Part 10

In Paris, in fact, he had witnessed an excess of liberality--in morals, in art, in literature, as well as in political philosophy. It had even made Hamilton uncomfortable. He felt that in contrast Mr. Pinkney’s philosophy was sound. It had, at least, the soundness of conservatism--the unwillingness to change what time has proved to be good, for the new and untried. There was no danger that a city of Pinkneys would ever tolerate any of the shocking spectacles that he had seen in the Paris concert halls. There was no danger that a city of Pinkneys would ever hold ideas of free love. It was inconceivable that any Pinkney would ever aid in razing a bastile or setting up a commune or a system of soviets. It was inconceivable even that a state of Pinkneys would attempt to operate public cotton mills, as some Socialistic western state was trying to operate grain elevators. Pinkney was certainly safe and sane--so insanely sane. Come what might he would forget nothing of his principles of Americanism. And would never learn anything.

Hamilton mildly expressed the view that practically every inhabitant of the United States was as American as even Mr. Pinkney would have him. The exceptions were so few that one could disregard them. But the holding of a different opinion on political, economic or even social questions did not at all interfere with their Americanism. If the opinion was wrong, full discussion of it, even a little experimentation of certain theories, would prove them wrong.

“A lie must fall of its own weight,” said Hamilton.

“But we’ll help push it over,” said the younger Pinkney coming up at this point, “won’t we dad? And we need men like you, Captain Hamilton, to help us. There are abuses that must be corrected. The Negro must be kept in his place. The supremacy of the white man must be maintained. The Constitution of the United States must be upheld. Unwarranted strikes must be prevented. Law and order must prevail.”

It was rather pompous nonsense, Hamilton thought. Certainly, law and order should prevail and unwarranted strikes be prevented and the Constitution upheld. As for the Negro, of course he must remain in his place. But what was his place? Two years ago he would have said that the Negro’s place was on the plantation and in the less skilled classes of labor exclusively. In Paris he had been ready to defend that theory fiercely. Now he was not so sure. He remembered the reception where Williams had been received on even terms with the white guests and he wondered what would happen should Williams suddenly walk into the room. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Margaret approaching with refreshments of some kind.

Neither Chlorabelle nor Chlorine had appeared that evening. Ordinarily they would have distributed the trays. Instead, Mrs. Hamilton, assisted by Margaret, was performing that service. Mammy Chloe and George were the only servants visible and they, from time to time, appeared with plates of sandwiches or cakes or ices or to renew the punch bowl.

Hamilton listened impatiently to Pinkney.

“When I was in Paris,” he began, “I saw something that I suppose would have shocked you all. It was at a reception, one of a number that I attended in the Champs Elysées. The hostess, the Countess Montfort....”

Hamilton went on to describe the reception.

“And who do you think was the center of attraction? Not any Frenchman, nor any of the foreign generals or ambassadors--but a Negro officer!”

Mr. Jarvis puffed out his cheeks.

“Horrible! Horrible!”

Mr. Forsythe shook his head vaguely. The elder Pinkney looked as though he had barely escaped swallowing his moustache. His son clenched his fists and puffed out his chest importantly.

“Really not,” exclaimed Margaret. “I hope you didn’t stay there.”

“No,” he replied, “I didn’t. I flew into a rage, said something that I’m afraid might have been misconstrued as rude and left.”

The Pinkneys uttered their approval and the others added their smaller voices.

“Splendid! That was exactly what I should have done!” declared Margaret, her brown eyes blazing. She looked like a reincarnation of Dixie aroused--lithe, beautiful, impassioned.

“But,” Hamilton gulped. He was aware that he was about to spoil the tableau. Of course he realised that he might explain that Williams had saved his life, which would make his feelings excusable. But why should he do that? The fact that a colored man had or had not rescued him really ought not to affect their attitude. He would not tell them. “But,” said Hamilton, “the queer thing about it was that later I felt ashamed of myself. Not right away, but a few days later. I felt ashamed that I, as an American, as an officer in an army which had gone over there with the avowed purpose of making the world safe for democracy, had held that attitude to another American, to a brother officer in the same army.” Hamilton watched Margaret’s face turn pale and then red and her eyes fall in embarrassment, but he went on. “I felt ashamed that of all the people there, representatives of every race and nation, that an American should have been the only one to express so un-American an attitude.”

He warmed to his subject as he noticed his hearers exchange uneasy glances. His mother, too, had come up to look for him, and he noticed her in a little fringe of guests who had been attracted by the discussion. She was listening.

“It isn’t as though I don’t think my race the finest on earth,” he went on. “But it seems that in some things we haven’t always been just--haven’t lived up to that high standard that we ought to maintain. To the outside world we have proclaimed our democratic ideals, our moral support of the different people of Europe in obtaining representative government. Have we been as just to our own citizens--to the Negro?”

Hamilton’s father looked surprised and tugged at his moustache.

“Robert doesn’t mean exactly what he--m’m, a--implies,” he offered a verbal straw at which his son might grasp. “Perhaps in some places the Negro isn’t accorded, what shall I say, kindness, or, perhaps better, human treatment. But not here in our city.”

Young Pinkney threw out a life preserver.

“There’s something in what Robert has said. I find that you can get more out of a Negro if you treat him considerately. For instance, in one of our lumber mills we found that the Negroes work best when they are allowed to sing. For a time we made them work quietly, but we found by a series of tests that they actually did more work when permitted to sing, so we reinstituted the custom and our output rose nearly 10 per cent.”

“Nobody in the South really mistreats the coon,” put in Jarvis, shaking his head. “In the North, maybe, where they don’t understand his nature. But not in the South.”

Mrs. Hamilton looked appealingly at him. Margaret still stared at the floor, but Hamilton could no more stop himself than he could that night in Paris.

“No,” he said. “That’s not what I mean at all. Only a brute treats human beings cruelly. I don’t mean to say you--we--that most of us do that. But I do mean to say that perhaps we haven’t given him a fair chance. We don’t let him vote, and we complain that he’s not a loyal citizen. We don’t provide equal educational facilities for him with the white child, and we complain that he’s ignorant. We don’t give him a fair trial in our courts and we accuse him of being a criminal. We crowd him off our sidewalks, we make him sit in Jim Crow cars, we treat him like a dog, and we complain that he’s less than the highest type of human being--and in Paris, the cream of European society shaking hands with a colored man and listening to him sing.”

There was a sound of clearing throats. Margaret turned her eyes from one side of the circle to the other, but there was no escape. The Hamiltons looked self-consciously at each other.

“Well, those Parisians,” began Mr. Forsythe in a small voice, as if his impending relationship with Robert made it incumbent upon him to say something that would relieve the tension; but young Pinkney, with a swift glance toward Margaret, took up the cudgels for white supremacy and the South.

“The French,” he began in his confidential manner, as though the French were the Smiths who lived in the next block, “the French, as you know, Robert, hardly ever see a Negro. He’s a novelty to them. The Frenchman invites him to his receptions just as--as a New York society woman might have an ape at a dinner. He sees only the Negro in a million with a gift for poetry or writing--and he’s never full-blooded. He has not seen the masses.” His voice suddenly became intense. “He hasn’t lived where there are three blacks for every white and breeding faster every year; where his whole white civilization is trembling on a foundation of lazy, ignorant, dirty, diseased, unruly niggers.

“You say, give them the vote. Give it to them, and they’ll fill every office in the state in time and make and enforce the laws that govern white men. For it’s only a matter of time when they’ll be outnumbering us in every locality throughout the South, only a matter of more time when they’ll be controlling politics throughout the country.

“Let them sit on the benches of our courts, and they’ll dispossess us of our property and our rights. Give them higher education, and they’ll become dissatisfied with their lot and revolt. Take away your Jim Crow cars, let them into the hotels and restaurants, and they’ll enter the club and the home. Bring them into the home, give them social equality, wipe cut the anti-marriage laws, and they’ll drag the white race down to their stinking level. Cruel are we?--unjust? Remember there’s only one crime for which a nigger is ever lynched in the South.

“I’ve been brought up by a Negro mammy and our family’s had colored servants. They stuck to us through the Civil War and after. There is a place for that kind of nigger--the good nigger, the nigger who knows his level and keeps it, the nigger who respects white authority and white supremacy. To him the Southerner’s heart is always open. He’ll find him the best friend in the world. But there’s no place for the smart nigger, the white-collared nigger, the nigger who wants what he calls equal rights.

“What does France or, for that matter, the North, know about the colored man? We here, in defense of white supremacy, pure womanhood and law and order, know that we have to make the nigger walk the mark. We know that the strong arm of justice--but the white man’s justice, with bullet, noose and torch, if need be--is the one thing that will keep this country from being overrun by an inferior race. It is a case of ruling or being ruled. We have had our experience, a brief one, at being ruled, by niggers and carpetbaggers after the war. We’re through.

“Maybe you don’t know what the colored races are doing? Japan coming into the conference on equal terms with the great Christian nations. The Hindus revolting. The Turks ready to strike back at the white nations which have shut her back into Asia, where she belongs, and spreading the doctrine of Islam throughout the brown and the black world of Asia and Africa. And now the same thing in America. The colored races outnumber us. Only our brains, our ability to rule, by word and by sword, keeps us on top. But let us once relax our grip, let the nigger only make the United States the mulatto paradise of which he dreams, and the agitator and nigger lover will wish to God he’d never started. The Red, the Yellow, the Brown and the Black people, outnumbering us ten to one, will rise like a black wave--dark water, that’s it--and sweep the white world away.”

Hamilton sat flushed and conscious of the glances directed at him. Pinkney had addressed all his remarks to Robert, as though he were the attacker of the white race and himself the defender. Robert was not particularly keen for an argument, especially with a guest in his own house, for the discussion had grown into that now and threatened to become even more heated. He noticed that Margaret’s eyes were intent upon Pinkney. He was tired from traveling and wished to be alone. Confound these receptions anyway! Why didn’t Pinkney change the subject or yield the floor to someone else? A score of answers came to him. He wondered what Dorothy was doing. He fell to comparing her with Margaret.

He was conscious of murmuring a few hazy affirmations or denials to Pinkney, while his mind was somewhere else. “Well, perhaps”; or “I don’t know about that.” He heard some one making apologies--not exactly apologies, but speaking about his services overseas and complimenting him. They were saying that he was all right anyway and that he was simply taking a side for an argument. Pinkney was still talking. Margaret was still hanging on to his words. He was quoting Du Bois. He was telling Hamilton to read him. He was telling him about diverse threats against the peace of the white world by more or less responsible writers of color. He was quoting Japanese militarists and Hindu pacifists as well as Georgia blacks.

“No, we need you, Hamilton, Captain Hamilton, in the fight for a higher and purer Americanism,” Pinkney was saying. “We need your type to carry on our fight for white supremacy, for the protection of pure womanhood”--his eyes were flashing proudly at Margaret. Hamilton was watching his little gestures without catching all the words. But for some time the circle had broken up into smaller groups and now Pinkney was simply inviting Robert to see him in his office at his earliest convenience. There was an arrangement he wished to discuss which might prove profitable.

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Hamilton, “I’ll drop in,” although he wondered how Pinkney could possibly discuss a profitable arrangement of any kind with him.

XX

Becoming reacquainted with the family and the city was an adventure. During his absence, he noted, the help had been cut down to Mammy Chloe and George. With Virginia Ruth living in New Orleans and himself away from home, the wants of the Hamiltons were really very simple, in spite of their standing in society. They had given up all the horses but one and had kept only the touring car.

“We don’t need much and it simplifies things,” Mr. Hamilton had explained. “You see, your mother is getting, well, is getting to the point where she wishes to be free from the responsibilities of managing a large household and we have even been considering selling the house--we’ve been offered a good price--and renting an apartment.”

Renting an apartment? What a dismal outlook. Robert detested apartments. They were all right in New York, but in the South! He wanted room--room to loaf about and read, room for riding and playing tennis, room to entertain his friends. The tennis court, he noticed, had been allowed to run down and he decided to have it put back in shape the first chance he got.

In the meantime there were so many old friends to visit, so many questions to answer. On the first night home, a reporter from the morning paper had come--it was almost midnight--to interview him, and the reporters from the afternoon papers had followed the next day. They had asked not merely questions about his personal experiences, but questions of which he knew nothing. About the peace conference, about the League of Nations. What did the French think of President Wilson and of Americans in general? Who won the war? And what part did the Southern, and particularly the Georgian, troops play in the war? Of course, he had been with New York troops, but he generously accorded the Southern soldiers their full meed of praise, which they doubtlessly deserved anyway, and of which he had heard indirectly.

And Margaret? He had to become acquainted with her all over again, too. She seemed younger than before he had left her to go to France. It was not alone her dress. He noticed that the women were wearing short skirts in imitation of the Parisiennes. It was not alone in her manner of combing her hair. It lay in a childish freshness that was at once impudent and sophisticated. Margaret had never been a serious-minded young lady, but now she seemed fairly to flutter above the realities of life.

They were returning from a dance one evening, at which Robert had incurred Margaret’s displeasure by attempting to sit out most of his dances. It was almost two o’clock and they were driving down a deserted street. Before the war, midnight had generally been the limit for a dance, unless it was some exceptional occasion, like the annual charity ball, for instance.

“You know, you seem--you seem so much younger than when I left,” said Robert.

“Oh, do I?”

“Yes.”

“And I suppose you don’t like it. You’d want me to stay home every evening and darn socks and go to bed at nine, I suppose. What’s the matter with you, Bob? We used to be such good pals. Don’t, don’t--oh, I don’t know.”

They drove on in silence. How could he explain things to her? How could he make her understand his feelings? He wished, in a way, that he had postponed their engagement, not that they wouldn’t marry eventually anyway, but that it placed him under obligations. He had to escort her to dances and receptions and take her to the theatre. Of course, he got a certain amount of pleasure out of these things, but then he preferred simply to loaf about the house. It was queer, a fellow lay in the mud in Flanders for months under a drizzling sky and dreamed of coming home. Home was pre-eminently a place for loafing. A place where one could sleep as late as one wanted, lounge about in old clothes and sleep some more. Now that one finally did reach home, one found that practise did not square with theory. Theoretically, Hamilton could have stayed in bed all morning. But when his parents were at the breakfast table at eight o’clock, he felt under a moral obligation to do likewise, especially now that the burden of housework had fallen on the shoulders of a single servant. Theoretically, too, he could have retired at eight every evening or stayed up until three in the morning, but practically, there were always social duties to perform. Margaret was always calling him up and claiming him.

There was no use trying to explain a thing like that to Margaret. How could she understand? She would probably think that he was getting old. He was only twenty-six. Had the war aged him? He had always taken Pinkney for a prematurely aged young man, and yet, while Pinkney was able to talk business and finances with the elders of the city, he was able to cut a commanding figure in the younger social set. He knew all the latest steps and even introduced little variations that he had picked up in New Orleans, Charleston and Baltimore.

With Dorothy, he reflected, he could sit idly at a table or walk along the street and express his thoughts--he had need to express them to some one. He wished, too, that Margaret did not so openly disapprove of what he had said in defense of the Negro that evening at his home. For a woman, anyway, he would have preferred that Margaret take the more humane point of view. He was old-fashioned enough to believe that a woman should display the softer virtues.

“What are you thinking about?” Margaret pouted coquettishly. “You haven’t said a word to me for five minutes, excepting monosyllables.”

“Oh, a lot of things. I--”

“Well, you mustn’t. That’s a bad habit. You should live instead of thinking about it. See ‘how sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.’”

Margaret’s mood could change from the colloquial to the mock poetic in a moment. When she quoted poetry it was with a little exaggerated air, as though she were pretending to act.

“‘Eat thou and drink,’” she quoted grandiloquently, “‘tomorrow thou shalt die.’ That’s what Howard recites to me sometimes. Don’t you think that’s right?”

“Yes, perhaps it is, but it’s only one point of view. Rossetti, you know, wrote three sonnets, each giving a different viewpoint, and that is only one of them.”

“Oh, is that so? Anyway, I think it’s very beautiful. Don’t you?”

Margaret relapsed into her poetic mood. She would ask Robert if he had heard this or that and then recite it with her coquettishly exaggerated emotion. It was very delightful on the whole. If she wished to sit closer to him, too, or hold his hand she could do it in play, as though it were part of the gestures accompanying the recitation. Some of the poems she quoted, Robert thought splendid, but others were sentimental bits that she had picked up from the fillers in the evening newspaper. She would quote, almost in the same breath with Shakespeare, the rhymed imbecilities of a syndicate humorist whose chief contribution to poesy was his method of arranging the lines so that they were separated by little asterisks and so that one had to read from the bottom line to the top. Probably otherwise nobody would ever read the stuff. The announced object of arranging the lines from bottom to top was to get the reader in the habit of always looking upward and onward to higher things, the highest thing being the rhymster’s signature, Milt Elkron, on the very pinnacle.

There were quarter hours, too, when Margaret would discuss “books,” that is, fiction. Here, too, she would speak of O. Henry, Henry James and James Branch Cabell with indiscriminate enthusiasm, although the first of the three was the only one of whom she had really read more than one volume.

“I didn’t like Wells’ last book. It was very disappointing. Not much plot. Too heavy. But Harold Bell Wright has a corking story. It’s just like life!”

Robert liked Margaret’s make-believe mood, during which she pretended to be giving expression to some inner spirit through the medium of verse. Pretense, after all, was something. And she pretended without in the least attempting to deceive. It was just a game. Of course, she expected him to return her little sallies with others in kind or with graceful, flowery compliments, which he could do skilfully. For instance, if she, coming to a dark spot in the road, and letting go of his arm, suddenly cried: “Thou know’st the wash of night is on my face, else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek,” he would reply: “Lady, by yonder blessed moon, I swear”--or something about Stygian darkness, and they would both laugh.

“Why don’t you ever write poetry?” asked Margaret, as they stopped before her house. “I think you ought to write something splendid. I have a trade-last for you.”

“Oh, have you? What is it? I’m all ears.”

“But you must tell me one first,” she pouted.

That struck him as another one of her childish absurdities.

“Oh, I--a--know some one who thinks you’re the prettiest girl in Corinth.”

“Do you? Who’s that?”

“Guess?”

“Can’t.”

“Try.”

“It isn’t, it isn’t you? Oh, that isn’t fair? You just made that up!”

“Oh, but it is though. Of course, I think you’re the prettiest girl in Corinth.”

He caught her in his arms and kissed her to prove it.

“Has to be some one else! Has to be some one else!” Margaret insisted, with fascinating mock childishness.

“Well, then,” Robert thought a moment, “it’s Howard Pinkney. Now are you satisfied?”

She shook her head, with a little smile.

“No. That’s just as bad. He tells me that himself every time I see him. But I’ll tell you anyway.”

The compliment was a minor one. Some elderly, romantic woman, whom Robert dimly remembered, had thought he looked like a poet--like a picture she had of Rupert Brooke--a far-fetched likeness.

“And now,” Margaret was standing at the door, her head thrown back, her eyes shining like dark stars:

“‘_Sweet, goodnight! This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath, May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet. Goodnight, goodnight! as sweet repose and rest Come to thy heart as that within my breast!_’”