Part 7

But that last afternoon he saw Helen Phillips. Her carriage was driven slowly across the sidewalk in front of him to enter the White House grounds. The sudden quickening of his pulses at sight of her was unaccountable to him. His gaze followed her as she went away from him, and for the first time in months he remembered in dumb pain he was a negro. He tried to separate the thought of his blood from his thought of the young woman, and to put the first and its unpleasantness out of his mind while he enjoyed the latter and its association with his college victory and his patriotic enthusiasms: but he could not think of her without that indefinable and subconscious heartache.

When he came to his lodgings and opened up the afternoon paper, the only item among all the notes of interest that had the power to catch or hold his thought for a moment was a brief statement to the effect that the veteran White House coachman was dead. Hayward sat and turned this over in his mind a few minutes and then asked himself "Why not?"

Next morning he applied for the vacant position of coachman to the President. With the purpose to conceal his identity during his little adventure, as he thought of it, he gave only his Christian names: John Hayward. With similar purpose he had dressed himself in civilian clothes; but these could not conceal his magnificent lines, and, though another employee had been given the dead coachman's place, Hayward's fine appearance was so much in his favour that he was engaged as footman on trial. This was really better suited to his wishes than the other. He had not foregone his army ambition in a night, but neither had he been able to resist the temptation to spend a short time--the remainder of his furlough at least--where he could see something of the young woman who was so closely associated in his mind with the events in his life that were worth while.

Hayward was not in love with Helen Phillips in any sense--at least not in the ordinary sense; for that undefined pain, a dumb monitor of the impossible, kept him hedged away from that. On the other hand, to his mite of natural feeling of inferiority was added the respect for rank and dignity which his army life had hammered into him; and his attitude toward her was the devotion which a loyalist peasant soldier might have for the daughter of his king. He wished to be near her, to serve her; and he counted himself fortunate that this opportunity had come to him.

--And a superb footman he made, having every aptitude and manner both of mind and body for form and show; and being relieved of any humiliation of spirit by his secret feeling that he had set himself to guard and serve a crown princess.

A superb footman he made--and a new-rich Pittsburger offered him double wages to enter his service. The sneer with which Hayward told him that he was not working for money ever will be a riddle to that Pittsburg brain.

A superb footman he made; and with the added distinction of the President's livery he always drew attention and comment. The veteran Senator Ruffin was entertaining a few friends with reminiscences once when Hayward passed. One of the party said: "Look at that footman. Phillips has a fine eye for form, hasn't he?"

"Yes," Senator Ruffin answered, "if he saw him before he employed him, which he very likely did not.

"But do you know," he went on, "I never see that nigger but I think of John Hayward of whose last speech in Congress I was telling some of you yesterday. The nigger has his figure and carriage, even the set and toss of his head, about everything save his colour. The first time I saw him get down from the Phillips' carriage I thought of John Hayward, who is dead these fifty years.

"There was a man for you, gentlemen. No more knightly spirit was ever carried in a kinglier figure of a man. He was just out of college when I was a boy, but I can remember that even then John Hayward was a toast and a young man of mark down in Carolina. Our fathers' plantations adjoined, and he was the first man that ever stirred in my boyish heart the sentiment of hero-worship. The Haywards were men of note in my State in that day as in this, and young John Hayward's future was as brilliant and well-assured as wealth, fine family, abounding talent, high purpose and personal force of character could make it."

--"But we lost him. A former half-Spanish, half-devil overseer on his father's plantation, who had been discharged because of his cruelty and general wickedness, had bought a small farm near the elder Hayward's place, and was trying to establish himself as a land and slave holder. This overseer came back from one of his periodical trips bringing with him one of the likeliest mulatto girls, as I remember it now, that I ever saw. All the neighbours knew he could have no good purpose in buying her, for he needed no house-girl to keep dressed up in calico as he began to keep her. It was but a few days before reports of his terrible cruelty to her began to be circulated by both negroes and white people, who heard her screams as he whipped her day and night.

"Late one afternoon, a week perhaps after he had brought her home, John Hayward and Dick Whitaker were riding through the overseer's farm and heard the girl scream. John, who was acquainted with the situation, said, 'Come on, Dick, let's go up and stop that;' and put his horse at the little gate and was pounding on the overseer's door before Dick could reply.

"The sound of blows ceased and the overseer came and opened the door, revealing the girl crouched down on the floor moaning and sobbing. When the slave-driver saw it was John his eyes snapped in wrath.

"'What do you want?' he demanded.

"'I want you to quit whipping that nigger,' said John.

"'You go to hell,' retorted the overseer. 'I'll whip my slaves whenever they won't work like I--'

"'Oh, master, I work, I work,' protested the girl to John.

"'Shut up! you--' began the overseer.

"'Yes, I know you work,' said John to the girl; and he turned to the man, 'and I know--everybody knows--what your purpose is, you fiend! My God, it is crime enough for such as you to own the bodies of women without your tearing their souls!'

"'Get off my land, damn you!' ordered the overseer; and then, as if to show his contempt for Hayward and Whitaker, he turned again to begin flogging the cowering girl, saying: 'She's my property, and the law gives me the right to make her obey!'

"'Stop!' thundered John, laying his hand on his pistol as the slave-driver raised his arm to strike. 'You son of hell! The man who puts the weight of his hand on a woman, even his wife, to make her obey his passions, deserves to die!'

"Whitaker said it was all over before he could slide from his horse. The overseer struck the girl a vicious cut as John was speaking, and his whip was descending again when John's pistol flashed and the brute dropped to the floor with a ball through his brain...."

"That was why my State lost John Hayward," the Senator continued after a pause. "It was seen at once that he must not come to trial. While the plea of self-defence can always be set up, the fact that John had killed the overseer in his own house and after being ordered out, would have made the law quite too risky. But beyond that it would have been necessary, in order that the jury's sympathy might override the law, to make such a presentation of the proper limitations, and the abuses and horrors, of slave management as would be clearly inimical, if not actually dangerous, to public order and safety.

"So the State lost John Hayward," the Senator rambled on. "He exiled himself less for his own safety than for the sake of a system for which he had no sympathy, but in which seemed to be bound up the peace and happiness, the very existence, of his people.... He went away, but the shadow of the Black Peril was upon his life to the end.... He went to Massachusetts, located in Boston, and began to practise law. He was successful from the beginning, though he always spent everything he made. He married a most lovable and beautiful woman of the finest family, and life again promised all he had once seemingly lost.... He had been in Congress two terms when I was first elected to the House. Mrs. Hayward was the most gracious lady I ever knew, and they made my first years here at Washington altogether enjoyable, for they knew everybody that was worth knowing and were great entertainers. I remember that as a young bachelor Congressman I used to think that if I only had John Hayward's constituency and a wife the equal of his in beauty, intelligence and diplomacy, I could be President without trouble.... We served together in Congress till the beginning of the Great War. It was just before the outbreak that that fateful shadow fell again upon him. His son--named for him: John Graham Hayward--a boy that I had watched grow up from a lad and loved as my own, was a student at Harvard and had acquired many ideas of which his father had no knowledge, and which would have startled him--with all his well-known anti-slavery sentiments. The boy's mother looked on the negro race purely from a missionary standpoint, and had never given a serious thought, I am sure, to the negro's social status.

"You perhaps may imagine the shock that came to John Hayward on going home late one afternoon to dinner to find already seated at his table his wife, his son, and a young negro about his son's age whom the boy had brought in to dine with him.... John told me about it a few months afterward, and even then, with all his heart-break, his eyes would blaze with an insane anger as he thought of that nigger at his table.... He looked at the three for a moment; and then he said things that blasted his home. He kicked the nigger incontinently out of his house, and was beside himself in the furious wrath he hurled upon his wife and son. The boy resented his outburst, especially because of its cruel effect upon the mother. The father in uncontrollable anger at his son's resentful opposition ordered him to leave his roof, and told him that he was unworthy of the name of Hayward and had disgraced it beyond repair. The boy replied with spirit that he would not carry the name of Hayward away from the house, but would renounce both the house and it then, there and for ever, and walked out of the door.... On his knees did John implore his wife's forgiveness, and receive it; but neither father nor mother ever saw the boy again.... John tried, I think, to learn his whereabouts, and was driven to desperation as he met failure at every point. The moment the call came for troops, he resigned his seat in Congress, volunteered in a Massachusetts regiment and was killed at Bull Run....

"As he was lost to his native State, so he was lost to the nation--because the baleful shadow of the Black Peril seemed to be upon his life.... Heaven save my people--nine-tenths of whom, like him, would deal with the negro in justice and righteousness and helpfulness--from the stress and the blood of an open conflict against social equality with the negro race, and from the further unspeakable, unthinkable horror of defeat in such a conflict if it shall come upon them."

*CHAPTER XI*

There can be no doubt Hayward found scant recompense for his first month's service as part of the White House _menage_. The money consideration of that service, as he told the gentleman from Pittsburg, he valued as nothing; and yet it was the money that held him over beyond the time limit he had set for his little adventure and his return to the army. He put his eyes on Helen but twice during the month, and that only for a moment, and he had taken his leave of Washington in less than a fortnight if his training in the service had not accustomed him to bear monotony with patience.

Before his time was up, however, a letter from his mother told him that she was hardly able longer to bear the burden of her own support or even to supplement his contributions by any appreciable efforts of her own. Too long and too closely indeed had she striven in his behalf, and the overwork was demanding its pound of flesh in severe and relentless compensation. Hayward thought he saw the hand of a kindly Providence in having already provided him with a wage sufficient to keep both his mother and himself from want--which his soldier's pay would not have accomplished; and he postponed his military ambition and brought her to Washington, where he might look after her comfort more carefully and less expensively. Very grateful was he for an opportunity to care and provide for her whose devotion he had always known, but the heroism and stress of whose struggles and the wonders of whose money-working he was beginning to appreciate only since leaving the all-providing care with which she and the quartermaster had hedged him about from the morning of his birth till ninety days ago.

While his intelligence, his spirit, his cultivated ideals would not let him rest in entire content as a menial--a footman to however high a personage--Hayward yet found his first real basis of self-respect in the consciousness of his responsibility for his mother's support and happiness, and in the feeling that he was equal to the duty so plainly laid upon him. However he had no thought but that his present work was temporary; and, to satisfy his taste for mental recreation and improvement as well as to have a definite purpose in his mental pursuits, he began in his spare hours to study the books that pertained to his proposed life-work as an officer of the army.

His first summer in Washington added no little to his stock of that knowledge which men acquire not out of books but at first hand. He had seen as an onlooker something of life on both sides of the earth, and had acquired more of the spirit of a cosmopolite than nine-tenths of the statesmen who foregathered in the nation's capital to formulate world-policies: and yet of the actual conditions of life, of living, which affected him as a bread-winner, as a social unit, as one having a part in the Kingdom of the Spirit, he was at the very beginning of knowledge when he donned the White House livery. His effervescence of interest in Helen Phillips in great measure subsided, naturally, among the many new problems that came to meet him, and with his frequent commonplace beholding of her.

He soon was brought to realize that rigid limitations were upon him not only by the colour-line which was drawn straight as a knife's edge from top to bottom of Washington, but by fences and barriers inside the confines of his own race against which he stumbled repeatedly and blindly before he dreamed they existed. On several occasions he had met with slight rebuffs in his friendly advances to persons of his own colour, and ascribed them to ill-temper or uncouth manners; but he finally received a jolt which waked him up--in this fashion:

He dropped in at the most imposing negro church in the city one Sunday evening, and heard a young woman of comely face and person, dressed in perfect taste, sing a solo which, in the sentiment and the purity and pathos of the singer's voice, met his idea of all that is exquisite in song. When the service was finished he spoke to a well-groomed man past middle age who had sat beside him.

"The young lady who sang did it with marvellous taste and beauty. She knows both how to sing and what to sing; and since I'm at it I may as well say that she's no-end good-looking."

The older man could not conceal his satisfaction and interest, for he had expended many dollars on the singer.

"I'm delighted you think so," he returned. "My daughter has had great advantages and she ought to sing well."

"Your daughter?" said Hayward. "You should be very proud of her. Will you not introduce me to her? I'd like to thank her for my share. I am John Hayward"--and feeling some identification was necessary--"footman at the White House."

"Excuse me, suh," said the other, with but a very slightly overdone manner; "we don't introduce strangers to our families--specially footmen."

The father's manner was not intended to be offensive, but his answer verily exploded in Hayward's face. Thanks to the younger man's training he did not wince or change countenance, but he was so bursting full of wrath that he never knew whether any further word was spoken between them. He moved with the throng toward the door, but stepped into a vacant pew for fear he would run over some one in furious impatience. True it was that in his attempt to volunteer three years before, he had been roughly impressed with the idea that there was some recognized difference between a white man and a negro, and in his association with the rough troopers of the 10th Cavalry he had become in a measure converted to the correctness of the proposition generally: "but," he thought in infuriated scorn, "I'm as good as any _nigger_ that ever drew breath! A footman, am I?"--and he threw back his head with pride as he recalled his answer to the man from Pittsburg--but dropped it again with some humility at the thought that he was now a footman for the money it brought. At the door he spoke to an usher.

"Who was the young woman who sang?"

"Miss Porter--old Henry Porter's daughter."

"So the old scoundrel is Washington's richest negro," he thought. "Well, his manners and his money are not well matched. I'll even the score with him yet."

After the first heat of his resentment was off he admitted that his request to be presented to the negro magnate's daughter was abrupt, informal and unwarranted, perhaps, but he argued and insisted that old Porter ought to have seen that his unconventional request was an impulsive outcome of his admiration for the girl's singing, and at least have been a little more gracious in his refusal. No, he would not forgive the manner of it; and when he remembered the song and its delight to his senses he found it about as hard to forgive the refusal itself.

Not in three years, except for an occasional moment of patriotic uplift, had his soul had a taste of something to drink--till he heard that song. His spiritual sense had virtually lain dormant those three years in the monotonous round of his world-circling outpost duty. In successive enlistments he might indeed altogether have stifled it, while perfecting his intelligence, courage, strength and skill as a soldier: for the only possibility--and there is only possibility, no certainty or even probability--of spiritual uplift incident to the profession of arms, is that of developing a surpassing, unselfish love of the flag. This sentiment in its pure fulness of bloom is of the spirit, and is an exalted virtue; but not all even of the heroes whose ashes the nations keep have appropriated to their souls, untainted with selfish or fleshly impulse, this the very flowering recompense of their travail and heroism.

Hayward had enlisted at the bidding of the most admirable impulses and had made an excellent soldier; but the monotonous round of garrison duty after the brief war was ended had benumbed his purely patriotic motive, and left only a great desire for personal advancement. In the dull grind his very highest nature had become stagnated; and it was with the joy of one first awakened to unforeseen possibilities that he felt reawakened within him by that one song desires not of the flesh but of the spirit so long stupefied and unfed.

As he became acutely conscious of his need in this behalf, he was more seriously regretful than before that an acquaintance with the singer who had revivified his finer sensibilities might not be had to satisfy in a measure the need which her singing had recreated. Under the impulse of such desires he set about seeking associates, friendships, wherefrom he might appropriate to himself his God-given share in the kingdom of the Mind. In his quiet and unobtrusive search for friends among his race who would be congenial and satisfy the craving of his higher nature for companionship, success came with starving sloth. Most of the negroes with whom he came at first in contact were of an order of intelligence so far below his own that they met not in any degree the demand from within him, and the few that possessed the intelligence were so unbearable in manner that he found little pleasure in them.

He had held aloof from the troopers of the 10th with the certain feeling that they were below his type and below the type of the best negroes he knew must exist somewhere: but he came to doubt the correctness of his own estimate in his search for congenial spirits in Washington. Educated negroes? Yes, there were many that had seen as much of the schools as he, and more. Men of money? Yes, scores of negroes who could buy him ten times over with a month's income. And yet it seemed that he could not happen upon any in his limited and slowly growing acquaintance who did not in some way offend his tastes.

*CHAPTER XII*

When the heat of summer came down upon Washington, President Phillips' wife and daughters fled to the shades of the family summer home, "Hill-Top," at Stag Inlet on Lake Ontario. There, in a roomy, rambling old house set back on the low wooded bluffs which enclose in more than half-circle the peaceful little bay, he and his wife and daughters, with a few congenial but not too closely situated neighbours, passed the hot days of summer, and stayed on usually into the red-splashed autumn, when the little cove put on its most inviting dress and brewed its most exhilarating air.

It was Hayward's fortune to be carried to the Inlet with the family carriage and horses for the summer outing. He was happy enough to be quit of brick walls and asphalt pavements for a time, and to get into God's out-of-doors, for whose open air he had become so hungry in a few short months. His duties were not very onerous, and he had much time to employ himself with his own pleasures. One form which this took was in learning to handle the various kinds of diminutive water-craft with which his master's family and their neighbours helped to while away their summer vacations. Before the summer was over he was a fairly good fisherman, a safe skipper on any small sail-craft used in the inlet, and a devoted and skilful driver of the gasoline, naphtha and electric launches of which the cottagers had quite a number. He was quick and adept at any and everything that came to his hand, and so careful and entertaining of the children of the near-by families whom he met and amused when they came down to play by the water's edge, that he came to be quite in demand as one servant who "knew how" and could be depended upon in any circumstances.

Helen Phillips was still a girl, natural, ingenuous, untouched by pride or affectation. She looked forward with some zest of anticipation to the time of her debut two winters to come; but was well content to have that time approach without haste. She evinced much interest in the plans that her mother and Elise made and re-made, discarded and revised for the social campaign of the next winter, and many lively and original suggestions did she make offhand and unasked. But as for her own personal plans she gave them no thought a day's time ahead. She was quite willing to receive her pleasures in the order chance ordained.