CHAPTER VIII

BLACKBURN

A week later, on an afternoon when the October sunshine sparkled like wine beneath a sky that was the colour of day-flowers, Caroline sat on the terrace waiting for Mrs. Blackburn to return from a rehearsal. In the morning Angelica had promised Letty a drive if she were good, and as soon as luncheon was over the child had put on a new hat and coat of blue velvet, and had come downstairs to listen for the sound of the motor. With a little white fur muff in her hands, she was now marching sedately round the fountain, while she counted her circuits aloud in a clear, monotonous voice. Under the velvet hat she was looking almost pretty, and as Caroline gazed at her she seemed to catch fleeting glimpses of Angelica in the serious little face. "I believe she is going to be really lovely when she grows up. It is a pity she hasn't her mother's colouring, but she gets more like her every day." Leaning over, she called in a low, admonishing tone, "Letty, don't go too near the fountain. You will get your coat splashed."

Obedient as she always was, Letty drew away from the water, and Caroline turned to pick up the knitting she had laid aside while she waited. Angelica had promised a dozen mufflers to the War Relief Association, and since it made her nervous to knit, she gracefully left the work for others to do. Now, while Caroline's needles clicked busily, and the ball of yarn unwound in her lap, her eyes wandered from the dying beauty of the garden to the wreaths of smoke that hung over the fringed edge of the river. On the opposite side, beyond the glittering band of the water, low grey-green hills melted like shadows into the violet haze of the distance. A roving fragrance of wood-smoke was in the air, and from the brown and russet sweep of the fields rose the chanting of innumerable insects. All the noise and movement of life seemed hushed and waiting while nature drifted slowly into the long sleep of winter. So vivid yet so evanescent was the light on the meadows that Caroline stopped her work, lest a stir or a sound might dissolve the perfect hour into darkness.

Growing suddenly tired of play, Letty came to Caroline's side and leaned on her shoulder. The child's hat had slipped back, and while she nestled there she sank gradually into the pensive drowsiness of the afternoon.

"Do you think she has forgotten to come for us?"

"No, dear, it is early yet. It can't be much after three o'clock."

Up through the golden-rod and life-everlasting, along the winding pathway across the fields, Alan and Mary were strolling slowly toward the lower garden. "They are so happy," mused Caroline. "I wonder if she is ever afraid that she may lose him? He doesn't look as if he could be constant."

Suddenly one of the nearest French windows opened, and the scent of cigar smoke floated out from the library. A moment later she heard the words, "Let's get a bit of air," and Blackburn, followed by two callers, came out on the terrace. While the three stood gazing across the garden to the river, she recognized one of the callers as Colonel Ashburton, but the other was a stranger--a tall, slender man, with crisp iron-grey hair and thin, austere features. Afterwards she learned that he was Joseph Sloane of New York, a man of wide political vision, and a recognized force in the industrial life of America. He had a high, dome-like forehead, which vaguely reminded Caroline of a tower, and a mouth so tightly locked that it looked as if nothing less rigid than a fact had ever escaped it. Yet his voice, when it came, was rich and beautifully modulated. "It is a good view," he remarked indifferently, and then looking at Blackburn, as if he were resuming a conversation that had been broken off, he said earnestly, "A few years ago I should have thought it a sheer impossibility, but I believe now that there is a chance of our winning."

"With the chance strengthening every hour," observed Colonel Ashburton, and as he turned his back to the view, his mild and innocent gaze fell on Caroline's figure. "It is good to see you, Miss Meade," he said gallantly, with a bow in which his blue eyes and silvery hair seemed to mingle. "I hope the sound of politics will not frighten you?"

Caroline looked up with a smile from her knitting. "Not at all. I was brought up in the midst of discussions. But are we in the way?"

The Colonel's gallantry was not without romantic flavour. "It is your Eden, and we are the intruders," he answered softly. It was a pity, thought Caroline, while she looked at him over Letty's head, that a velvet manner like that had almost vanished from the world. It went with plumes and lace ruffles and stainless swords.

"I am going to drive, father," called Letty, "if mother ever comes."

"That's good." Blackburn smiled as he responded, and then moving a step or two nearer the garden, drew several deep wicker chairs into the sunshine. For a few minutes after they had seated themselves, the men gazed in silence at the hazy hills on the horizon, and it seemed to Caroline that Blackburn was drawing strength and inspiration from the radiant, familiar scene.

"I have never wanted anything like this," he said at last, speaking very slowly, as if he weighed each separate word before it was uttered.

"Not for yourself, but for the country," replied the Colonel in his musical voice, which sounded always as if it were pitched to arouse sleeping enthusiasm. He had once been in Congress, and the habit of oratorical phrasing had never entirely left him. "Do you know, Blackburn, I sometimes think that you are one of the few statesmen we have left. The others are mixtures of so many ingredients--ambition, prejudice, fanaticism, self-interest--everything but the thought of the country, and the things for which the country should stand. It's the difference, I suppose, between a patriot and a politician."

"It is not that I am less selfish," Blackburn laughed with embarrassment as he answered, "but perhaps I have had a harder time than the others, and have learned something they haven't. I've seen how little material things or their acquisition matter in life. After all, the idea is the only thing that really counts--an idea big enough to lift a man out of his personal boundaries, big enough to absorb and possess him completely. A man's country may do this, but not a man's self, nor the mere business of living."

As he paused, though his head was turned in Caroline's direction, she had a queer impression that he was looking beyond her at some glowing vision that was imperceptible to the others. She knew that he was oblivious of her presence, and that, if he saw her at all, she was scarcely more to him than an image painted on air. The golden light of the afternoon enveloped his figure, yet she realized that the illumination in his face was not due to the shifting rays of the sun. She did not like him--the aversion she felt was too strong for her to judge him tolerantly--but she was obliged to admit that his straight, firm figure, with its look of arrested energy, of controlled power, made Colonel Ashburton and the stranger from the North appear almost commonplace. Even his rough brown clothes possessed a distinction apart from the cut of his tailor; and though it was impossible for her to define the quality which seemed to make him stand alone, to put him in a class by himself, she was beginning to discern that his gift of personality, of intellectual dominance, was a kind of undeveloped genius. "He ought to have been a writer or a statesman," she thought, while she looked at his roughened hair, which would never lie flat, at his smoky grey eyes, and his thin, almost colourless lips. It was a face that grew on her as she watched it, a face, she realized, that one must study to understand, not attempt to read by erring flashes of insight. She remembered that Colonel Ashburton had told her that Blackburn had no small talk, but that he spoke well if he were once started on a current of ideas. "It is true. He speaks just as if he had thought it all out years ago," she said to herself while she listened, "just as if every sentence, every word almost, was crystallized." She felt a mild curiosity about his political convictions--a desire to know what he really believed, and why his opinions had aroused the opposition of men like Charles Peyton and Robert Colfax.

"I used to believe, not long ago, that these things counted supremely," Blackburn said presently, with his eyes on the river--those intense grey eyes which seemed always searching for something. "I held as firmly as any man by the Gospel of Achievement--by the mad scramble to acquire things. I had never had them, and what a man hasn't had, he generally wants. Perhaps I travelled the historic road through materialism to idealism, the road America is following this very hour while we are talking. I am not saying that it isn't all for the best, you know. You may call me an optimist, I suppose, down beneath the eternal muddle of things; but I feel that the ambition to acquire is good only as a process, and not as a permanent condition or the ultimate end of life. I haven't a doubt that the frantic struggle in America to amass things, to make great fortunes, has led to discoveries of incalculable benefit to mankind, and has given a splendid impetus to the development of our country. We wanted things so passionately that we were obliged to create them in order to satisfy our desires. This spirit, this single phase of development, is still serving a purpose. We have watched it open the earth, build railroads, establish industries, cut highways over mountains, turn deserts into populous cities; and through these things lay the foundation of the finer and larger social order--the greater national life. We are fond of speaking of the men who have made this possible as money-grubbers or rank materialists. Some of them were, perhaps, but not the guiding spirits, the real builders. No man can do great constructive work who is not seeking to express an imperishable idea in material substance. No man can build for to-morrow who builds only with bricks and mortar."

He leaned forward to flick the ashes from his cigar, while the sunshine sprinkling through the junipers deepened the rapt and eager look in his face. "It all comes back to this--the whole problem of life," he pursued after a moment. "It all comes back to the builders. We are--with apologies for the platitude--a nation of idealists. It is our ability to believe in the incredible, to dream great dreams, not our practical efficiency, that has held our body politic together. Because we build in the sky, I believe we are building to last----"

"But our mistakes, our follies, our insanities----?" As Blackburn paused the voice of Colonel Ashburton fell like music on the stillness. "Even our fairest dreams--the dream of individual freedom--what has become of it? Show me the man who is free among us to-day?" With his bowed white head, his blanched aristocratic features, and his general air of having been crushed and sweetened by adversity, he reminded Caroline of one of the perpetual mourners, beside the weeping willow and the classic tomb, on the memorial brooch her great-grandmother used to wear.

"I believe you are wrong," replied Blackburn slowly, "for, in spite of the voice of the demagogue, America is a land of individual men, not of classes, and the whole theory of the American State rests upon the rights and obligations of the citizen. If the American Republic survives, it will be because it is founded upon the level of conscience--not upon the peaks of inspiration. We have no sovereign mind, no governing class, no body of men with artificial privileges and special obligations. Every American carries in his person the essential elements of the State, and is entrusted with its duties. To this extent at least, Colonel, your man is free."

"Free to sink, or to swim with the current?"

Blackburn smiled as he answered. "Well, I suppose your pessimism is natural. In Colonel Ashburton, Sloane, you behold a sorrowful survivor of the Age of Heroes. By Jove, there were giants in those days!" Then he grew serious again, and went on rapidly, with the earnest yet impersonal note in his voice: "Of course, we know that as long as a people is striving for its civil rights, for equality of right before the law, there is a definite objective goal. Now, in theory at least, these things have been attained, and we are confronted to-day with the more difficult task of adjusting the interests, without impairing the rights, of the individual man. The tangled skeins of social and economic justice must be unravelled before we can weave them into the fabric of life."

"And for the next fifty years this is our business," said Sloane, speaking suddenly in the rich, strong voice which seemed to strike with unerring blows at the root of the question.

"Yes, this is our business for the next fifty years. I believe with you, Sloane, that this may be done. I believe that this work will be accomplished when, and only when, the citizen recognizes that he is the State, and is charged with the duties and the obligations of the State to his fellowmen. To reach this end we must overthrow class prejudice, and realize that justice to all alike is the cornerstone of democracy. We must put aside sectional feeling and create a national ideal by merging the State into the nation. We must learn to look beyond the material prosperity of America and discern her true destiny as the champion of the oppressed, the giver of light. It is for us to do this. After all, we are America, you and I and Ashburton and the man who works in my garden. When all is said, a nation is only an organized crowd, and can rise no higher, or sink no lower, than its source--the spirit of the men who compose it. As a man thinketh in his heart so his country will be."

For a moment there was silence, and then Sloane said sharply: "There is one thing that always puzzles me in you Southerners, and that is the apparent conflict between the way you think and the way you act, or to put it a trifle more accurately, between your political vision and your habit of voting. You see I am a practical man, an inveterate believer in the fact as the clinching argument in any question, and I confess that I have failed so far to reconcile your theory with your conduct. You are nationalists and idealists in theory, you Virginians, yet by your votes you maintain the solid South, as you call it, as if it were not a part of the American Republic. You cherish and support this heresy regardless of political issues, and often in defiance of your genuine convictions. I like you Virginians. Your history fascinates me like some brilliantly woven tapestry; but I can never understand how this people, whose heroic qualities helped to create the Union, can remain separated, at least in act, from American purposes and ideals. You give the lie to your great statesmen; you shatter their splendid dream for the sake of a paradox. Your one political party battens on the very life of the South--since you preserve its independence in spite of representatives whom you oppose, and, not infrequently, in spite even of principles that you reject. However broad may be our interpretation of recent events, as long as this heresy prevails, the people of the South cannot hope to recover their historic place in the councils of the nation. And this condition," he concluded abruptly, "retards the development of our future. A short while ago--so short a while, indeed, as the year 1896--the security of the nation was endangered by the obsession of a solid and unbreakable South. This danger passed yesterday, but who knows when it may come again?"

As he finished, Blackburn leaned eagerly forward as if he were bracing himself to meet an antagonist. To the man whose inner life is compacted of ideas, the mental surgery of the man of facts must always appear superficial--a mere trick of technique. A new light seemed to have fallen over him, and, through some penetrating sympathy, Caroline understood that he lived in a white blaze not of feeling, but of thought. It was a passion of the mind instead of the heart, and she wondered if he had ever loved Angelica as he loved this fugitive, impersonal image of service?

"I sometimes doubt," he said gravely, "if a man can ever understand a country unless he was born in it--unless its sun and dust have entered into his being."

"And yet we Southerners, even old-fashioned ones like myself, see these evils as clearly as you Northerners," interposed Colonel Ashburton while Blackburn hesitated. "The difference between us is simply that you discern the evils only, and we go deep enough to strike the root of the trouble. If you want really to understand us, Sloane, study the motive forces in English and American history, especially the overpowering influence of racial instinct, and the effect of an injustice on the mind of the Anglo-Saxon."

With the Colonel's voice the old sense of familiarity pervaded Caroline's memory like a perfume, and she seemed to be living again through one of her father's political discussions at The Cedars--only the carefully enunciated phrases of Sloane and Blackburn were more convincing than the ringing, colloquial tones of the country orators. As she listened she told herself that these men were modern and constructive while her father and his group of Confederate soldiers had been stationary and antiquated. They had stood like crumbling landmarks of history, while Blackburn and his associates were building the political structure of the future.

"Of course I admit," Sloane was saying frankly, "that mistakes were made in the confusion that followed the Civil War. Nobody regrets these things more than the intelligent men of the North; but all this is past; a new generation is springing up; and none of us desires now to put your house in order, or force any government upon you. The North is perfectly willing to keep its hands off your domestic affairs, and to leave the race problem to you, or to anybody else who possesses the ability to solve it. It seems to me, therefore, that the time has come to put these things behind us, and to recognize that we are, and have been, at least since 1865, a nation. There are serious problems before us to-day, and the successful solution of these demands unity of thought and purpose."

There was a slight ironic twist to his smile as he finished, and he sat perfectly still, with the burned-out cigar in his hand, watching Blackburn with a look that was at once sympathetic and merciless.

"Colonel Ashburton has pointed out the only way," rejoined Blackburn drily. "You must use the past as a commentary before you can hope clearly to interpret the present."

"That is exactly what I am trying to do." The irony had vanished, and a note of solemnity had passed into Sloane's voice. "I am honestly trying to understand the source of the trouble, to discover how it may be removed. I see in the solid South not a local question, but a great national danger. There is no sanctity in a political party; it is merely an instrument to accomplish the ends of government through the will of the people. I realize how men may follow one party or another under certain conditions; but no party can always be right, and I cannot understand how a people, jealous of its freedom, intensely patriotic in spirit, can remain through two generations in bondage to one political idea, whether that idea be right or wrong. This seems to me to be beyond mere politics, to rise to the dignity of a national problem. I feel that it requires the best thought of the country for its adjustment. It is because we need your help that I am speaking so frankly. If we go into this war--and there are times when it seems to me that it will be impossible for us to keep out of it--it must be a baptism of fire from which we should emerge clean, whole, and united."

"Ashburton is fond of telling me," said Blackburn slowly, "that I live too much in the next century, yet it does not seem to me unreasonable to believe that the chief end of civilization is the development of the citizen, and of a national life as deeply rooted in personal consciousness as the life of the family. The ideal citizen, after all, is merely a man in whom the patriotic nerve has become as sensitive as the property nerve--a man who brings his country in touch with his actual life, who places the public welfare above his private aims and ambitions. It is because I believe the Southern character is rich in the material for such development that I entered this fight two years ago. As you know I am not a Democrat. I have broken away from the party, and recently, I have voted the Republican ticket at Presidential elections----"

"This is why I am here to-day," continued Sloane. "I am here because we need your help, because we see an opportunity for you to aid in the great work ahead of us. With a nation the power to survive rests in the whole, not in the parts, and America will not become America until she has obliterated the sections."

Blackburn was gazing at the hills on the horizon, while there flickered and waned in his face a look that was almost prophetic.

"Well, of course I agree with you," he said in a voice which was so detached and contemplative that it seemed to flow from the autumnal stillness, "but before you can obliterate the sections, the North as well as the South must cease to be sectional--especially must the North, which has so long regarded its control of the Federal Government as a proprietary right, cease to exclude the South from participation in national affairs and movements. Before you can obliterate the sections, you must, above all, understand why the solidarity of the South exists as a political issue--you must probe beneath the tissue of facts to the very bone and fibre of history. Truth is sometimes an inconvenient thing, but experience has found nothing better to build on. First of all--for we must clear the ground--first of all, you must remember that we Virginians are Anglo-Saxons, and that we share the sporting spirit which is ready to fight for a principle, and to accept the result whether it wins or loses. When the war was over--to dig no deeper than the greatest fact in our past--when the war was over we Virginians, and the people of the South, submitted, like true sportsmen, to the logic of events. We had been beaten on the principle that we had no right to secede from the Union, and therefore were still a part of the Union. We accepted this principle, and were ready to resume our duties and discharge our obligations; but this was not to be permitted without the harsh provisions of the Reconstruction acts. Then followed what is perhaps the darkest period in American history, and one of the darkest periods in the history of the English-speaking race----"

"I admit all this," interrupted Sloane quickly, "and yet I cannot understand----"

"You must understand before we work together," replied Blackburn stubbornly. "I shall make you understand if it takes me all night and part of to-morrow. Politics, after all, is not merely a store of mechanical energy; even a politician is a man first and an automaton afterwards. You can't separate the way a man votes from the way he feels; and the way he feels has its source in the secret springs of his character, in the principles his parents revered, in the victories, the shames, the sufferings and the evasions of history. Until you realize that the South is human, you will never understand why it is solid. People are ruled not by intellect, but by feeling; and in a democracy mental expediency is no match for emotional necessity. Virginia proved this philosophical truth when she went into the war--when she was forced, through ties of blood and kinship, into defending the institution of slavery because it was strangely associated with the principle of self-government--and she proved it yet again when she began slowly to rebuild the shattered walls of her commonwealth."

For a moment he was silent, and Colonel Ashburton said softly with the manner of one who pours oil on troubled waters with an unsteady hand, "I remember those years more clearly than I remember last month or even yesterday."

His voice trailed into silence, and Blackburn went on rapidly, without noticing the interruption: "The conditions of the Reconstruction period were worse than war, and for those conditions you must remember that the South has always held the Republican Party responsible. Not content with the difficulties which would inevitably result from the liberation of an alien population among a people who had lost all in war, and were compelled to adjust themselves to new economic and social conditions, the Federal Government, under the influence of intemperate leaders, conferred upon the negroes full rights of citizenship, while it denied these rights to a large proportion of the white population--the former masters. State and local governments were under the control of the most ignorant classes, generally foreign adventurers who were exploiting the political power of the negroes. The South was overwhelmed with debts created for the private gain of these adventurers; the offices of local governments were filled either by alien white men or by negroes; and negro justices of the peace, negro legislators, and even negro members of Congress were elected. My own county was represented in the Legislature of Virginia by a negro who had formerly belonged to my father."

"All this sounds now like the ancient history of another continent," remarked Sloane with anxious haste, "Fifty years can change the purpose of a people or a party!"

"Often in the past," resumed Blackburn, "men who have taken part in revolutions or rebellions have lost their lives as the punishment of failure; but there are wrongs worse than death, and one of these is to subject a free and independent people to the rule of a servile race; to force women and children to seek protection from magistrates who had once been their slaves. The Republican Party was then in control, and its leaders resisted every effort of the South to re-establish the supremacy of the white race, and to reassert the principles of self-government. We had the Civil Rights Act, and the Federal Election Laws, with Federal supervisors of elections to prevent the white people from voting and to give the vote to the negroes. Even when thirty years had passed, and the South had gained control of its local governments, the Republicans attempted to pass an election law which would have perpetuated negro dominance. You have only to stop and think for a minute, and you will understand that conditions such as I have suggested are the source of that national menace you are trying now to remove."

"It is all true, but it is the truth of yesterday," rejoined Sloane eagerly. "If we have made mistakes in the past, we wish the more heartily to do right in the present. What can prove this more clearly than the fact that I am here to ask your help in organizing the independent vote in Virginia? There is a future for the man who can lead the new political forces."

The sun was dropping slowly in the direction of the wooded slopes on the opposite shore; the violet mist on the river had become suddenly luminous; and the long black shadows of the junipers were slanting over the grass walks in the garden. In the lower meadows the chanting rose so softly that it seemed rather a breath than a sound; and this breath, which was the faint quivering stir of October, stole at last into the amber light on the terrace.

"If I had not known this," answered Blackburn, and again there flickered into his face the look of prophecy and vision which seemed to place him in a separate world from Sloane and Colonel Ashburton, "I should have spoken less frankly. As you say the past is past, and we cannot solve future problems by brooding upon wrongs that are over. The suffrage is, after all, held in trust for the good of the present and the future; and for this reason, since Virginia limited her suffrage to a point that made the negro vote a negligible factor, I have felt that the solid South is, if possible, more harmful to the Southern people than it is to the nation. This political solidarity prevents constructive thought and retards development. It places the Southern States in the control of one political machine; and the aim of this machine must inevitably be self-perpetuation. Offices are bestowed on men who are willing to submit to these methods; and freedom of discussion is necessarily discouraged by the dominant party. In the end a governing class is created, and this class, like all political cliques, secures its privileges by raising small men to high public places, and thereby obstructs, if it does not entirely suppress, independent thought and action. I can imagine no more dangerous condition for any people under a republican form of government, and for this reason, I regard the liberation of the South from this political tyranny as the imperative duty of every loyal Southerner. As you know, I am an independent in politics, and if I have voted with the Republicans, it is only because I saw no other means of breaking the solidarity of the South. Yet--and I may as well be as frank at the end as I was at the beginning of our discussion, I doubt the ability of the Republican Party to win the support of the Southern people. The day will come, I believe, when another party will be organized, national in its origin and its purposes; and through this new party, which will absorb the best men from both the Republican and the Democratic organizations, I hope to see America welded into a nation. In the meantime, and only until this end is clearly in sight," he added earnestly, "I am ready to help you by any effort, by any personal sacrifice. I believe in America not with my mind only, but with my heart--and if the name America means anything, it must mean that we stand for the principle of self-government whatever may be the form. This principle is now in danger throughout the world, and just as a man must meet his responsibilities and discharge his obligations regardless of consequences, so a nation cannot shirk its duties in a time of international peril. We have now reached the cross-roads--we stand waiting where the upward and the downward paths come together. I am willing to cast aside all advantage, to take any step, to face misunderstanding and criticism, if I can only help my people to catch the broader vision of American opportunity and American destiny----"

The words were still in the air, when there was a gentle flutter of pink silk curtains, and Angelica came out, flushed and lovely, from a successful rehearsal. An afternoon paper was in her hand, and her eyes were bright and wistful, as if she were trying to understand how any one could have hurt her.

"Letty, dear, I am waiting!" she called; and then, as her gaze fell on Sloane, she went toward him with outstretched hand and a charming manner of welcome. "Oh, Mr. Sloane, how very nice to see you in Richmond!" The next instant she added seriously, "David, have you seen the paper? You can't imagine what dreadful things they are saying about you."

"Well, they can call him nothing worse than a traitor," retorted Colonel Ashburton lightly before Blackburn could answer. "Surely, the word traitor ought to have lost its harshness to Southern ears!"

"But Robert Colfax must have written it!" Though she was smiling it was not because the Colonel's rejoinder had seemed amusing to her. "I know I am interrupting," she said after a moment. "It will be so nice if you will dine with us, Mr. Sloane--only you must promise me not to encourage David's political ideas. I couldn't bear to be married to a politician."

As she stood there against a white column, she looked as faultless and as evanescent as the sunbeams, and for the first time Sloane's face lost its coldness and austerity.

"I think your husband could never be a politician," he answered gently, "though he may be a statesman."