying at last, with more of the growly, coughy way, that no, no, they "couldn't flout him."

It would be more cruel, far, far more cruel, said Uncle John, than to stay away. Besides,--didn't the ladies know?--it was private. "Though," the speaker went on, his worn, somber face lighting up with something like a gleam of comfort, "I reckon that was to keep those other white hounds away as well as the rest of us."

Ma nodded. They weren't gentlemen-born, as he was, she sighed--"born to Southern best." And then, with a "Poor wretch--poor, proud, degraded wretch!" she handed out the thing she had been making--a white rosette as beautiful as any rose--and told Mrs. Preston to put it "there," touching the myrtle cross with fingers kissing-soft.

But Mrs. Preston only said back, "He's refused even the minister!" and seemed more unhappy, oh, mighty unhappy.

Hope Carolina gasped with the wonderment of it all. How funny it seemed, how dreadfully funny, that everybody had forgotten everything just because a child had gone up into the sky: Uncle John the bullet, and Mrs. Preston the lost paradise next door, and Ma the barbecue speeches that made niggers vote any which way--all, all that Radicals had ever done to them!

After a while one of the voices spoke again--whose, Hope Carolina could never tell:

"_Think, there won't be a white face there!_" And then, after a pause, another voice:

"_No, not one!_"

Hope Carolina jumped in bed, trembling.

Presently Mrs. Preston went, and then everybody else went to bed. But still Hope Carolina trembled. For that was exactly what Miss Polly and Miss Sally Graham had said--_about the white face_.

After a while she knew. It meant, oh, the mightiest, biggest disgrace on earth not to have white people at your funerals. They went to black funerals, even--_good_ black funerals.

"Oh!" moaned Hope Carolina suddenly, loud enough for everybody to hear. But she cried silently. It was a way she had.

She cried again in the night, too--so loudly everybody did hear; but the dream mother who came and loved her, putting her head on the dear place, drove away all the lumps in her throat. After that the dark was still like the dear place, and like arms around her, too.

She had forgotten the dream mother when breakfast came; but she hadn't forgotten the other thing--the thing about the white face.

Ma said anxiously once to Uncle John, "Do you think she can be sick, brother?" and Uncle John shook his head, though he knew, too, of the tearful night.

Hope Carolina sat very still, not seeming to hear even when Ma announced that the funeral was at nine o'clock. She ate her breakfast like a ravenous cherub, smiling silently, mysteriously, whenever her mother looked at her with adoring eyes. Sometimes these dear, watching eyes, as blue as jewels, set wide apart under a low brow crowned with waved, satin-bright brown hair, filled slowly. But the darling child, who had certainly proved her excellent condition, only grinned back sweetly. All Hope Carolina was thinking of was that she had a _hole_--she was still wearing the soiled pink calico--and that her frilled white apron was mussed, and that shoe-strings wouldn't tie good. In the tarnished gilt-framed mirror behind Ma's lovely head she could see her own. _That_ was all right; beautiful! She had doused it with water, the round baby poll, and plastered the short hair smooth, so that under this close, shining cap her apple cheeks seemed fresher than ever.

Ma kissed them in passing, going then swiftly, with her eyes closed tight lest she herself should see, to shut windows on _that_ side of the house. Hope Carolina knew. Children mustn't look out of windows when funerals were going on. They mustn't play in the yard, either, till after they were over.

The big clock in the corner ticked, ticked, ticked, seeming to say always, "Hurry up, hurry up." And then--it was the longest, longest while afterward--Ma called from another room that Hopey (it was the foolish home name) could go and play in the yard now, for it was nine o'clock.

"Quite half-past, darling," went on the liquid Southern voice, still tremulous with emotion, still with the yearning anxiety for its own that the death of any child of kindred age brings to the mother breast. But there was no answer, and for a very good reason.

Down the long clay road which led from living and now pitying Fairville to the little cemetery where slept its quiet dead, Hope Carolina was running.

* * * * *

A mile and a half is a long way for a wee fat maiden to go when the August sun is beating down upon bare heads and necks, and red clay roads spread sun-baked ruts and furrows as sharp as knives. As many times as her years, Hope Carolina fell by the way; oftener, indeed. But the good folk in the scattered blind-closed houses along the way--who, too, a half-hour ago had whispered tremulously, "There won't be a white face"--saw no sign of tears.

"It's only Hope Carolina," called somebody, and other watchers laughed; for all knew the wandering ways of this wise and fearless child.

And so, stumbling, falling, struggling to her feet again,--wiping away blood once, even, with impatient hand,--on, on the little figure in pink and white had gone, a brave and storm-driven flower in the cruel road. And at last there were the shining crosses and columns of the dead. One inclosure, radiant with more magnolias and angel poplars, more stately and wonderful than all the rest, was the dear Preston plot.

The child, who had paused anxiously at the open gate, sighed, sighed with immense relief, to see it still without the sacrilege of Radical invasion. He hadn't taken _that_, too! Then, a step farther, she stopped again. The red clayey place he had taken had neither fence nor flowers. Only a tree grew near his place, a great solitary pine, with the low wailing of whose softly swaying needles singing was mingled.

A single person was singing--a single _black_ person. She knew by the soft mellow roll of the voice, the sweet, oh, honey-sweet sound of the hymn words, which she herself had sung many times at the Baptist Sunday-school, where she had to go when there was no Episcopal minister. The great figure towering above the tiny, dusky group, with bare woolly head and working, apelike face uplifted to the sky, took on a new grandeur.

But only for a moment did she think of Pete, so marvelously changed. The hymn was ending--they were a long way past the dear line, _Safe on his gentle breast_.

Now they were moving, the little "crowd of mo'ners over yonder,"--all black it looked, house-servants mostly,--and quickly, with a breathless fear of being too late, she rushed forward and thrust her head between the singer and a sobbing petticoated figure beside him.

Then she drew back smiling, smiling divinely.

The grief-stricken eyes at the other side of the little grave--a grave heaped with Radical roses, sweet with one Democrat myrtle cross--had seen it, _the white face_.

"You go fust, honey, jus' behin' him," Pete whispered, as, trudging valiantly along with the rest, Hope Carolina passed out of the cemetery gate.

It was the quaint custom at funerals in Fairville, especially funerals with negroes, to follow mourners in line from the grave as well as to it. What had been begun through a lack of sidewalks had been continued as a ceremony of passionate respect.

Pete bent soft, wet, grateful eyes upon her, pushing her close behind the one carriage as he spoke--eyes as dear and tender as any old nigger eyes Hope Carolina had ever looked into. All at once she understood: Pete, bad Pete, loved the Radical judge.

She nodded comprehendingly, including all the other black faces--which seemed to look toward her, too, with a doglike gratitude--in her flashing smile.

"Of course!"

* * * * *

So it came to pass that Fairville's terrible prophecy was falsified. In his darkest hour the Radical Judge was not forsaken of all his race; still unconscious of fatigue and hurt in the cruel clay road, the little white Democrat, who had toiled this hard way before, led and redeemed the funeral procession of his child.

POVERTY AND DISCONTENT IN RUSSIA

BY GEORGE KENNAN

In an address delivered in New York City on the 14th of January, 1908, Paul Milyukov, historian, statesman, and leader of the Constitutional Democratic party in the third Russian Duma, after reviewing dispassionately, from a liberal point of view, the unsuccessful attempt at revolution in the great empire of the north, summed up, in the following words, his conclusions with regard to the present Russian situation:

"The social composition of the future Russia is now at stake; the fate of future centuries is now being determined"; but, "wherever we turn or look, we meet only with new trouble to come, nowhere with any hope for conciliation or social peace. This, I am afraid, is not the message that you expected from me, and I should be much happier myself if I could answer your wish for information with words of hope, and with the glad tidings that quiet and security have returned to Russia; but I am here to tell you the truth."

Americans who have not followed closely the sequence of events in Russia since October, 1905, may feel inclined to ask, "Why should Mr. Milyukov take such a pessimistic view of the future, when his country has not only a representative assembly, but an imperial guaranty of political freedom and 'real inviolability of personal rights'?" The answer is not far to seek. A representative assembly that has no power, and an imperial guaranty that affords no security, do not encourage hopeful anticipations. Russia has never had a representative assembly, in the Anglo-Saxon meaning of the words; and as for the imperial guaranty of political freedom, it was written in water.

Twenty-seven months ago, when Count Witte reported to Nicholas II. that Russia had "outgrown its governmental framework," and when the Czar himself, recognizing the necessity of "establishing civil liberty on unshakable foundations," directed his ministers to give the country political freedom and allow the Duma to control legislation, there seemed to be every reason for believing that the crisis had passed and that the people's fight for self-government had been won; but, unfortunately, the unstable Czar, who would run into any mold, but would not keep shape, did not adhere to his avowed purpose for a single week. In the words of a Russian peasant song:

The Czar promised lightly to go, And made all his plans for departing; Then he called for a chair, And sat down right there, To rest for a while before starting.

Not even so much as an attempt was made to carry the "freedom manifesto" into effect, and before the ink with which it was written had fairly had time to dry, the rejoicing people, who assembled with flags and mottos in the streets of the principal cities to celebrate the dawn of civil liberty, were attacked and forcibly dispersed by the police, and were then cruelly beaten or mercilessly slaughtered by adherents of a national monarchistic association, hostile to the manifesto, which called itself the "Union of True Russians."[27] According to the conservative estimate of Mr. Milyukov, these "true Russians," with the sympathy and coöperation of the police, killed or wounded no less than thirteen thousand other Russians, whom they regarded as not "true," in the very first week after the freedom manifesto was promulgated. One not familiar with Russian conditions might have supposed that the Czar would use all the force at his command to stop these murderous "pogroms" and to punish the police and the "true Russians" who were responsible for them; but he seems to have regarded them as convincing proof that all true Russians would rather have autocracy than freedom, and, instead of insisting upon obedience to his manifesto and punishing those who resorted to wholesale murder as a means of protesting against it, he not only allowed the slaughter to go on, but, a few months later, showed his sympathy with the "true Russians" by telegraphing to their president as follows:

"Let the Union of the Russian People serve as a trustworthy support. I am sure that all true Russians who love their country will unite still more closely, and, while steadily increasing their number, will help me to bring about the peaceful regeneration of our great and holy Russia."[28]

Disappointed at the Czar's failure to stand by his own manifesto, and exasperated by the murderous attacks of the Black Hundreds upon defenseless people in the streets, the Social Democrats, the Social Revolutionists, and the extreme opponents of the government generally resorted to a series of armed revolts, which finally culminated in the bloody barricade-fighting in the streets of Moscow in December, 1905. Taking alarm at these revolutionary outbreaks, and yielding to the reactionary pressure that was brought to bear upon him by the ultra-conservative wing of the court party, the Czar abandoned the reforms which he had declared to be the expression of his "inflexible will,"[29] and permitted his governors and governors-general to "put down sedition" in the old arbitrary way, with imprisonment, exile, the Cossack's whip and the hangman's noose.