Part 8

“Yes, I admire his sex unconsciousness,” she repeated. “He treats me, not exactly like a man, but like an intellectual equal.”

The idea amused Hamilton.

“And what do you talk about?” he asked.

“Oh, we discuss things. Just as two men would. Politics, sociology, literature, art.”

Hamilton laughed.

“Just as two men. You mean just as two Dr. Levins. When two men get together they talk--well, where I come from, they’d probably talk about hunting, or the cotton crop, or baseball or what would have happened if it hadn’t been for the war--that is, the Civil War. I called Dr. Levin when I came in, but they told me--”

“Yes, he’s gone for about two days to visit a sister. Oh, yes, and we even discuss such things as intermarriage.”

“That’s a rather dangerous subject, isn’t it?” he asked. His mind went back once more to McCall, who was a Catholic. Still this, too, was probably only part of their intellectual conversation. It was probably impersonal.

“Perhaps.” She changed the subject.

At Claridge’s they watched the people about them. They recognized some of them as actors and actresses, one of them, a Broadway star active in the formation of the new Equity League. In one corner sat a distinguished looking gentleman, with cruel blue eyes and dark hair and beard, surrounded by a group of admirers.

“That’s General Rodzinoff,” said Hamilton, “the Czarist commander whom we saw in Paris. New York is becoming cosmopolitan.”

“Oh, yes, I remember him. He’s probably arousing sympathy for the old régime,” remarked Dorothy. “The town is full of them. The emigrés are tired of Paris and are coming to this country. It’s more fertile.”

For a time they studied their menus. The colored waiter took their order obsequiously and hurried away.

“Don’t look now,” said Dorothy in a low voice, “but your Russian friend seems to be flirting.”

“Has he been practising his charms on you?” asked Hamilton.

“Oh, he’s glanced this way once or twice. But I don’t take it seriously. He’s probably spoiled by too much adulation.”

“And I suppose he’ll finish by marrying some American millionaire’s daughter. Why shouldn’t he? He’s a great war hero.”

“I don’t know about that,” Dorothy’s eyes snapped, “but I do know that he can drink like a good Russian officer. In Paris he was always more or less intoxicated, and if I don’t mistake the symptoms, he’s a little mellow now. That’s one of his favorite pastimes. The others are women and Jew baiting.”

“Jew baiting?”

“Yes. Dr. Levin has told me of some of his activities in Russia. He’s a regular _pogromchik_. That means an instigator of those horrible massacres in Russia. I’m surprised they tolerate him. I understand that he is spreading his propaganda in this country.”

“What propaganda? Against the Jews?”

“Yes. In Russia when anything went wrong, the ruling class always blamed the Jew. He was the scapegoat. If taxes were high or wages low, it was the Jew who was at fault. Now if General Rodzinoff can spread anti-Semitism in this country, he may succeed also in spreading the false impression that the Jews are the cause of all the trouble in Russia. He may make people forget the oppression of the old Czarist régime against which the people rebelled and from which they went to the other extreme.”

“Oh, no. The American people are too sensible for that. He might get a few fanatics, perhaps. But--” Hamilton shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “Nobody of any standing.”

“Well, has Howard Brooks any standing?”

“Brooks?” Hamilton, like nine hundred and ninety-nine Americans out of a thousand, knew Brooks as the inventor and exploiter to the tune of many millions of the most widely-used automobile tire in the world--a tire which had revolutionized the automobile industry and made it possible for the first time in history for the farmer and small salaried city man to operate his own car. Because of the peculiar hissing sound they made, the tires were called “babbling brooks”--but they did the work and were cheap. Brooks had mobilized thousands of workmen, by paying them a bit more than the other manufacturers, and had then housed them and cared for them with an exacting, paternalistic benevolence. It was as though a super-efficiency man and the Kaiser had decided to go into charity on a vast scale. Wages were higher, hours were shorter, operations were safer than anywhere else; but while the men did work, they worked like machines. Their production was astounding. The lost moments in which workmen wipe their brows, blow their noses or simply rest between processes had been reduced so effectively that whereas seventeen per cent had been the smallest lost time ever achieved in any factory, Brooks had cut the percentage down to six--the minimum of safety, efficiency engineers agreed. How long a man could work at a six per cent rate--or rather a ninety-four per cent rate, of course had never been determined, as the system had been in operation only a few years and the labor turnover was rather large.

Not only were the wages of Brooks’ employees higher than the prevailing standard, but they were required to place a certain percentage of it in the bank each week. There were also numberless rules about conduct, about furnishing the home, about physical care. No Brooks employee was allowed to drink or smoke. Company investigators visited the homes to see if the food was cooked scientifically and if the baby was being fed the proper formula of prepared milk, and, so it was whispered, to smell breaths.

When the European war began Brooks had engaged the best aeronautic engineers to construct an enormous dirigible balloon. The idea was to fly over the Atlantic with it and then over the western front. Brooks and his assistants, selected from representative clubs and associations, would drop tons of peace tracts upon the combating armies. Upon reading these, the armies would cease fighting. “Out of the trenches by apple blossom time,” was his motto. Incidentally the balloon would have a powerful advertising value, as the dirigible was to be known as the Brooks Peace Ship. It wouldn’t hurt to get the good-will of foreign motor users for after-the-war trade.

When a Chicago newspaper had poked fun at the plan and Brooks had sued the paper for libel, Brooks had been placed on the witness stand and exhibited a shocking ignorance of the most elementary facts of American history. When asked who Benjamin Franklin was, for instance, he had replied that he was the inventor of an air-cooled automobile motor and Benedict Arnold, an English author.

At the last minute the committee in charge of the airship had fallen out as to where they should fly first, over the French or over the Germans, without offending either of the belligerents. It ended in a tremendous row, with every one calling every one else a pro-German or a pro-Frenchman and going home.

At the vaudeville shows, in the smokers of trains, in the joke columns Brooks’ name appeared frequently. It was a by-word and a signal for laughter. For one person to say to another:

“Say, I see you’ve got a new set of rubber doughnuts on your car,” was a cue for uproarious laughter--rubber doughnuts of course meaning “babbling brooks.”

For all these reasons the mention of Brooks’ name caused Hamilton to smile involuntarily. He waved his hand in a deprecating gesture.

“Of course that strikes you as funny,” said Dorothy, “but Brooks _has_ standing--any man with so much money has. Of course he has no culture, in fact is an ignoramus, but he has money and can hire brains. Men will do anything for money.”

Hamilton laughed.

“Hope I’ve heard my last Brooks joke,” he said. “But where did you get all this information?”

“Some of it from Dr. Levin. Some of it--”

“Oh, I see,” he interrupted. “Dr. Levin. Probably a little sensitive. I’ve noticed most Jews are. Even in my company. You say something about English or Irish or Italian and nobody minds. You even say ‘wop’ and an Italian grins good naturedly. But the minute you say something, anything, good or bad, about the Jew, they’re all ears and eyes--all on edge. I think Dr. Levin’s probably supersensitive.”

Hamilton refused to take the matter seriously. At the same time he wondered why she brought Dr. Levin’s name so often into the conversation. She had learned this from Dr. Levin, and that. She quoted him and sometimes even held him up as an example.

They finished their meal and left the Claridge, the Russian general still charming his circle of admirers with his conversation, his cruel blue eyes still circling the room for fresh objects of feminine beauty.

XVII

“Now for another Luxembourg Garden,” said Hamilton as they left the Claridge.

“It’s not exactly the same thing, but perhaps Central Park might do,” suggested Dorothy. “I go there once in a while, when I wish to escape from--from myself. We might go there for a while. As long as you get me back by five.”

They boarded a Fifth Avenue bus and dismounted at Fifty-ninth Street. Spring had scarce come and only the first buds and the boldest blades of grass appeared, but it was warm in the sunshine. Overhead innumerable birds proclaimed their faith in the coming of another summer. And the women on horseback along the bridle-paths or afoot wore bright, spring clothes. Hamilton’s thoughts flew back to Georgia. There the trees must be thick with foliage, green leaves and sweet-scented magnolia blossoms, and roses must be in bloom.

How long they walked together Hamilton did not know. Nor did he know of what they spoke. In fact he said little, leaving the burden of their conversation to Dorothy. His mind was flying back and forth between the present and the future. He was sensing the passing moments, perhaps his last with the woman who walked at his side, with such eagerness that he somehow missed their details. It was as though he were saying: “This moment, this position of her head, this touch of the sunlight upon her face, all these are precious and will not return.” And in the meantime the moment had melted into another and he had lost the thread of their common talk.

Dorothy’s mind was everywhere--the war, its effect on art, on literature, on morals, on conceptions of democracy. The thread of their conversation was being broken and picked up.

They had seated themselves on a bench when Hamilton suddenly became aware of the lateness of the hour. In a few minutes they would be riding home and there were so many things to tell her. It seemed to him that she, too, was waiting for something, something that had sprung up between them and to which he must give voice.

“You know,” he said at length, “I’m engaged.”

It was not what he had wished to say, and the knowledge that he had said it for a single moment appalled him. He was glad in a way and proud that he had told her. In another way he feared that he had been presumptuous. Was that a tremor of her lip, or simply the play of light and shadow? Or was it his imagination? No, her eyes were still sparkling, happy. He was right. They were only friends. They could be nothing else. And, though their friendship was fated for nothing deeper; still it was right that he had told her. He had done the right thing. It was not a conflicting love, but the faint possibility of disloyalty even in thought to the woman whom he had already chosen, that he had shut out.

“No, I didn’t know, exactly,” she smiled. “For a time I thought--I suppose it is the faithful little Southern girl you left behind you, the one whose letters I used to bring you.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, yes, once when you were delirious you even paid me the compliment of saying that I looked like her.”

For a fleeting instant Hamilton had an impression that Dorothy was laughing at him--trying to laugh or trying not to laugh, he could not tell which.

“I did say that--and I do. It was not delirium.”

She rose and Hamilton knew that his afternoon had come to an end.

“No, don’t take me home. Just see me to the bus line. I’d rather leave you that way,” she was smiling.

“This afternoon,” he said, “I shall always remember. It’s been--” from somewhere a phrase popped into his head--“‘a sheaf of golden moments.’”

Dorothy darted a quick look of surprise.

“‘With here and there,’” she continued, “‘a scarlet memory.’”

Hamilton suddenly remembered where he had heard that phrase. The memory gave him a queer shock. It seemed as though he had suddenly intruded upon something. And yet, she had said that McCall had not called on her before returning home.

“Where did you hear that?” she asked. “I picked it up somewhere in Paris, in the hospital.”

“I don’t remember,” he replied.

They had reached the street and a bus was approaching. Dorothy held out her hand.

“We shall always be friends, I hope.” Were her eyes a bit wistful?

“Yes, friends.”

She was climbing into the bus, her face flushed, little ends of brown hair blowing free from under her turban. Hamilton remembered their last leave-taking in the Luxembourg gardens. Through the window he caught a glimpse of her walking forward to a seat, smiling as he had seen her smiling in the hospital, when caring for the wounded.

He wondered if there were tears on her lashes.

XVIII

When Hamilton looked out of the window of his Pullman the next morning he noticed that the earth was red. He had left the land of dark earth, the cities of gray streets and walks. He had left the cold North and was back home in the South. The hills, rolling in every direction to the slowly rotating horizon, were covered with greenery, and a warmer, more golden sunshine brightened it. It seemed, too, that the sky was bluer. And, peeping out from between the trees and shrubs and running along the roads and ditches--red earth.

At noon he saw for the first time in two years a little patch covered with scrubby green plants, just bursting into fluffy white blossoms. In one corner of the field a shack, weather-beaten, gray, unpainted, with a sagging door and broken windows. A Negro mammy in the doorway, a half-dozen pickaninnies playing at her feet, all in rags. Out in the field a white-haired Negro, bent under the load of a crate piled high with cotton, tottering toward the shack. The heads and backs of other Negroes bending over their cotton.

It was only a patch. It was too far north for the heavier yields of cotton. Yet, it was cotton!

It kept growing warmer. Hamilton’s coat became too heavy. He wished that he had taken his cotton uniform with him. He noticed how the vegetation kept growing thicker as they proceeded southward. Now the forests through which they passed were so thick that one could not see into them. Vines and creepers, heavy moss, thick shrubs, high grass, all knit the forest into a single being. The grass grew up to the tracks and even between them.

The towns too were different--smaller, slower, dingier. It was a different world, a more picturesque world, and a more primitive one. He noticed, with a new insight into such things, how much of the towns was wooden--stores, factories, public buildings, and, of course, homes. Even the sidewalks. Also there were more wagons drawn by horse or mule. The streets looked crooked and unpaved. The structures unpainted. Men stood around or moved slowly--at the stations, on the streets. And everywhere there were Negroes. Negroes moving trucks at the depots. Negroes lazily driving their teams along the roads. Negroes on the streets. Negroes on the farms and plantations. Negroes even behind the counters of stores. He had never before realized how black the South was, how many less white men than in the North. Previously most of his life away from home had been spent at school, a world where black men seldom intruded. But now they seemed like a tide of color, like a forest pressing down upon the little towns and villages, slowly choking them with their prolific vegetation.

He thought of Williams and of the Paris salons that had been thrown open to him and to other colored soldiers who had fought under the same flag as the white men. He watched the ragged black patiently toiling under the Southern sun. He wondered whether they would be content to remain thus. An idea struck him. He examined the individual figures more closely. Yes! He had noticed something familiar about the shirts that some of the laborers wore. They were the olive drab of the army. And there was a husky in olive drab breeches and army shoes.

It was five o’clock. Hamilton looked through his time table again. He had wired his father to meet him at a suburb one station north of Corinth. It was about the same distance from home as the main station, but he wished to avoid anything approaching a public reception. He had entered the service as a student officer. He was coming back a captain. Some of the home guards might not understand how automatic promotion was. They might greet him with a band or something equally nonsensical. He wished to come home quietly. He wished to rest. He wished--he did not know--yes, Margaret. He wished to see her again. He wished to have the wedding as soon as possible and settle down to his new life.

The train was screeching to a halt and through the window he saw them waiting for him--his father, a little paler than when he had seen him in New York, it seemed; his mother, clutching his arm, and trying not to cry--it was the same way she looked when she had bade him good-bye, only she, too, seemed a little older, and then Margaret, flushed and radiant, in a bright yellow silk sweater.

The next minute he was down the steps and into his mother’s arms. Yes, she was older, but not very much, and still beautiful--with her white hair and girlish complexion, her gentle blue eyes, her refined features. Hamilton remembered the time that a schoolmate had mistaken his mother and his only sister, Virginia Ruth, for sisters. Virginia Ruth was married to a New Orleans banker and had children of her own now. But no one would any longer mistake the two for sisters. One cheated time for a while, for a few years; but, in the end, time won.

Hamilton could think of nothing to say, but “Mother, how are you?”

Of the hundred questions that crowded in her brain, all that she could ask was: “Robert, isn’t your uniform too warm?” The gulf between them was suddenly bridged and they laughed.

Superintended by Mr. Hamilton, George, the middle-aged Negro chauffeur, was proudly piling the suitcases into the family automobile. He was grinning from ear to ear and remarked repeatedly that “the gen’ral sure do look well” and something about “bein’ mighty scrumptious.” Father and son shook hands briefly, but Margaret held out her arms and drew down Hamilton’s head. It was the first time that he had kissed her in the presence of anybody else, the first time he had kissed any one, outside the family, before his mother and he felt awkward and self-conscious. As he bent down, he noticed the sparkle of emeralds and diamonds in her engagement ring and felt ashamed that he had eyes for anything but Margaret herself. He noted how calmly she could kiss him--not exactly calmly, but self-possessedly and without embarrassment.

With his first glance, too, he saw how beautiful she really was and how strikingly similar her beauty was, in a way, to that of Dorothy. Only it had a quality of naiveté. She looked, if not actually younger in years, younger in spirit. Hers was the naive sophistication of the rising generation--a generation wise in its own conventionalities, the conventionalities of breaking older conventionalities.

It was surprising how her set, among the sons and daughters of the best families in Georgia, could assimilate so readily the spirit of the new freedom, without, at the same time, absorbing its intellectual aspects. Margaret, for instance, knew nothing about political or economic movements save as they came filtered to her through the mind of her parents. The freedom, therefore, was exhibited mainly in the social sphere--in attending dances and parties unchaperoned, in driving her own motor car, in discussing love and sex theories--generally gleaned from motion pictures or printed stories--in dressing more freely than her mother had done, in staying away with increasing frequency from church, in smoking cigarettes surreptitiously and even in drinking away from home--a little.

She had no real discrimination in her choice of either art, literature or cigarettes. She had no favorite schools or intellectual movements. And no theories. She simply liked a picture or a book, or didn’t like it--her emancipation from the old conventionalities expressing itself simply in a frankness in expressing her opinion. Whereas her mother would have admired a painting because she thought that was the thing to do, with Margaret the thing to do was to say you didn’t like it if you didn’t. But her taste for fiction--the only kind of literature she read--was omnivorous. In music, too, her tastes were of contradictory breadth, preferring Beethoven one night and jazz the next. She played the piano. Classical music when there were older visitors, old ballads when alone with her mother, jazz music when in her own set. When there was no one else with her she played the three categories in the order of jazz first, then ballads, and lastly classical music.

Margaret was a joy on a horse and a mermaid in the water and altogether a creditable product of the finishing school which her mother had selected for her. The best testimony to this being the fact that she could have married a half dozen of the most eligible young Corinthians, since her graduation, two years ago in June.

The Hamiltons climbed into the touring car, the returned hero seating himself between his mother and his fiancée, while the father took one of the collapsible seats. The home-coming had not been unseen by a crowd of tatterdemalion colored children, who viewed Captain Hamilton with awe until he disappeared down the street.

Hamilton was conscious of many things and of many emotions: warm sunshine bathing the town and fragrant blooming magnolia trees overarching the road; glimpses of familiar houses; the street down which he had attempted to elope with Margaret; the public school-house where he had been set upon and in which he had triumphed in his last fight of childhood; a magnificent old church which he used to admire profoundly as a boy; homes of old friends. He was conscious of the love and pride of the three with whom he rode and the feeling of possession of Margaret, whose eyes were on him, as much as his mother’s.

“Your wound is quite all right?” asked Mr. Hamilton sitting sidewise in his seat.

“It’s fine,” Hamilton assured him. “Couldn’t be better. I think I could even take the sorrel over the fence.”

“Robert, you wouldn’t do that?” said his mother reprovingly, while his father and Margaret laughed. “Taking the sorrel over the fence” had become a family joke, an expression for extreme recklessness, because shortly before leaving for New York, Robert, on a dare, had actually jumped the stone fence on the sorrel, Annabell Lee. As his father had said at the time, Robert had risked the knees of a very valuable horse and the neck of a very heedless rider.

“No, there’s not much chance after the bawling out I got last time.” Mr. Hamilton smiled.

“But Annabell is waiting for you,” he said, “all groomed up sleek and shiny by George himself, here.”

The chauffeur’s white-teethed grin was reflected in the windshield as he nodded his head. “Tha’s right, sir, that’s right. Annabell Lee, there ain’t no horses slicker than her. She like mahogany.”

“Well, I won’t take any fences. But how are you, mother? It’s wonderful to be back.”

“Oh, I’ll take you out riding,” suggested Margaret eagerly. “I know just a ripping place to go, and I’ll race you.”

“Not for a while, Margaret, I’m too lazy for much of anything right now. If I go I’ll take old Major. How is Major?”

“He’s not with us any more, Robert.”

“Did he die?”