The Call of the South
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Title: The Call of the South
Creator: Robert Lee Durham
Illustrator: Henry Roth
Release date: March 24, 2014 [eBook #45206]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45206
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CALL OF THE SOUTH ***
Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: Cover art]
[Illustration: "HAYWARD ... SENT PRINCE WILLIAM AFTER THE MARE UNDER
PRESSURE OF THE SPUR." (See page 114)]
*The Call of the
South*
By
Robert Lee Durham
Illustrated by
Henry Roth
"_When your Fear Cometh as Desolation and
Your Destruction Cometh as a Whirlwind_"
Boston
L. C. Page & Company
MDCCCCVIII
Copyright, 1908
BY L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)
Entered at Stationers' Hall, London
All rights reserved
First Impression, March, 1908
Second Impression, April, 1908
COLONIAL PRESS
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, U.S.A.
TO THE
LION OF HIS TRIBE
Stonewall Jackson Durham
*List of Illustrations*
"HAYWARD ... SENT PRINCE WILLIAM AFTER THE MARE UNDER PRESSURE OF THE
SPUR" (See page 114) . . . _Frontispiece_
"CARRIED HIM FOR FORTY YARDS OR MORE THROUGH THE HURRICANE OF LEAD"
"HIS WHIP WAS DESCENDING AGAIN WHEN JOHN'S PISTOL FLASHED"
"ELISE ... STOPPED SHORT IN THE DOORWAY--AND TURNED QUICKLY BACK"
"'I AM HIS WIFE,' SHE SAID"
"HIS ARMS UPON HIS DESK AND HIS FACE UPON HIS ARM--DEAD"
*The Call of the South*
*CHAPTER I*
The President had called upon the Governors for troops; and the
brilliantly lighted armory was crowded with the citizen-soldiers who
followed the standards of the 71st Ohio, waiting for the bugle to call
them to order for the simple and formal ceremony of declaring their
desire to answer the President's call.
A formal and useless ceremony surely: for it was a foregone conclusion
that this gallant old regiment, with its heroic record in two wars,
would volunteer to a man. It was no less certain that, presenting
unbroken ranks of willing soldiers, it would be the first selected by
the Governor to assist Uncle Sam's regulars in impressing upon the
Kaiser the length and breadth and thickness of the Monroe Doctrine.
For many bothersome years the claimant nations had abided by the Hague
Tribunal's award, though with evidently decreasing patience because of
Venezuela's lame compliance with it. Three changes of government and
dwindling revenues had made the collection of the indebtedness by the
agent of the claimants more and more difficult. Finally on the 6th of
January, 191-, Senor Emilio Manana executed his coup d'etat, overthrew
the existing government, declared himself Protector of Venezuela, and
"for the people of Venezuela repudiated every act and agreement of the
spurious governments of the last decade," seized the customs, and gave
the agent of the creditor allies his passports in a manner more
effective than ceremonious: all of this with his weather eye upon the
Monroe Doctrine and a Washington administration in some need of a
rallying cry and a diverting issue.
The Kaiser's patience was exhausted, and his army and navy were in the
pink of condition. On the 10th of January his ministers informed the
allies that their most august sovereign would deal henceforth with
Venezuela as might seem to him best to protect Germany's interests and
salve the Empire's honour.
In less than a week the President sent to Congress a crisp message,
saying that the Kaiser and the great doctrine were in collision. The
Senate resolution declaring war was adopted after being held up long
enough to permit fifty-one Senators to embalm their patriotism in the
_Congressional Record_, and, being sent to the House, was concurred in
in ten minutes after the clerk began to read the preamble.
The country was a-tremble with the thrill and excitement of a man who is
preparing to go against an antagonist worthy of his mettle, and in the
71st's armory a crowd of people jammed the balconies to the last inch.
The richly varicoloured apparel of the women, in vivid contrast to the
sombre walls of the armory, the kaleidoscopic jumble and whirl of
soldiers in dress uniforms on the floor, the frequent outbursts of
hand-clapping and applause as favourite officers of the regiment were
recognized by the galleries, the surging and unceasing din and hubbub of
the shouting and gesticulating mass of people on floor and balcony, gave
the scene a holiday air which really belied the feelings of the greater
number both of soldiers and onlookers. There was a serious thought in
almost every mind: but serious thoughts are not welcome at such times to
a man who has already decided to tender his life to his country, nor to
the woman who knows that she must say good-bye to him on the morrow. So
they both try to overwhelm unwelcome reflections by excited chatter and
patriotic enthusiasm. They will think of to-morrow when it comes: let
the clamour go on.
On the very front seat and leaning over the balcony rail are seated
three women who receive more than the ordinary number of salutes and
greetings from the officers and men on the floor. Two young women and
their mother they are, and any one of the three is worthy of a second
glance by right of her looks. The mother, who, were it not for the
becoming fulness of her matronly figure, might be mistaken for an elder
sister of the older daughter, has a face in which strength and dignity
and gentleness and kindliness and a certain air of distinction proclaim
her a gentlewoman of that fineness which is Nature's patent of nobility.
The older daughter is a young woman of eighteen years perhaps,
inheriting her mother's distinction of manner and dignity of carriage,
and showing a trace of hauteur, attributable to her youth, which is
continually striving with a spirit of mischief for possession of her
gray eyes and her now solemn, now laughing mouth. The younger daughter,
hardly more than a child, has an undeveloped but fast ripening beauty
which her sister cannot be said to possess. They have gray eyes and
erect figures in common; but there the likeness ceases. The younger
girl's mass of hair, impatient of its braids, looks black in the
artificial light; but three hours ago, with the setting sun upon it, a
stranger had thought it was red. Her skin indeed, where it is not
tinted with rose, is of that rare whiteness which sometimes goes with
red hair, but never unaccompanied by perfect health. She has been
straining her eyes in search of some one since the moment she entered
the gallery, and finally asks impatiently, "Why doesn't papa come out
where we can see him? The people would shout for him, I know."
"Don't be a fidget," answers her sister in a low voice, "he will come
presently;" and continues, "I declare, mamma, I believe Helen thinks all
these soldiers are just for papa's glorification, and that if papa
failed to volunteer the country would be lost."
"Well, there isn't any one to take his place in the regiment, for I
heard Captain Elkhard say so."
"Captain Elkhard would except himself, I suppose, even though he thought
like you that papa is perfection."
"Yes, and I suppose that you would except Mr. Second Lieutenant Morgan,
wouldn't you? Humph! he is too young sort, too much like a lady-killer
to be a soldier. I don't care if I do think papa is perfection. He is
most--isn't he, mamma?"
A roar of applause drowns the mother's amused assent; and they look up
to see this father, the colonel of the 71st, uncover for a moment to the
noisy greeting whose vigour seems to stamp with approval his younger
daughter's good opinion of him. In a moment a trumpet-call breaks
through and strikes down and overwhelms all this clamour of applause,
and there is no sound save the hurrying into ranks of the men on the
floor. Then comes the confused shouting of a dozen roll-calls at once,
the cracking of the rifle-butts on the floor, the boisterous counting of
fours, a succession of sharp commands and trumpet-calls,--and the noise
and confusion grow rapidly less until only is heard the voice of the
adjutant as he salutes and presents the regiment in line of masses to
the colonel, saying, "Sir, the regiment is formed."
A short command brings the rifles to the floor, and there is absolute
quiet as every one waits to catch each word that its commander will say
in asking the regiment to volunteer. But Colonel Phillips knows the
value of the psychological moment and the part that emotion plays in
patriotism, and he does not intend to lose a feather-weight of force in
his appeal to the loyal spirits of his men. So he brings the guns again
quickly to salute as the colour-guard emerge from an office door behind
him, bearing "Old Glory" and the 71st's regimental colours; and,
turning, he presents his sword as the field music sounds _To the Colour_
and the bullet-torn standards sweep proud and stately to their posts in
the centre battalion. This sudden and unexpected adaptation of the
ceremony for _The Escort of the Colour_, which for lack of space is
never attempted in the armory, is not without effect. The men in the
ranks, being restrained, are bursting to yell. The onlookers, free to
cheer, cannot express by cheap hand-clapping what wells up in them at
sight of the flags, and they, too, are silent. When the rifle-butts
again rest on the floor the Colonel begins his soldierly brief address:
"The President has asked the Governor for six regiments. While under
the terms of their enlistment he could name any he might choose, he
prefers volunteer soldiers as far as may be. So you are here this
evening to indicate the extent of your willingness and wishfulness to
answer the President's call. I need make no appeal to you. The 71st is
a representative regiment in its personnel. Its men are of all sections
and classes and parties. My mother was a South Carolinian, my father
from Massachusetts. Your colour-sergeant is a Texan, and your
regimental colours are borne by a native of Ohio, grandson of him who
placed those colours on the Confederate earthworks at Petersburg. You
in the aggregate most fitly represent the sentiment of the whole people
of this union of states. This sentiment is a loyalty that has never to
this moment failed to answer a call to arms. It is not to be supposed
that the present generation is degenerate either in courage or
patriotism. When the trumpet sounds _forward_ the ranks will stand
fast, and such as for any reason may not volunteer will fall out to the
rear and retire."
At the lilting call there was silence for ten seconds, in which not a
breath was taken by man or woman in the house: then the galleries broke
out to cheer. Not a man had moved; though not a few felt as did
Corporal Billie Catling, who remarked to his chum when the ranks were
dismissed, "It's going to be devilish hard for my folks to get along
without my salary; but to fall out to the rear when that bugle said
'forward'--damned if I could do it."
One of the most deeply interested spectators of the scene in the armory
had stood back against the wall in the gallery during the whole time,
and had apparently not wished to be brought into notice of the crowd,
mostly women, packed in the limited gallery space. His goodly length
enabled him to see over the heads of the other spectators everything of
interest happening on the floor. A long overcoat could not conceal his
perfectly developed outlines; and many heads were turned to look a
second time at him, attracted both by his appearance and by the fact
that he seemed to be an utter stranger to every one around him, not
having changed his position nor spoken to a soul since coming up into
the gallery. He was broad of shoulder, full-chested, straight-backed,
with a head magnificently set on; and had closely cropped black hair
showing a decided tendency to curl, dark eyes, evenly set teeth as white
as a fox-hound's, a clean-shaved face neither full nor lean, and
pleasing to look upon, a complexion of noticeable darkness, yet all but
white and without a trace of colour. While nine-tenths of the people
who saw him that evening had no impression at all as to his race or
nationality, an observant eye would have noted that he was unobtrusively
but unmistakably a negro.
He had been quite unconscious of anything around him in his absorbed
interest in the ceremony below him. This manifest interest was
evidenced by his nervous hands which he clinched and opened and shut as
varying expressions of enthusiasm, resentment and disappointment,
humiliation, disdain and determination came and went over his face. He,
Hayward Graham, had applied to enlist in this regiment a month before,
and had been refused admission because of the small portion of negro
blood in his veins,--and that in a manner, too, that added unnecessary
painfulness to the refusal. He rather despised himself for coming to
witness the regiment's response to the call for troops, but his
patriotic interest and his love for his friend Hal Lodge, who had
loyally assisted his effort to enlist in the 71st, overcame his pride,
and he had come to see the decision of Hal's enthusiastic wager that
nine-tenths of the regiment would volunteer.
The first trumpet-call had stirred his enthusiasm, only to have it
turned to chagrin and resentfulness when the roll-calls brought to him
the realization that his name was not among the elect, and the black
humiliation of the thought that he might not even offer to die for his
country in this select company because he was part--so small a
part--negro; and he gnawed his lips in irritation. But when the flags
had come in so suddenly--he involuntarily straightened up and took in
his breath quickly to relieve the smothering sensation in his throat,
and forgot his wrongs in an exaltation of patriotic fervour.
He stood abstracted for some time after the outflow from the galleries
began, and came down just behind the three women of the Colonel's
family. At the foot of the stairs Lieutenant Morgan met the party and
said, "Mrs. Phillips, the Colonel told me to bring you ladies over to
his office."
"So that's the Colonel's wife and daughters," thought Graham, as he
passed out into the street. "Where have I seen that little one?"
*CHAPTER II*
After lingering at the entrance of the armory for a few minutes to see
Hal Lodge, and failing to find him, Graham, still gloomily and
resentfully meditating upon his rejection by the regiment, started
briskly toward the temporary lodgings of his mother and himself as if he
had some purpose in mind. Arrived there, he began catechizing her even
while removing his overcoat.
"Look here, mother, put down that work for awhile, and tell me all about
my people."
"What is it, Hayward? What do you want to know?" his mother asked.
"I want you to tell me all about my father and grandfathers and
grandmothers, everything you know--who they were, and what they were,
and what they did, and where they lived--the whole thing."
"And what is the matter that you want to know all that at once? Are you
still worrying about not getting into that regiment?"
"Yes; I want to know why I am not good enough to go to war along with
respectable people--if there is any reason."
"Honey, you are just as good as any of them, and better than most. I
wouldn't think about it any more if I were you."
"Well, I'm not going to think about it any more--after to-night; but I
want to know all about it right now. Where was father from? You have
never told me that."
"Well, honey, I don't know myself; for he never told me nor any one else
that. All I know is that something--he never would say what--made him
leave his father and mother when he was not twenty years old and he
never saw them afterwards,--didn't let them know where he was or even
that he was alive. Your pa was mighty high-spirited, and he never
seemed to forget whatever it was that came between him and his father;
though he would talk about him some too, and appeared to worship his
mother's memory. They must have been very prominent people from what he
said of them. His mother died very soon after he left home, he told me;
and your grandfather was killed not long after that in a battle right at
the beginning of the war, I've heard him say; but he didn't seem to like
to talk of them."
"Didn't father say which side my grandfather was on?"
"On our side--the Union side."
"And father was in the war?"
"Yes, but I forget what he did. He had some sort of a badge or medal
tied up with a red, white and blue ribbon that I found in his trunk
after he died; but I gave it to you to play with when you were little
and you lost it. That had something to do with the war, but I didn't
understand exactly what. He didn't like to talk about the war. When we
were first married he used to say that the war was the first battle and
the easiest, and that he was enlisted for the second and intended to see
it through. But before he died I often heard him say that the war was
only clearing away the brush, and what the crop would be depended on
what was planted and how it was tended, and that his great-grandchildren
might see the harvest."
"Where did you first meet him?"
"Down in Alabama. He went down there soon after the war to teach
school, just as I did. I had been to college and got my diploma and I
wanted to teach; but it seemed I could not get a position in the whole
State of New Hampshire. So when some of the people offered to send me
down to Alabama to teach the negroes, I went. Your father had a school
for negroes not very far from mine, and he had had a hard time from the
very first. None of the respectable white people would have anything to
do with him, and he could not get board from any one but negroes. But
the worse the people treated him the harder he worked, and his school
grew. Finally it became so large that he could not do the work alone.
He tried every way to get another teacher, but could not. As a last
resort he asked me to combine my school with his and see if we could not
manage in that way to teach all the children who came. I never saw
anybody with a heart so set as his was on giving every little negro a
chance to learn.
"So we combined the schools and were getting along very well when one
day as your father was coming out of the post-office in the little town
near which we taught, a young man named Bush stepped up in front of him
and cursed him and said something about me that your father never would
tell me. Your father knocked him down and he was nearly killed by
striking his head against a hitching-post as he fell. The next morning a
committee of some of the citizens came to the schoolhouse, and Colonel
Allen, who was one of them, told your father that the community was
greatly aroused by the condition of affairs, and that the injury done to
young Bush, while they didn't approve of Bush's conduct, had brought the
trouble to a head. He said that sober-minded citizens didn't want any
outbreak, but that the peculiar relation existing between your father
and me outraged the sentiments of every respectable man and woman in the
county."
"Did father hit him?"
"No, honey; but he rose right up without waiting to hear any more and
told Colonel Allen that as for the injury to young Bush he had done
nothing more than defend the good name of a woman and had no apologies
or explanations to offer. He talked quite a long time to them, and I
could see that they didn't like some of the things he said. As he
finished he told them that he could see that our condition, cut off as
we were from association with respectable people by prejudice and from
the lower classes because of their dense ignorance, and thrown into
intimacy by our work, was somewhat unusual, but that was because of
conditions we could not control and be true to our work. He would try
to arrange, he told them, if they would give him a week, so that there
would be no grounds for these criticisms. They asked him what he
proposed to do, but he said he couldn't answer them then.
"They gave him the week he asked for, and left us. He dismissed the
school when the committee was gone, and when all the children had
scampered out of the schoolhouse he told me that while we could not be
blamed for the way things had come about, it was true that our being so
much together and cut off from everybody else gave our critics a chance
to talk, and his solution of the difficulty was for us to be married--at
once. He went on to say a whole lot of things, honey, that I never
imagined he thought of, and wound up by declaring that I owed it to the
work we had begun to make any sacrifices to carry it on. Now, honey,
there was never a better, braver man than your father, nor a better
looking one, I think, and there was no reason why I should not love him.
I was younger then than I am now and I was not a bad-looking girl
myself, and I did not think till long afterwards that when he spoke of
my sacrifices he was thinking of his own.
"Well, he made what arrangements were necessary that evening, and we
were married by a Bureau officer of some kind or other next morning
before time for school. When school assembled he sent a note by one of
the boys to Colonel Allen, saying that we had arranged the matter so
that there could be no further objection to our running the school in
together, and informed him that we were married."
"And what reply did Colonel Allen send to that note?" Hayward asked his
mother with great interest.
"He didn't send any," she replied; "but came along with some others of
the committee in about half an hour to bring his answer himself."
"What did he say?"
"Well, he started off by saying to your father that there could be no
doubt that what we had done would make the people forget their former
objections, but he thought it would be because the former offence
against their notions of propriety would be lost sight of in their
unspeakable indignation at this method we had adopted, which, he said,
struck at the very foundation of their civilization. He talked very
high and mighty, I thought, and though he pretended to try to hold
himself down and not get mad, he ripped and charged a long time right
there before the whole school, and finally told us he would do all he
could to keep the people from doing us harm, but he advised us to leave
the community just as soon as we could, as he wouldn't be responsible
for the result of our act."
"What did father say to that?" Hayward asked eagerly.
"Well, he waited until Colonel Allen got through and then said very
quietly that he had done what he had because he had appreciated the
force of the objections that had been raised to our intimate association
and was always willing to be governed by the proprieties, but that he
did not agree with Colonel Allen about uprooting any principle of
civilization, that times and conditions had changed, and, while he knew
the sentiment of the people would be against our marriage, he thought
that sentiment was wrong and would have to give way before the pressure
of the new order of things, that the law had married us and we would
look to the law to protect us. He said that the work we were doing was
worthy of any man's effort, that he had consecrated himself to it and
was not going to be driven from it by any predictions of danger, that I
was his wife and he would protect me."
"What did the honourable committee think of that?"
"I don't know. Colonel Allen and the other men just turned around
without saying another word and left the schoolhouse."
"Did you run the school on after that?"
"Yes, honey, but not for long. One night when those awful people came
to destroy things at the schoolhouse as they had done several times
before, your father was there to meet them and identify them. Instead of
running away as he thought they would, they crowded around him, and
after a struggle in the dark they left him lying just outside the door
with a broken arm, a pistol-ball through his side, and unconscious from
a lick on the head. Some of the coloured people who lived near there
heard the row, and after it was all over and all those folks were gone,
they slipped up there and found your father and brought him home.
"It was hard for us to get a doctor at first. A young one who lived
nearest to us wouldn't come, though we sent for him, and we were all
frightened nearly to death. We could hear those awful people yell every
once and awhile away off on all sides of the house, then they would fire
off guns and pistols--it was an awful night, Hayward. At last old
Doctor Wright came about three o'clock in the morning. He lived ten
miles or more from us, and we thought that your father, who was raving
and moaning, would surely die before he got there. But the old doctor
told us as soon as he examined him that he would pull through all right.
He said that he had been a surgeon in Stonewall Jackson's corps and that
he had seen men forty times worse hurt back in the army in two months.
That made us feel a great deal better, I tell you. Your father came to
his senses before the old man quit working with him, and when he heard
that the young doctor had refused to come to see him (because he was
scared, the negro who went for him said), and that the old man had
ridden so far through a very cold and wet night to help him, I never
heard any one say more to express his thanks than your father did. The
old doctor listened to it all without making any answer except an
occasional grunt. When he got ready to go home I asked him if he would
not prefer to wait till daylight, for fear those awful men would hurt
him."
"And did he wait?" interrupted Graham.
"No. He stiffened up as straight as his rheumatism would let him and
stumped indignantly out of the house with his pill-bags in one hand and
in the other an old pair of home-knit woollen gloves he wouldn't stop to
put on--I can see him now."
"Did he ever come back?" asked Graham.
"Oh, yes. The sight of him on his tall pacing bay mare made us glad
every two or three days till your father got well."
"The old doctor evidently didn't agree with his neighbours about you and
father, then."
"I don't know about that. He never would discuss our troubles or speak
any words of sympathy; and on the last day he came, when your father was
thanking him as he had done so often for his kindness to him, the old
man asked him in his rather curt manner, 'Don't they need
school-teachers up north?'"
"Did you and father leave that place as soon as he got well?"
"No. Your father said that we would stick to it to the end; and as soon
as he was able to teach we opened the school again, but in less than a
week the schoolhouse was burned down. We rented another after some
trouble, but that was burned promptly also. Then it became impossible
to get one.
"We decided it would be best for us to go away to some place where the
people were not prejudiced against us. We moved more than a dozen
times, but were never able to stay longer than a few months at most, and
often had to pack up almost before we finished unpacking. Finally we
lost all hope of being able to teach the negroes in the South, and
decided to go home. Your father did go so far as to suggest that if I
would go back North and leave him down there alone the people might not
molest him. He certainly did have his heart in the work. As I did not
like the idea, however, he dropped it."
"And that's when father got the professorship at Oberlin?"
"Yes; and kept it till his death."
"I can hardly recollect father at all," said the son, "though it seems
sometimes I remember how he looked. I wish I could have been older
before he died."
"Well, you were not two years old at your father's death, Hayward, and
really saw very little of him. He never seemed to care for children.
Your two sisters that died before you were born--it seemed that
sometimes a week would pass without his being conscious that they were
in the house. He was so absorbed in his work that he didn't have time
for anything else. His hard work and disappointment over the failure
that he had made down South was what killed him, I have always thought.
Though he lingered for many years, he was so broken-spirited after we
went to Ohio that his health gave way, and he was not more than a shadow
when he died. I am not sorry that you do not remember how he looked at
the last.
"But, honey," the mother continued after some moments of silence, "you
ought to be proud of your father. I wish you could have heard the
funeral sermon Doctor Johnson preached. He did not say anything about
your father's being in the war of the rebellion, but he told about his
trials and struggles to teach the negroes in the South, and said that in
that work John Graham was as much a soldier and was as brave and
faithful as any man who ever fought for the flag. If these folks here
could have heard that sermon they never would have voted to keep you
from joining the regiment."
"Oh, it's not because of what my father did or did not do," said Graham
impatiently; "nor is it because of what I've done or left undone, nor of
what they think I would do or would not do if they kindly permitted me
to enlist. No, no. It's because I'm part negro--though I'm quite as
white as a number I saw there to-night. Now, mother, exactly how much
negro am I? You've told me your father was a white man; but who was
your mother, and what do you know about her?"
"Yes, my father was a white man. He was a German just come over to this
country. He had a beer saloon in a New Hampshire town--at least he
bought it afterwards. He worked in the saloon when my mother, who had
run away from Kentucky, was hired to work in his employer's house. He
boarded there and she was treated something like a member of the family,
although she was a servant, and they were married after awhile. Some
few of the people didn't like it, I've heard mammy say, but they got
along without any trouble; and when my father saved up some money he
bought the little saloon from his employer and made some little money
before he died. We had a hard enough time getting it, though, goodness
knows. I moved back to New Hampshire from Ohio after your father's
death in order to push the case through the--"
"Yes, yes, I've heard that before," said Hayward; "but tell me about
your mother's running away from her master. You have never told me
anything about her, except that her name was Cindy or Lucinda, and that
she belonged to General Young."
"Well, honey, she was just a slave girl that belonged to General Young
over in Kentucky. She ran away and got across the river without being
caught, and some of the white people helped her to get on as far as New
Hampshire and got her that place to work where my father boarded. She
and my father were--"
"Yes, yes, I know," the son interrupted again, "but what made her run
away and leave her father and mother--did she know her father and
mother?"
"I don't know that I remember it all," said the mother evasively, "and
it doesn't make any difference anyway."
"Oh, well, go on and tell what you know or have heard. Let's get at the
bottom of it. I declare I believe you don't like my being a negro any
better than those dudes in the 71st."
The mother laughed at his statement; and seemed pleased at the
interruption, for she made no move to proceed with the narrative.
Graham looked at her quietly a few moments, and, ascribing her reticence
to unwillingness to descant upon the negro element in her ancestry,
which was indeed a part but a very small part of her motive, repeated
his demand for information sharply.
"Oh, honey," cried his mother, "don't ask me any more about it. I just
made mammy tell me all about her father and mother and her running away
from Kentucky, and I wish to the Lord I never had! It was just awful."
"So! Well, now I must know. Go on and tell it. The quicker you do the
sooner it will be over. Go on, I say. What was your mother's father
named?"
"Gumbo--Guinea Gumbo."
"Poetic name that! And her mother's name, what was it?"
"Big Lize."
"Not so poetic, though it sounds like some poetry I've read, too. And
now what did this pair do or suffer that was so terrible? It's no use
dodging any longer."
"Well, child, if I must, I suppose I must. My mother's mother didn't do
anything that was awful; but Guinea Gumbo--I wish I knew I was no kin to
him. Mammy said he was brought right from Africa and was as wild as a
wolf. Nobody could understand much that he said, and General Young had
a time keeping him from tearing things up. He used to run away and stay
in the swamp for weeks at a time. The children on the place, black and
white, were as scared of him as death, and none of the slave women would
ever go about him if they could help it. Not long after General Young
bought him, Gumbo and his first wife, who was brought over from Africa
with him, had the plans all fixed to steal one of the General's little
boys, five or six years old, and carry him off to the river-swamp and
have a regular cannibal feast of him. General Young found it out in
time; and mammy said the old negroes on the plantation said that was
what killed the woman, the whipping she and Gumbo got for it. It laid
Gumbo up for a long time, but he got over it. It seemed that nothing
but shooting could kill him."
"Did they shoot him to kill him? What was that for?" asked Graham.
"Honey, that is the awful part of it. Mammy said that one day her young
mistis, the General's oldest daughter, didn't come home from a ride she
had taken, and the whole plantation was turned out to find her. But some
one came along and told the General that she had eloped across the river
with a young man he had forbidden to come on the place, and all the
people on the plantation went back to their quarters. As the young man
could not be found, everybody thought that he and Miss Lily had run away
and married and were too much afraid of her father to come back home.
The next day, however, the young man turned up, and swore he had not
seen Miss Lily in a week. Then the plantation was in terror.--Honey, I
can't tell you the rest.--They found her.--When they were calling out
all the people from the quarters, the General learned that Gumbo had not
been seen since Miss Lily was lost. He had run away so often that no
attention was paid to it, for he always came back after a time.--They
got the bloodhounds, mammy said, and went to the swamp. After a long
time the dogs struck Gumbo's trail, and--yes, they found her,--tied
hands and feet and her clothing torn to strings, in a kind of hut made
of bark and brush way back in the swamp. She was dead, but she had not
been dead an hour, from a gash in her head made by an axe. The dogs
followed a hot scent from the hut for another hour, and led the men to
where they had run Gumbo down. That was where they shot him--and left
him. He still had the axe, and had killed one of the dogs, and nobody
could get to him. They didn't want to, I suppose."
Graham had listened to his mother's last words without breathing, and
when she stopped he dropped his face in his hands with a groan.... She
began again in a few moments:
"Mammy said that when they brought her young mistis back home the
General went off in a fit, and raved and cursed till the doctors and the
rest of 'em had to hold him to keep him from killing somebody. Mammy was
one of her old mistis's house-girls, and she heard all the General's
ravings and screams that he would kill every nigger on the place; and he
kept it up so long and kept breaking out again so after they thought
they had him pacified that mammy said she was scared so bad she just
couldn't stay there any longer: and that's what made her run away the
very next night. She had a hard time getting across the river, but
after she got over safe she didn't have much trouble, for some of the
white people took charge of her and helped her to get further on north.
Pappy always said--"
"Oh, Lord, that's enough!" the son broke in, raising his head out of his
hands, and interrupting his mother's flow of words, of which he had
noted little since hearing the tragic story of his savage
great-grandfather. He rose from his chair impatiently.
"So I am Hayward Graham, son of Patricia Schmidt, daughter of
Cindy--nothing, daughter of Gumbo--nothing."
"Guinea Gumbo," corrected his mother.
"Oh, I beg my distinguished ancestor's pardon for presuming to credit
him with only one name. A gentleman with his record ought to have as
many as Kaiser Bill," drawled Graham sarcastically. Then with better
humour he said to his mother, "And will you please to inform me from
which of your ancestors you inherited that name of Patricia?"
"Mammy named me that for her old mistis."
* * * * *
Graham stood for awhile looking at the blank wall. Then he spoke as if
he had settled his problem.
"Yes I'm a negro--no doubt about that; and a negro I'll be from
to-morrow morning."
"Why, honey, you are not going to lower yourself to--"
"No, no. I'm not going to lower myself to anything; but I'm going to go
with my own crowd, where I'll not be insulted by people who are no
better than I am. I got along very well at college, but these people
here are different. I'll show 'em. I'll go to the war, and I'll get as
much glory out of it as any of 'em. My father was a soldier, and his
father died in battle: I rather guess I can't stay out of it. Good
night, mummer."
And he took himself off to bed.
*CHAPTER III*
Hayward Graham was twenty-three years old. He had half finished his
senior year at Harvard--with credit, it must be said--when the imminence
of war drove all desire for study from his mind. He wrote to Harry
Lodge a former college chum who had graduated in the class ahead of him
and gone to Ohio to make a name for himself--fortune he had already--and
asked that his name be proposed for membership in Lodge's company of the
71st, as a regiment most likely to get in the scrimmage when it came.
Lodge had done this and had written to Graham that doubtless he would be
received on the next meeting night as war was at that time a certainty.
Whereupon Graham had bundled up his traps and come without delay.
Graham's mother also had travelled to Ohio, for the double purpose of
telling her soldier good-bye and making a passing, and what promised to
be a last visit to some, of her old Oberlin friends, drawing for
expenses upon limited funds she had religiously hoarded and applied to
her son's tuition.
Her husband had always impressed upon her, and in his last moment
enjoined, that the boy should be educated; and she had obeyed his wishes
to the limit of her power and as a command from heaven. She had
husbanded her small patrimony, recovered after a costly suit at law,
slow-dragging through the New Hampshire courts, and had allowed it to
accumulate while her son was in the graded schools against the time when
it would be needed to send him to college. When that time had come it
required no little faith to see how the small bank account would be
sufficient to meet the expenses of four years at Harvard. She would
better have sent the boy to a less expensive school, but no: John Graham
had gone to Harvard, and nothing less than Harvard for his son would
satisfy her idea of loyalty to his father's memory and admonitions. So
to Harvard she sent him, while she planned and worked to stretch and
patch out the limited purse; and--miracle of financiering--she had
fetched him to the half of his last year, and could have carried him to
his graduation and still had enough dollars left to attend that
momentous ceremony in a new frock.
Hayward Graham had repaid his mother's sacrifices by diligence in his
studies. He had been a close second to the leader of his class at the
graded school, an exemplary and hard-working pupil in the grammar
school, and at college his literary labours were diminished only by his
efforts in athletics, which, indeed, did his work as a student little
serious damage. He was quick to learn everything that his college
career offered, not only the lore of books, but good-fellowship, easy
manners and how to get on. His naturally friendly disposition did him
little service at first in finding or making friends at Harvard, where
there seemed to him to be so many desirable circles that he would be
glad to enter, and he had thought for awhile his colour would bar him
from any close friendships there. However, near the end of his freshman
year he had occasion by personal combat to demonstrate his willingness
to fight for the honour of his class and to show that his pugilistic
powers were of no mean calibre, by thoroughly dressing down a couple of
sophomores who had held him up to tell him what they thought of the
whole tribe of freshmen, and who, upon his being so bold as to take
issue with them, had attempted to "regulate" him. Kind-hearted Harry
Lodge, himself a sophomore, had witnessed the trial of Graham's courage,
class loyalty and fistic abilities, and being struck with admiration had
shaken hands with him and congratulated him on his prowess. From that
moment Graham was by every token a member of the small coterie known as
"Lodge's Gang," to whom Lodge had introduced him as "the only freshman I
know that's worth a damn."
From the time of his admission into this set of good fellows Graham's
social side was provided with all it desired. Lodge and his friends
seemed to think nothing at all of Graham's colour; or, if they did, made
the more of him in their enthusiastic support of the idea that "a man's
a man for a' that." They had enough rollicking fun to keep their spare
hours filled to the brim and sought the society of women very seldom;
but when they did go to pay their vows at the shrine of the feminine,
Graham was as often of the party as any other of "the gang."
The young women they visited seemed to find no fault with his coming;
for he could do his share of stunts, had a good voice and a musical ear,
and was never at a loss for something to say, while his colour meant no
more to them than that of a Chinaman or a Jap. He was promptly and
effectually smitten with each new pretty face that he saw on these
occasional forays, just as were Hal and Jim Aldrich; but his
ever-changing devotions showed plainly that it was as yet to no one
woman, but to women, that his soul paid homage. As for the young women,
any of them as soon would have thought of marrying one of the Chinese
students in the University as him. In fact they did not associate him
with the matrimonial idea, but were interested in him as in an unusual
species of that ever-interesting genus, man. They made quite a lion of
him for a time after his performance in the Harvard-Yale football game
of 19--; so much so that he had become just a mite vain, which condition
of mind precluded his falling in love with anybody for several weeks.
It was right at the height of his popularity that he had left Harvard to
join the ranks of the 71st. But Corporal Lodge had written with too
much assurance. Lieutenant Morgan of Lodge's company caught the sound of
that name, Hayward Graham, and remarked casually, "He has the same name
as that Harvard nigger who was smashed up in the Yale game."
Some of the men thought the lieutenant said the applicant was a negro,
and began to question Lodge. When that gentleman stood up to speak for
his friend he quite captured them with his description of Graham's
courage and other excellences, but when he answered "yes" to a direct
question whether his candidate was a negro, the enthusiasm and Graham's
chance of enlistment in the 71st died together, and suddenly.
Lieutenant Morgan, who was presiding at the company meeting, sneered,
"This is not a negro regiment," and the ballot was overwhelmingly
adverse.
Lodge was offended deeply at Graham's rejection, and said hotly that if
the regiment was too good for Graham it was too good for him, and he
would apply for his discharge at once. Lieutenant Morgan replied drily
that "one pretext is as good as another if a man really doesn't want to
get into the fighting." This angered Harry to the point of profanity,
but he thought no more of a discharge.
This blackballing of his name was Graham's first rebuff, and it bore
hard upon his spirits. He had never had an occasion to take an
inventory of the elements in his blood, and this sudden jolt to his
pride and eager patriotic impulses made him first angry, then
heart-sick, then cynically scornful.
The morning after his mother had gone into the history of his ancestry,
as far as she knew it, he sought an army recruiting station without
delay. The gray-headed captain in charge did not betray the surprise he
felt when Graham told him he desired to enlist,--his recruits,
especially negroes, did not often come from the class to which Graham
evidently belonged.
"May I join any branch of the service I prefer?" Hayward asked.
"Yes," said the officer; and added, as a fleeting suspicion entered his
mind that this negro might intend passing himself off for a white man if
possible, "that is, of course, infantry or cavalry. There are no
negroes in the artillery."
Graham winced in spite of himself at this blunt reminder of his
compromising blood, and mentally resented the statement as an
unnecessary taunt. But he had determined to fight for the flag if he
had to swallow his pride, and he was quickly put through all the
necessary formalities of enlistment. His physical qualifications
aroused the unbounded admiration of the examining surgeon, who called
the old captain back into the room where Graham stood stripped for the
examination, to look upon his perfect physique.
"I don't know about that broken leg, though," the surgeon said. "How
long has it been well?"
"I've had the full use of it for more than a month now," Graham
answered. "It's as good as the other, I think. It wasn't such a bad
break anyway."
"How did you break it?"
"In the Yale game at Cambridge last November."
"Say," the surgeon broke out, "were you the Harvard man that was laid
out in that last rush?"
"Yes."
"Well, I saw that game," the surgeon went on; "and I say, Captain, be
sure to assign this young fellow to a regiment that will get into the
scrimmage. Nothing but the firing-line will suit his style."
"Which do you prefer, infantry or cavalry?" questioned the Captain
briefly.
"As I've walked all my life, I think that I'll ride now that I have the
chance," Graham answered.
"Very well. You are over regulation weight and length for a trooper,
but special orders will let you in for the war only."
"The fighting is all I want," said Graham
"All right," replied the officer. "I'll send you to the 10th. They
have always gotten into it so far, and likely nobody will miss seeing
service in this affair."
Graham was given a suit of uniform and ordered to report morning and
afternoon each day till his squad would be sent to join the regiment.
He carried the uniform to a tailor to have it fitted to his figure, in
which he took some little pride; and lost no time in getting into it
when the tailor had finished with it, and hurrying to parade himself
before his mother's admiring eyes. That worthy woman was as proud of
him as only a combination of mother love, womanly admiration for a
soldier, and a negro's surpassing delight in brass buttons, could make
her.
Graham busied himself with the study of a book on cavalry tactics
borrowed from the old sergeant at the recruiting station, and with that
experienced soldier's help he picked up in the ten days that elapsed
before he was sent away no little knowledge of the business before him.
He was an enthusiastic student, took great pains to perfect himself in
the ceremonious side of soldiering, and delighted in the punctilios
which the regulations prescribed. He went at every opportunity to
witness the drills of the national guard troops who were preparing to
leave for the front; and began to acquire the feeling of superiority
which the regular has for the volunteer, and to sniff at the little
laxities of the guardsmen, and with the air of a veteran comment
sarcastically upon them to the old sergeant: till he finally persuaded
himself that his good angel had saved him from these amateurs to make a
real soldier of him.
Two days before Graham was sent away the 71st gave its farewell parade.
Graham was there, of course. It was near sunset. The wide street was
lined with spectators. The ranks were standing at rest, and the
soldiers and their friends were saying all manner of good-byes. The
band was blowing itself breathless in patriotic selections, and as it
crashed into one after another soldiers and people cheered and shouted
with gathering enthusiasm. Colonel Phillips, sitting on his horse by
his wife's carriage, said, "Orderly, tell Brandt to play 'Dixie,'" and,
addressing the crowd of friends about him, "My mother was a South
Carolinian," he added jocularly. When the band burst in on that
unaccountably inspiring air the assemblage stood on its toes to yell and
scream, and the tall Texas colour-sergeant came near letting "Old Glory"
fall in the dust in his conscientious effort to split his lungs.
Graham stood quite near the Colonel and his party, and was much
interested in watching both this man of whom he had heard Harry Lodge
speak so enthusiastically, and his daughters, Miss Elise and Miss Helen,
who were abundantly attractive on their own account without the added
distinction of being children of their father. It was interesting to
him to note the differing expressions of patriotic enthusiasm as it
forced itself through the well-bred restraint of the elder sister or
bubbled up unrestrainedly in the unaffected girlish spirits of Helen.
Her spontaneous outbursts were irresistibly fascinating to him, and he
could hardly avoid staring at her.
When the parade was formed, however, he was true to his new learning;
and after the bugle had sounded _retreat_, and while the band was
swinging slow and stately through that grandest and most uplifting of
military airs, "The Star-Spangled Banner," he for the first time had
uncovered and stood at _attention_, erect and steady as a young ash, his
heart thumping like that of a young devotee at his first orison.
As he looked up when the band had ceased, he met the full gaze of Helen
Phillips. She was looking straight at him, with a rapt smile upon her
fresh young face. Then he remembered where he had seen that face
before.
It was at that Yale game at Cambridge. Harvard was due to win; but Yale
had scored once in the first half, and all but scored again before the
Harvard men pulled themselves together. During the intermission Captain
"Monk" Eliot had corralled his crimson warriors in the dressing-room and
addressed to them a few disjointed remarks that made history.
He began moderately; but as he talked his choler rose, and he took off
the limit: "You lobsters are the blankety-blankedest crowd of wooden
Indians that ever advertised a dope-house. You seem to think you are
out here for your health. What in the blank is the matter with you? Do
you think Soldiers Field is a Chinese opium joint where you can go to
sleep and forget your troubles? Maybe you don't want to get your
clothes dirty, or you are afraid some big, bad, blue Yale man will eat
you up without salt. Now look here! I want you to understand that
we've got to win this game if it breaks every damn one of our infernal
necks, and if any of you overgrown babies doesn't like what I say or
hasn't the nerve to go into the second half on that basis, just say so
right now, damn you, and I'll give you the job of holding some _man's_
sweater for the rest of this game--and we'll settle it when it's over."
It was a desperate crowd of men in crimson who went into that second
half; and their collision with the Yale line was terrific. But Eli
didn't seem to change his mind about winning the game--for he hadn't
heard the crimson captain's crimson speech.
For twenty minutes the giants reeled and staggered in an equal struggle.
Yale then saw that she must win by holding the score as it was, and
began all manner of dilatory tactics. This drove Captain Eliot frantic.
He must score in five minutes--or lose. Fifty-five yards in five minutes
against that wall of blue fiends!--nothing but desperation could
accomplish it. He glanced at his squad of reserves on the side-lines;
and with spendthrift recklessness that counted not the cost he began to
burn men up. He sent his best and strongest in merciless repetition
against the weakest--no, not that--against the least strong man in the
Yale line.
Harvard began to creep forward slowly, so slowly; and the five minutes
were no longer five, but four--three--two and a half--hurry! Still
forward the crimson surged with every hammering shock. But flesh and
blood could not stand it! Out went Field, the pick of the Harvard
flock, carried off mumbling like a crazy man, with a bleeding cut across
his forehead. Next went Lee, then Carmichael, then Eliot himself, after
a desperately reckless dash, with a turned ankle.
Can Harvard score? Perhaps,--if the time and the men last long
enough.... Graham was a substitute. Eliot, supported between two of
his men and breathing threatenings and slaughter against those who would
carry him off, called Graham's name; and with a nervous shiver the negro
was out of his sweater in a jiffy. Eliot whispered to the crimson
quarter, "Graham's fresh; send him against that tackle till he faints."
_Bang--Smash_. _Bang--Smash_. Yes, he's making it every time, but
hurry! _hurry_!
"Kill that nigger," growls Chreitsberg, the Kentucky Captain of the
Blue, between his set teeth: and now "that nigger" comes up with his
nose dripping blood, next with his ear ground half off. But he will
score this time! No, the Yale eleven are on him like a herd of
buffaloes. He stands up and draws his sleeve across his nose with a
determined swipe. Eliot screams from the side-lines, "You _must_ make
it this trip--time's up,"--but he can't hear his own voice in the
pandemonium.
A last crunching, grinding crash,--and the twenty-two maniacs heave, and
reel, and topple, and stagger, and slowly wring and twist themselves
into a writhing mass of bone and muscle which becomes motionless and
quiet at the bottom while still struggling and tearing without let-up on
the outside. They refuse to desist even when the referee's whistle
sounds the end of the game, for no man knows just where under that mass
of players which is lying above the goal-line is the man with the ball.
The referee and the umpire begin to pull them off one by one in the
midst of an indescribable tumult: and at the bottom, with a broken leg,
but with the ball hugged tight against his breast and a saving foot and
a half beyond the line, they find Graham.
He is picked up by the roughly tender hands of his steaming, breathless
fellows, who are ready to cry with exultation, and hurried to a
carriage. It was while they were carrying him off the field he had
redeemed that he first saw Helen Phillips. She was standing on the rear
seat of a big red touring-car, waving a crimson pennant and excited
beyond measure. As she looked down on him as they carried him past,
there came into her face a look of childish admiration and pity
commingled; and she hesitated a moment, then impulsively pitched out the
pennant she held, and it fell across his chest like a decoration and was
carried with him thus to his room across the Charles.
When he had surprised her gaze at him as he turned from the parade of
the 71st, and saw her smile upon him, he thought she had recognized him
as the line-smashing half-back,--and he very properly drew in his middle
and shoved out his chest another notch. But not so! She did not
recognize him nor remember him. In her overflowing patriotism she saw
only a soldier of the Republic; and her smiling face had but
unconsciously paid tribute to an ideal.
*CHAPTER IV*
On the first day of April, 191-, Hayward Graham, wearing the
single-barred yellow chevrons of a lance-corporal in Troop M of the 10th
Cavalry, was sitting flat on the ground, perspiring and inwardly
grumbling as he rubbed away at his sawed-off rifle, and mentally
moralizing on his inglorious condition. There was he, almost a graduate
of Harvard, a gentleman, accustomed to a bath-tub and a toothbrush,
bound up hard and fast for three years' association with a crowd of
illiterate, roistering, unwashed, and in the present situation
unwashable, negroes of every shade from pale yellow to ebony. Why,
thought he, should negroes always be dumped all into one heap as if they
were all of one grade? Didn't the government know there were negroes
and negroes? Whimsically he wondered why the officers didn't sort them
out among the troops like they did the horses, according to
colour,--blacks, browns, yellows, ash-coloured, snuff-coloured. Then
what possibilities in matching or contrasting the shades of the troopers
with those of their mounts: black horse, yellow rider,--bay horse, black
rider,--sorrel horse, gingersnap rider--no, that wouldn't do, inartistic
combination! And what colour of steed would tastily trim off that
freckled abomination of a sergeant yonder? Can't be done,--scheme's a
failure!--damn that sergeant anyhow, he had confiscated Graham's only
toothbrush to clean his gun with. Graham again records his oath to
thrash him when his three years is up.
But three years is an age. It will never roll round. Only two months
has he been a soldier, and yet everything that happened before that is
becoming vague--even the smile on Helen Phillips' face. He cannot close
his eyes and conjure up the picture as he did at first.
Graham was out of temper. Cavalry wasn't what it is cracked up to be,
and a horse was of more trouble than convenience anyway, he was
convinced. In the battle-drills the men had been put through so
repeatedly day after day the horse played no part, and what riding
Graham had done so far had served only to make him so sore and stiff
that he could neither ride nor walk in comfort. He heartily repented
his choice and wished he had taken the infantry, where a man has to look
out only for himself and his gun. Oh, the troubles, the numberless
troubles, of a green soldier!
All of Corporal Graham's military notions were affronted, and his
right-dress, upstanding ideas of soldiering were shattered. The reality
is a matter of pushing a curry-comb, getting your nose and mouth and
eyes filled with horse-hairs, which get down your neck and up your
sleeves, and stick in the sweat and won't come off and there's no water
to wash them off. Then the drills--save the mark!--not as much
precision in them as in a football manoeuvre,--just a spreading out into
a thin line and running forward for five seconds perhaps, falling on
your belly and pretending to fire three rounds at an imaginary foe, then
jumping up and doing it all over again till you feel faint and
foolish,--every man for himself, no order, no alignment, one man
crouching behind a shrub, another falling prone on the ground, another
hiding behind a tree,--surely no pomp or circumstance or glory in that
business. Graham's study of punctilios did him no service there. Not a
parade had the regiment had. Mobilized at a Southern port only three
days before the sailing of the transport, it had taken every hour of the
time to load the horses and equipment and supplies. Graham had found
that fighting is a very small part of soldiering, which is mostly
drudgery, and he had revised his idea of war several times since his
enlistment.
He thought as he sat cleaning his rifle that surely the preliminaries
were about over, and, if camp rumour counted for anything, that the day
of battle could not be more than one or two suns away. He would have
his gun in fine working order, for good luck might bring some shooting
on the morrow. At any rate his carbine must glisten when he becomes
part of to-morrow's guard, and he hoped that he would be put right on
the point of the advance picket. He hadn't had a shave in three weeks,
and his uniform was sweat-stained and dusty, and he could not hope to
look spick and span; but his gun could be shiny, and he knew Lieutenant
Wagner well enough by that time to have learned that a clean gun counted
for more with him than a clean shirt. So he hoped and prayed that he
would be selected for some duty that was worth while.
The brigades under General Bell, which had been landed at Alta Gracia
with difficulty, were pressing forward with all haste to cut off a
garrison of Germans that had been thrown into Puerto Cabello from the
German cruisers, and to prevent the arrival of reinforcements which were
being rushed to their aid from Caracas. Reports from native scouts and
communications from General Manana himself placed the number of these
reinforcements at from five to seven thousand. General Bell doubted
that this force was so large, but was anxious to meet it, whatever its
size.
Despite the vigilance of the all too meagre patrol of warships for
Venezuelan waters which the United States had been able to spare from
the necessary guard for her Atlantic and Gulf ports, the forehanded and
ever-ready Kaiser had landed seven or eight thousand troops from a fleet
of transports at Cumana, and with characteristic German promptness had
occupied Caracas and Barcelona before Uncle Sam had been able to put any
troops on Venezuelan soil. It seemed nonsense for either Germany or the
United States to care to fight any battles down in that little
out-of-the-way place. They could find other more accessible and far
more important battle-grounds: but no, as the Monroe Doctrine forbade
Germany to make a foothold in Venezuela and her doing so was the casus
belli, the ethics of the affair demanded that there should be a bona
fide forcible ejectment of the Kaiser's troops from Venezuelan territory
by the United States. The battles there might be only a side issue, and
the real test of strength might come at any or all of a dozen places on
land and sea, but there must be some fighting done in Venezuela just to
prove that the cause of war was not fanciful.
General Bell's brigades were one under General Earnhardt, consisting of
the 5th, 7th, 10th and 15th Cavalry, and a second, including the 4th and
11th regular infantry, the 71st Ohio, and the 1st X----, under General
Cowles, with a battalion of engineers and four batteries of field
artillery. General Earnhardt's cavalry brigade was striving to reach
the Valencia road, the only passable route from Caracas to Puerto
Cabello, before the German force should pass. General Manana had sent a
courier to say that he would hold the Germans in check till Earnhardt's
arrival.
On the morning of April 2d Graham was among the advance pickets and
almost forgot his saddle pains and creaking joints in the excitement of
expected battle. For half a day Earnhardt pushed forward as fast as the
trail would permit. He had halted his troops for five minutes' rest
about noon, when a native on a wiry pony, riding like one possessed,
dashed into the picket and came near getting his head punched off before
he could make Graham understand that he was a friend with a message for
the _Americano capitan_. Graham carried him before General Earnhardt,
who at the head of his column was reclining on a bank beside the trail,
perspiring and dusty and brushing viciously at the flies and mosquitoes
that swarmed around him. The general did not change his position when
the native, who was clad in a nondescript but much-beribboned uniform,
slid from his horse and with a ceremonious bow and salute informed him
that he was Captain Miguel of General Manana's staff, and had the honour
to report that he was despatched by General Manana to say that, despite
that gentleman's earnest and desperate resistance, a large and
outnumbering force of German cavalry had forced a passage of the road to
Puerto Cabello about eleven o'clock that morning. While Captain Miguel
was delivering his elaborate message to the disgusted cavalryman, the
picket passed in an old soldier of the 10th who had been detailed as a
scout at the beginning of the campaign; and this scout rode up to report
just as the native captain finished speaking. Earnhardt turned
impatiently from Manana's aide to his own trusted man and said:
"Well, Morris, what is it?"
"Small force of German cavalry, sir, had a scrimmage with General
Manana's troops this morning on the Valencia road, and rode on in the
direction of Puerto Cabello."
"How many Germans got through?" asked the general.
"All of them, sir; about two troops, as near as I could count."
"And how many men did Manana have?" the question came sharply.
"Something like fifteen hundred I should judge, sir, from the sound of
the firing and what I could see," answered the scout.
General Earnhardt, without rising, turned with unconcealed contempt to
Captain Miguel and said:
"My compliments to General Manana, and he's a ---- old fraud and I don't
want to have anything more to do with him;" and while the red-splashed
aide was trying to solve the curt message which he but half understood,
the trumpeter at a word from the angry cavalryman sounded _mount_ and
_forward_ and the brigade was again off at top speed, hoping still to
cut off the main relief force sent out from Caracas. General Earnhardt
considered himself a lucky soldier to find that this force had not
passed when at last he reached the road (which was hardly worthy of the
name highway, though one of the thoroughfares of Venezuela); and he
hastily disposed his forces to meet the German advance.
It was not long in coming. The crack of a rifle was the first notice
Corporal Graham had that he was about to be under fire. He felt a cold
breeze blow upon his back for a moment, and then as the popping began to
approach a rattle the joy of contest entered his soul and sent his blood
bounding.
But the joy was short-lived. When the Germans came near enough to see
that they were opposed by men in Uncle Sam's uniform, and not by the
nagging natives who had been popping harmlessly away at them from the
roadside, they decided it was best not to be too precipitate. They
stopped and began to feel for the American line. After some desultory
sharpshooting they finally located it, and quieted down to wait till the
German commander could get his little army up and into line of battle.
Then Hayward Graham had to sit still and hold his gun while the
exhilaration and enthusiasm died down in him like the fiz in a glass of
soda-water. He had worked his nerves up to such a tension that the
reaction was nothing less than painful, and he was full of impatience
and profanity. He could hardly wait for to-morrow, when Germany and
Uncle Sam would get up after a good night's rest and lay on like men.
Again what was his unspeakable disgust and almost unbearable
disappointment when the next morning came and he was detailed as stable
guard, and given charge of the 10th's corral, quite a distance in rear
of the line of battle and absolutely out of all danger. Profanity was a
lame and feeble remedy for that situation. He sat down and growled.
"Oh, for an assorted supply of languages in which to separately and
collectively and properly consign this whole bloody system of details to
the cellar of Hades!"
A veteran sergeant of Graham's troop, who on occasions wore a medal of
honour on his blouse, and at all times bore an unsightly scar on his
cheek as a souvenir of Wounded Knee, sought to soothe the young man's
feelings.
"It all comes along in the run of the business, corporal," he said.
"Soldiering is not all fighting. A man earns his money by doing whatever
duty is assigned to him."
Graham answered with heat: "I didn't come into this nasty, sweaty,
horse-smelly business for any such consideration as fifteen dollars a
month and feed, and if I am to miss the scrapping and the glory I prefer
to cut the whole affair."
His temper improved, however, as the day began to drag itself away with
no sound of conflict from the battle-line save the occasional pop of a
pot-shot by the pickets, and as the rumour began to leak back to the
corral that both sides must be waiting for their guns to come up. This
was doubtless true: for the four batteries of American artillery arrived
late in the afternoon, and the infantry brigade was all up by nightfall.
*CHAPTER V*
The two small armies were separated by the valley of a small stream
which ran in a broad circle around the low wooded hills or range of
hills upon which the Germans were entrenched. This valley was from a
mile to a mile and a half wide, and the water-course was much nearer the
outer or American side. The bed of this stream would furnish an
excellent breastwork or entrenchment for the American troops if they
should see fit to use it, but it was not tenable by the Germans because
it was at most all points subject to an enfilading fire from the
American position. The surface of the valley was slightly broken and
undulating on the German side, but clear of timber and covered only with
grass, while on the American side the rise was more precipitous and
covered with a scattering growth of trees and bush.
On arriving and looking over the ground General Bell ordered that during
the night his artillery should be placed and concealed on the commanding
heights which his position afforded; and that his fighting-line,
composed of the 5th and 15th Cavalry as his left wing, the 1st X---- as
his centre, and the 4th and 11th Infantry as his right wing, be moved
forward down the slope and into the bed of the stream, leaving as a
reserve the 71st Ohio and the 10th Cavalry located approximately in rear
of the centre of his line of battle. The 7th Cavalry he had sent out
toward Puerto Cabello to hold in check any possible German troops that
might appear from that quarter.
Corporal Hayward Graham, back at the 10th's corral, had recovered his
spirits as the day dragged along without any sound of battle, and he
began to congratulate himself that he would finish up in good time all
details that would keep him out of the fighting. When he walked over to
the line late in the afternoon, however, and learned that the whole
regiment was to be held out of the fight as a reserve, he immediately
surmised that the 10th was kept out of it because they were negroes, and
that the others from the general down wanted to scoop all the glory for
the white soldiery,--and again he sat down and cursed the negro blood in
his veins. The only salve to his outraged spirit was the information
that those high and mighty prigs of the 71st were also to miss the
glory. He even chuckled when he thought of the chagrin of Lieutenant
Morgan and pictured to himself the scene of the lieutenant's meeting
with Miss Elise Phillips if he should have to go back and explain to her
how he came not to be under fire. Then he remembered Helen Phillips and
the crimson pennant locked up in his trunk, and he felt that the whole
war would count for naught if he had no chance to do something worthy of
that pennant and of her. He wandered listlessly along the lines and
tried to forget his troubles in listening to the talk of the fortunates
who were going in.
He came to where a crowd of 1st X---- men were chaffing a squad of the
71st for "taking a gallery-seat at the show." Corporal Billie Catling
of the 71st replied that they took the "gallery-seat" under orders and
were put behind the 1st X---- to see that they didn't dodge a fight
again like they did in Cuba.
"That's a damn lie!" came the 1st X----'s rejoinder in chorus; to which
one of them added, "The 1st X---- never ran out of any fight in Cuba,
and you gallery-gods can go to sleep or go to the devil, for we'll stay
here till hell freezes over so thick you can skate on the ice."
"Well, you may not have run _out_ of any fight in Cuba, but it's blamed
certain you didn't _run in_to one," retorted the 71st's spokesman.
"Now, sonny," yelled the X---- man, "don't get sassy because you're not
permitted to sit down along with your betters. Run along and wait for
the second table with the niggers!"
The 71st's contingent could not find a suitable retort to this sally,
and, as fighting was out of the question, they walked away muttering
imprecations amid the jeers of the men from X----.
Graham enjoyed the discomfiture of the 71st; but he was more than ever
convinced that the colour of the 10th accounted for its being robbed of
a chance for fame in this campaign: and he went back to his duty in a
mutinous mood. He could not know that General Bell had held this
veteran negro regiment in reserve because of its proved steadiness and
valour; nor that he had placed the untried 1st X---- in his centre
because it would thus be in the easiest supporting distance of his
reserves.
The battle opened on April 3d the moment it became light enough for the
gunners to locate the half-hidden German lines and artillery. For
awhile the cannoneers had it all between themselves; and in this duel
the advantage was with the Americans, for their position gave them
better protection--the fighting-line being sheltered by the stream-bed
and the guns and reserves by the hill. The Germans were entrenched on a
hill as high as the Americans, but it was much flatter and afforded less
natural cover.
After two or three hours of pounding the Germans with his artillery,
which was evidently inflicting great damage, General Bell ordered his
line forward to carry the German position by assault. Then the battle
began in earnest. The German machine-guns opened on the American line
as it rose out of the stream-bed and began its slow and terrible journey
across the open valley by short rushes. The first breath of lead and
iron that dashed in the faces of the American troops as they stood up
began the work of death; and it came so promptly and so viciously that
it overwhelmed the raw discipline and untempered metal of the 1st X----;
for before advancing thirty paces the line wavered and broke and
retreated ignobly to the sheltering bank of the stream. Not all the
regiment broke at once; but the break and stampede of one company
quickly spread along the entire regimental front, and back into the
ditch they dived. Some of the officers cursed and commanded and
entreated; but to no purpose. The wings of the American line were
advancing steadily but slowly, standing up for a few moments to dash
forward a dozen yards, and then lying as close to the ground as possible
while returning the terrible fire from the hills in front of them.
General Bell from his position of vantage saw the failure of the 1st
X---- to advance, and waited a few moments in hope that a half-dozen
officers who were recklessly exposing themselves in their attempts to
urge the men forward might succeed in their efforts. As it became
evident that the regiment would not face the deadly fire of the Germans,
however, and as the wings of the battle-line were diverging as they
advanced because of the formation of the ground in their front, General
Bell waited no longer, but ordered forward both the 10th Cavalry and the
71st Ohio. These came over the hill on the run and dropped down the
slope into the water-course, where the heroic handful of officers were
still making frantic efforts to have the 1st X---- go forward. A
captain was violently berating his men for their cowardice and imploring
them to advance, while his first lieutenant squeezed down behind the
bank was yelling at them not to move. A major of one battalion was
standing up straight and fully exposed, waving his sword and appealing
to his men by every token of courage, while another major was lying as
close to the bottom of the ditch as a spreading-adder. At places the
men seemed to want to move, while the officers crouched in fear; while
at others officers by no amount of commands or entreaties could get a
man out of the ditch. A panic of terror seemed to be upon the regiment
which the few untouched spirits were not able to overcome by any power
of sharp commands, or violent pleading, or reckless examples of courage.
The boys of the 71st and the negro troopers of the 10th did not treat
the X---- men tenderly as they passed over them. They jumped down upon
them as they lay in the ditch and tramped upon them or kicked them out
of the way contemptuously, while the fear-smitten creatures were as
unresentful as hounds. Corporal Graham, near the left flank of the 10th,
heard an officer of the 71st yell as they passed over the ditch, "Why
don't you go forward? What the devil are you waiting for?" to which
Billie Catling, as he knocked a cowering X---- man from his path, cried
out in answer, "It's too hot for 'em, captain. They are going to stay
here till this hell freezes over!"
As many perhaps as a fourth of the 1st X----, officers and men, fell in
with the 71st and the 10th and bravely charged with them up the long
slope. The remainder waited till the battle was so far ahead of them
that their belated advance could not wipe out the black shame of
cowardice.
In the hurry of their rush into the breach the adjoining flanks of the
10th and the 71st overlapped and were confused; but it was well that the
two regiments were sent to replace the one, for the loss was appalling
as they surged forward toward the German lines, and they were not long
in being thinned out to an uncrowded basis.
The first sight of a man struck and falling to the ground shook Corporal
Graham's nerves, and he had to pull himself together sharply to save
himself from the weakening horror death always had for him. He turned
his eyes resolutely away from the first half-dozen, that were knocked
down, and applied himself religiously and consciously to the prescribed
method of advancing by rushes; but all his faculties were alert to the
dangers of the situation, and he could not shake off his keen sense of
peril and of the tragedies around him. Not for long did he suffer thus,
however, for as he rose up from the grass for one rush forward a bullet
grazed his shin--and changed his whole nature in a twinkling. It did
him no real damage and little blood came from the wound, but the pain
was intense. He dropped on the earth and grabbed his leg to see what
the harm was, and was surprised to find himself uninjured save for the
burning, stinging sensation. Then he forgot everything but his pain,
and became as pettishly angry in a moment as if he had collided with a
rocking-chair in the dark. In that moment he conceived a personal
enmity and grudge against the whole German army, and proceeded to avenge
his injury on a personal basis. He became as cool and collected as if
he were playing a game of checkers, and went in a business-like way
about reducing the distance between himself and the gentlemen who had
hurt his shin. His anger had dissolved his confusion and neutralized
the horrors that were at first upon him. He was more than ever
conscious of the falling men about him; but he had his debt to pay,--let
them look after their own scores. He saw Lieutenant Wagner stagger and
fall and raise up and drag himself into a protecting depression in the
ground; he saw the colonel of the 1st X----, fighting with a carbine in
his hand right alongside the black troopers of the 10th, drop in a heap
and lie so still he knew he was dead; he saw Corporal Billie Catling
straighten up and pitch his gun from him as a bullet hit him in the face
and carried away the whole back of his head;--yet Graham stopped not to
help or to think. He had only one purpose--to reach the man who hit his
shin. He saw man after man, many of his own troop, drop in death or
blood or agony--and his purpose did not change. Then, a little distance
to his left and somewhat to his rear, he saw Colonel Phillips of the
71st go down in the grass; he saw him try to gain his feet, and fail;
and then try to drag himself from his very exposed position, and fail.
Then Corporal Graham forgot his personal grievance, and thought of the
girl and the pennant. He ran across to Colonel Phillips and, finding him
shot through both legs, picked him up and carried him for forty yards or
more through the hurricane of lead to where the Valencia road made a cut
in the long slope; and in this cut, down behind a sheltering curve, he
placed him. Not a moment too promptly had the trooper acted, for of all
the unfortunates who had fallen anywhere near Colonel Phillips not one
but was found riddled with the bullets of the machine-guns when the
battle was ended. Graham's own hat was shot away from his head and the
officer in his arms received another wound as he bore him out of harm's
way.... At the Colonel's request the negro tried to remove the boot
from the bleeding right leg, which was broken below the knee. As this
was so painful Colonel Phillips handed him a pearl-handled pocket-knife
and asked him to cut the boot-top away. Graham did so, and bound a
handkerchief around the leg to stop the flow of blood. Having made
every other disposition for the officer's comfort which his situation
permitted, he looked out in the direction of the battle so wistfully
that the Colonel told him he might return to the fight. He did so with
a rush, absent-mindedly pocketing the pearl-handled knife as he ran.
[Illustration: "CARRIED HIM FOR FORTY YARDS OR MORE THROUGH THE
HURRICANE OF LEAD."]
The firing-line had advanced quite a distance while Graham was rescuing
Colonel Phillips and ministering to him; and in his overweening desire
to be right at the front of the battle he ran forward without the
customary stops for lying down and firing. That they should carry him
safe through that driving rain of bullets, despite his indifference to
the ordinary rules of the desperate game, was more than reasonably could
have been expected of the Fates which had protected him up to that
moment from serious harm; and--down he crashed in the grass and lay
still without design, while the battle passed farther and farther up the
long slope, away from him. In dim half-consciousness he realized what
had befallen him; and the only two ideas which found place in his mind
were the uncomfortable thought that he would be buried without a bath,
and a feeling of satisfaction that the god of battle at least had
dignified him with a more respectable wound than a bruised shin-bone.
*CHAPTER VI*
When two strong, alert men, disputing, come to the final appeal to
battle, the decision is usually made quickly. It is only the weak or
the unprepared who prolong a fight.
So was it that late summer in 191- saw an end of war between Germany and
the United States--thanks partially to the intervention of the Powers.
And with what result? The result does appear so inadequate! The Monroe
Doctrine was still unshaken--and that was worth much perhaps; but ten
thousand sailors and the flower of two navies were under the tide, and
half as many soldiers dead of fever or fighting in Venezuela; small
armies of newly made orphans and widows in Germany and America; mourning
and despair in the houses of the desolate,--some hope in the heart of
the pension attorney; a new set of heroes on land and sea,--at the top.
Long, who at the battle of the Bermudas, finding his own small craft and
a wounded German cruiser left afloat of twenty-odd vessels that had
begun the fight, in answer to her demand for his surrender, had
torpedoed and sunk the German promptly, and to his own everlasting
astonishment had managed to save his neck and prevent the battle's
becoming a Kilkenny affair by beaching his riddled boat and keeping her
flag above water: from Long an endless list of real and fictitious
heroes, dwindling by nice gradations in importance as they increased in
numbers, till they touched bottom in the raw volunteer infantryman whose
wildest tale of adventure was of his exemplary courage in a great storm
that swept the God-forsaken sand-bar on which his company had been
stationed,--to prevent the German navy's purloining the new-laid
foundations of a fort to guard Catfish River.
In the long list of heroes Colonel Hayne Phillips was not without
prominence. The sailormen were first for their deeds were more numerous
and spectacular; but among the soldiers who were in the popular eye he
was easily the most lauded. He was a volunteer; and that was everything
in his favour, for it put him on a par with members of the regular
establishment of ten times his merit. He was nothing more than a brave
and patriotic man with a taste for the military and with but little of a
professional soldier's knowledge or training; and yet his demonstrated
possession of those two qualities alone, patriotism and personal courage
(which most men indeed possess, and which are so inseparably associated
with one's thought of a regular army officer as to add nothing to his
fame or popularity),--the possession of these two simple American
virtues had brought to Colonel Phillips the enthusiastic admiration of a
hero-loving people, and--what was of more personal advantage to him--the
consequent consideration and favour of party-managers in need of a
popular idol.
These political prestidigitators, mindful of the political successes of
the soldiers, Taylor, Grant and Roosevelt, took him and his war record
in hand and proceeded to work a few easy miracles. The love and
plaudits of a great State and a great nation for a favourite regiment
coming home with honour and with the glory of hard-won battle upon its
standards were skilfully turned to account for partisan political uses.
The deeds and virtues of a thousand men were deftly placed to the credit
of one, and before the very eyes of the people was the legerdemain
wrought by which one political party and one Colonel Phillips drew all
the dividends from the investment of treasure and of blood and of
patriotic energy and devotion which that thousand men had made without a
thought of politics or pay.
The partisan press, as always advertent to the peculiar penchant
hero-worship has for ignoring patent absurdities, overdrew the
picture--but no harm was done: for while truth of fact was disregarded
and abused, essential truth suffered no hurt. Although enterprising
newspapers did furnish for the political campaign one photogravure of
Colonel Phillips leading the 71st regiment over the German earthworks at
the battle of Valencia, and another of him in the act of receiving the
German commander's sword on that occasion--these things did the gallant
Colonel no injustice. He gladly would have attended to those little
matters of the surrender in place of the veteran officer of regulars who
officiated. It was through no fault of the 71st's commander that
shortness of breath made it impossible for him to keep pace with his men
up that long slope; nor in the least to his discredit that he was shot
down in the rear of the regiment and his life saved through the bravery
of a negro trooper.
The Colonel's courage was indeed of the genuine metal and he willingly
would have met all the dangers and performed all the mighty deeds
accredited to him if opportunity had come to him. Being conscious of
this willingness in his own soul, he took no measures to correct
impressions of his prowess made upon the minds of misinformed thousands
of voters. The error was not in a mistaken public opinion as to his
valour, for that was all that was claimed for it, but in the people's
belief in certain spectacular exhibitions of that valour which were
really totally imaginary. He knew that he was as brave a man as the
people thought: why then quibble over facts that were entirely
incidental? The hero-idolaters swallowed in faith and ecstasy all the
details which an inventive and energetic press bureau could turn out,
and cried for more: and the nomination for the presidency practically
had been tendered to him by acclamation almost a year before the
convention assembled which officially commissioned him its
standard-bearer.
Colonel Phillips' campaign was attended by one wild hurrah from start to
finish. It was pyrotechnic. Other candidates for this office of all
dignity have awaited calmly at home the authoritative call of the
people; but the materia medica of politics teaches that to quicken a
sluggish pulse in the electorate a hero must be administered directly
and vigorously into the system. So the Colonel was sent upon his mighty
"swing around the circle."
In that sweeping vote-drive many weapons were displayed, but only one
saw any real service. That was the Colonel's gray and battered campaign
hat. He wore it for the sake of comfort, to be sure; but, like the log
cabin and grandfather's hat of the Harrisons, the rails of Lincoln, and
the Rough Riders uniform of Roosevelt, it was the tumult-raising and
final answer to every argument and appeal of the opposition. It uprooted
party loyalties, silenced partisan prejudices, overrode eloquence and
oratory, beat back and battered down the shrewd attacks and defences of
political manipulation, and contemptuously kicked aside anything
savouring of serious political reasoning. The convention which
nominated him had indeed formulated and declared an admirable platform
upon which he should go before the people, and he placed himself
squarely on that platform; but the gaze of the people never got far
enough below that campaign hat to notice what its wearer was standing
on.
Colonel Phillips was a sincere, honest, candid, plain-spoken
politician--for politician he was if he was anything, while yet so
fearless of party whips and mandates that his name was synonymous with
honesty and lofty civic purpose. So, feeling his own purposes ringing
true to the declarations of his party's platform he did not deem it
necessary to direct the distracted attention of the people to these
prosy matters of statecraft when they were taking such a friendly
interest in his headgear. If they were willing to blindly follow the
hat, he knew in his honest heart that the man under it would carry that
hat along paths of political righteousness.
He was indeed playing upon every chord of popular feeling and seeking
the favour of every man with a ballot. He had always fought to win in
every contest he had entered, from single-stick to war, and he made no
exception of this race for the chieftaincy of the Republic. It was to
be expected, therefore, that the large negro vote in pivotal States, as
well as his natural love of justice and his admiration for a brave
soldiery, would lead him to pay enthusiastic and deserved tribute to the
negro troops who had served in the Venezuelan campaign. He paid these
tributes religiously and brilliantly in every speech he made, but always
in general and impersonal terms and without a hint of his own debt to a
corporal of the 10th Cavalry. There was no need for such minutiae of
course, for that was a purely personal affair between him and an unknown
negro who might be dead and buried for all he knew; while, besides, a
recital of these unimportant details would necessitate a fruitless
revision of other incidental ideas now pleasantly fixed in the public
mind. He sometimes entertained his wife and daughters with the story of
how a trooper of the 10th had saved his life, but never did he sound the
personal note in public.
Colonel Phillips made votes with every speech and it looked as if he
would win. He deserved to win, for he was honest, capable, clean. As
election day drew near the opposing candidate received a confidential
letter from his campaign manager in which that veteran politician said:
"I have lost and won many hats in my political career, but this is the
first time I have ever been called upon to fight a hat--just a hat--to
settle a Presidency. This is a hat campaign; and you have evidently
made the mistake of going bareheaded all your life. You seem, too, to
have limited yourself to a home-grown ancestry. The Colonel is simply
wearing a hat and claiming kin with everything from a Plymouth Rock
rooster to a palmetto-tree. The newspapers are getting on my nerves
with their unending references to that campaign-hat and Phillips'
ding-dong about the unity and virility of American blood and his
mother's being a South Carolinian."
* * * * *
"The cards are running against us."
*CHAPTER VII*
Colonel Phillips' daughters were enjoying life to the full in their long
summer outing on the St. Lawrence. The older, Elise, had just finished
with the schools and was free from many of the restraints which the
strict and old-fashioned ideas of her mother had put upon her during her
girlhood, and was filled with a lively enjoyment of her first
untrammelled association with the males of her kind. Helen was still a
girl, and her mother yet threw about her all the guards and fences that
properly hedge about the days of maidenhood. But this did not in the
slightest check the flow of Helen's joy in life, for the matter of sex
in her associates was not an element in her happiness. Boy or girl, it
mattered not to her, if her fellow in the hour's sport was quick-witted,
quick-moving and mischief-loving. The extent of her thoughts of love
was that it and its victims were most excellent objects of banter and
ridicule; and she found the incipient affair between Elise and Evans
Rutledge a source of much fun.
"Are you a hero?" she once asked Mr. Rutledge solemnly.
"Not to my own knowledge," Rutledge answered. "Why?"
"Because if you are you may be my brother sometime. Elise likes you a
little, I think, and she thinks your hair would curl beautifully if you
didn't crop it so close--but you will have to be a hero. You needn't
fear Mr. Morgan. He failed to be a hero when he had the chance, and now
his chance is gone. Nobody but a hero can interest Elise for keeps."
"When did Morgan have his chance?" asked Rutledge, amused at the
mischief-maker's plain speaking.
"He went to Venezuela in papa's regiment, but never had a shot fired at
him the whole time he was gone. That's what he did. Elise cannot love
a man like that."
"Perhaps it was not his fault. He may have been detailed to such duties
as kept him away from the shots."
"Yes, I think he says he was; but what of that? He wasn't in the
fighting, and that's what it takes to make a hero. Oh, I wish I were a
man. I would ride a horse and hunt lions and tigers, and I would have
gone to the war in Venezuela and nobody's orders would have kept me from
the firing-line--I believe that's what papa calls it--the place where
all the fun and danger is. When papa talks about it I can hear my heart
beat. Elise says she wouldn't be a man for anything; but I've heard her
say that she could love a man if he was a _man_--brave and strong--you
know--a man who did things. I would prefer to do the things myself. I
wouldn't love any man I ever saw--unless he was just like papa. What
regiment were you in, Mr. Rutledge?"
"I wasn't in any regiment," said Rutledge meekly.
"What! Didn't you volunteer?" asked Helen in surprise.
"I did not volunteer"--a trifle defiantly.
"Why?" Helen demanded scornfully. "If I had a brother and he had failed
to volunteer I would never have spoken to him again! I thought all
South Carolinians were fighters."
"I had other things to attend to," said Rutledge shortly. "Where is
Miss Phillips this afternoon?"
"She's out on the river with Mr. Morgan. They will not be back till
dinner, so you would just as well sit down here and talk to me.... But
I'm sorry you didn't volunteer--you will never be my brother now.... And
I was beginning to like you so much."
"I thank you, little girl, for your attempt to think well of me. I see
that I have sinned past your forgiveness in not being a hero. Remember
that it is only because ninety and nine men are commonplace that the
hundredth may be a hero. I am one of the ninety and nine that make the
hero possible--a modest king-maker, in a way. A hero must have some one
else to fight for, or die for, or live for. He cannot do these things
for himself, for that would make him anything but a hero. So you see
that the second person is as necessary to the process of hero-making as
the hero himself. It's all in the process and not in the product,
anyway. It's the hero in act and not in fact, in the making and not in
the taking, that enjoys his own heroism and is worth our interest. While
he is making himself he thrills with the effort and with the uncertainty
as to whether he will get a commission, a lathe-and-plaster arch, or a
court of inquiry; and we the ninety and nine, we thrill with the
gambling fever and make wagers that his trolley will get off the wire.
But when he gets himself done--clean done, so to speak, wrapped in
tinfoil and ready for use--then there is nothing left for the hero to do
but to pose and await our applause--which is most unheroic; and we,
after one whoop, forget him in the excitement of watching the next
candidate risk his neck. Besides, the hero's work in hero-making is
temporary and limited, for he stops with making one; but we, when we
have finished with one, turn to the making of another, and our work is
never done. While I am not even one hero, I have helped to make a
hundred. Come now--you are generous and unselfish--which would you most
admire, one finished hero listening for applause, or a hero-maker, who,
without reward or the hope of reward, modestly and continuously assists
in thus bringing glory to an endless procession of his fellows?"
"You think you are brilliant, Mr. Rutledge," answered Helen with an
impatient toss of her head, "but you can't confuse me by any such talk
as that. You needn't think you will be able to persuade Elise by any
long jumble of words that you are greater than a hero. A king-maker!"
She laughed mockingly at him.
"Don't fear that I will use any sophistry or doubtful method to become
your brother," Rutledge rejoined amusedly. "I have only one thing to
tell Miss Phillips."
"And what is that?" asked Helen with interest.
"I am inexpressibly pained to refuse your lightest wish," said Rutledge
grandiloquently, "but to grant your request would be--telling; and I
may--not tell,--perhaps,--even Miss Phillips."
"Do not suffer so," said Helen with an assumption of great indifference.
"I don't care to hear it."
"Yes, I predict that you will be delighted to listen to it when it is
told to you," said Rutledge confidently. "And it will be beyond doubt.
But you are too young to hear such things yet. Be patient. You'll get
older if you live long enough."
It fretted Helen to be told that she was young, as she was told a dozen
times a day--not that she disliked her youth, but because of the
suggestion that she was not free to do as she pleased; and her eyes
began to flash at Rutledge's taunt and her mind to form a suitable
expression of resentment--when that gentleman walked away from her
smiling at her petulant anger.
Evans Rutledge had more interest in Helen's words about her sister than
he showed in his manner or conversation. He had not told Elise what his
heart had told him for many days past, though she did not need spoken
words to know. He, manlike, thought that he was keeping this knowledge
of his supreme affection for her a secret in his own soul, to be
delivered as a startling and effective surprise when an impressive and
strategic opportunity should come to tell her of it. She, womanlike,
read him as easily as a college professor is supposed to read Greek, and
concerned herself chiefly with feigning ignorance of his interest in
her.
Elise's true attitude toward Rutledge was a sort of neutrality. She was
neither for him nor against him. She was attracted by everything she
saw or knew of him, and looked upon him with that more than passing
interest which every woman has for a man who has asked or will ask her
to be his wife.
On the other hand she was decided she could not accept Rutledge. She
had but crossed the threshold of her unfettered young womanhood, and her
natural and healthy zest in its pleasures overcame any natural impulse
to choose a mate. Added to this were the possibilities held out in her
romantic imagination as the increasing newspaper prophecies concerning
her father induced day-dreams of court-like scenes and princely suitors
when she should be the young lady of the White House, the most exalted
maiden in great America, with the prerogative of a crown princess. A
temporary prerogative surely, but well-nigh irresistible when combined
with the compelling charm of American womanhood, that by right of genius
assumes the high positions for which nature has endowed the gentlewomen
of this republic, and by right of fine adaptability and inborn
queenliness establishes and fortifies them, as if born to the purple, in
the social high places of older civilizations.
Elise Phillips, with all her democratic training, with her admirable
good common sense, with her adorable kindliness of heart and
friendliness of spirit for every man and woman of high or low degree,
with her sincere admiration for true manliness and pure womanliness
unadorned by any tinsel of arbitrary rank, with all her contempt for the
shams and pretences of decayed nobilities parading dishonoured titles,
was yet too much a woman and too full of the romantic optimism of life's
spring-time not to dream of princely youths wearing the white flower of
blameless lives who would come in long procession to attend her
temporary court.
And in that procession as it even now passed before her imagination, she
kept watch for _him_,--the ideal of her maiden soul, the master of her
virgin heart;--_him_, with the blue eyes and flaxen hair and the
commanding figure that looked down upon all other men;--_him_, with the
look and gesture of power that men obeyed and women adored, and that
became tender and adoring only for her;--_him_, with a rank that made
him to stand before kings with confidence, and a clean life that might
stand before her white soul and feel no shame;--_him_, with a strength
and courage that failed not nor faltered along the rocky paths by which
the laurel and Victoria Crosses grow, and that yet would falter and
tremble with love in her presence. Oh, the wonderful dreams of Youth!
How real they are, and how powerful in changing the issues of life and
of death.
Had Rutledge taken counsel of his mother or heeded her disapprobation of
Miss Elise Phillips, he would have saved himself at least from the pain
of a flouted love; and if he could have made his heart obey his mother's
wish he would have avoided the stress of many heartaches and jealousies,
and of slow-dying hope.
Mrs. Rutledge had her young womanhood in the heart-burning days of the
Great War, and the partisan impress then seared into her young soul was
ineradicable. She had a youth that knew fully the passions and the
sorrows of that awful four years of blood and strife: for every man of
her house, father and five brothers, had she seen dead and cold in their
uniforms of gray; and her antipathy for "those people" who had sent
anguish and never-ending desolation into her life might lie dormant if
memory was unprovoked, but it could never change nor lose its sharp
vehemence.
She had objected to Elise from the moment her son showed a fancy for
her, and began quietly to sow in his mind the seeds she hoped would grow
into dislike and aversion. She told him that "those people," as she
invariably called persons who came from that indefinite stretch of
country which her mind comprehended in the term "the North," were "not
of our sort,"--that they were intelligent and interesting in a
way;--that Elise Phillips was unquestionably fascinating to a young man,
that her money had given her a polish of mind and manner that was
admittedly attractive; but that she was not fitted to be the life
companion of a man whose culture and gentlemanliness was not a product
of schools and of dollars but a heritage from long generations of gentle
ancestors who had bequeathed to him converging legacies of fine and
gentle breeding.
Evans Rutledge, however, was of a new day; and his mother's theory that
good blood was a Southern and sectional product found no place in his
thought. He was tender, however, and considerate of his mother's
prejudices, and was never so rude as to brush them aside contemptuously.
He always treated them with deference and tried always to meet them with
some show of reason. In the case of Elise Phillips he sought to placate
his mother's whim and capture her prejudice by tacitly agreeing to the
general proposition while excepting Elise from it by the use of Colonel
Phillips' well-worn statement that his mother was a South Carolinian.
"That makes Miss Phillips a granddaughter of South Carolina," said
Rutledge to his mother; "and surely there cannot be much degeneracy in
two generations,--especially when the Southern blood was of the finest
strain."
Mrs. Rutledge admitted that the argument was not without force, but
solemnly warned her son there was no telling when the common strain
might crop out.
"What's bred in the bone will come out in the blood," she said, "and bad
blood is more assertive than good."
Evans loved his mother better than any other soul except Elise, and he
would go far and deny himself much to obey even her most unreasonable
whim, but his love for Elise was too fervid a passion to be stifled for
the sake of a war-born prejudice. He would win her; yes, he must win
her; and he waited only the winning moment to plead openly for his
happiness.
*CHAPTER VIII*
It was a morning in late September that Elise and Rutledge went for
their last canoe ride on the mighty river. Mrs. Phillips and her
daughters were to leave for home on an early afternoon train, and Mrs.
Rutledge and Evans for Montreal an hour later.
It was a day to live. By an occasional splash of yellow or red among
the green that lined the riverside and clothed the diminutive island in
the stream, Summer gave notice that in thirty days Nature must find
another tenant; and a taste of chill in the air was Winter's advance
agent looking over the premises and arranging to decorate them in the
soberer grays and browns for the coming of his serious and mighty
master.
The lassitude of the hot days was gone, and life and impulse were in the
autumn breeze. There was not a suggestion of melancholy or decay or
death in earth, air or sky. It was more as if a strong man was risen
from drowsy sleep and stretching his muscles and breathing a fresh air
into his lungs for a day of vigorous doing. Not exhaustion but
strength, not languor but briskness, not the end but the beginning, was
indicated in every breath and aspect of Nature.
It was a morning not to doubt but to believe: and Rutledge felt the
tightening spring in mind and body and heart, and the bracing influence
made his love and his hopes to vibrate and thrill. As with easy strokes
he sent the canoe through the water he drank in the fresh beauty of
Elise as an invigorating draught. She was so _en rapport_ with the
morning and the sunlight and the life as she sat facing and smiling upon
him, her cheeks aglow with health and her face alight with the exquisite
keenness of joy in living, that she seemed to him the incarnate spirit
of the day.
The crisp tingle in the air was not without its spell upon Elise. No
blood could respond more quickly than hers to Nature's quickening
heart-beats, and it sang in her pulses with unaccustomed sensations that
morning. She looked upon Rutledge as he smartly swung the paddle, and
was struck with the strength he seemed to possess without the coarse
obtrusion of muscle. She accredited the easiness of his movements to
the smooth water, in which he had kept the canoe because of his desire
to be as little distracted as possible from contemplation of Elise's
charms and graces. The swing of his body and arms was as graceful as if
he had learned it from a dancing-master, and there was a touch of
daintiness about it which was his only personal trait that Elise had
positively designated in her mind as not belonging to her ideal man.
She did not object to it on its own account, but surmised it might have
its origin in some vague unmanly weakness--and weakness in a man she
despised.
She had talked to him of a score of things since they had embarked,
passing rapidly from one to another in order to keep him away from the
one subject he seemed attracted to from any point of the conversational
compass. At the moment she had been so clearly impressed with his
almost feminine gracefulness the conversation was taking a dangerous
swerve, she thought; and for a minute she was at a loss how to divert
the course of language from the matter nearest his heart. In a blind
effort to do so she unthinkingly challenged him to prove his sterner
strength which she had never seen put to the test.
"It's easy going here, isn't it?" she said. "What a pity we couldn't
have one visit to the island before we go away."
"Do you wish to go there?" asked Rutledge.
"I would like to," she replied, "but of course we cannot attempt it
without an experienced canoe-man. It is about time for us to return;
don't you think so?"
"That depends on whether you really want to go to the island," returned
Rutledge, who was quick to see and resent the intimation that he was not
equal to the business of putting her across the racing water between
them and the small cluster of trees and shrubs growing among a misshapen
pile of rocks nearly across the river.
"I am told no one but these half-breed guides have ever tried the
passage," he continued. "Not because it is so very dangerous, I
suppose, but because it is too small to attract visitors to try the
rough water."
"They can get to it easily from the other side, can't they? It seems so
near to that," said Elise.
"No. Jacques tells me that the narrow water on the other side runs like
a race-horse, and has many rocks to smash the canoe. Even going from
this side I would prefer to leave you here, Miss Phillips, and of course
that would make the visit without inducement to me."
"You allow your carefulness of me and your politeness to me to reason
you out of the danger," said Elise, without any sinister purpose; but
Rutledge recalled Helen Phillips' words about Elise and heroes, and
became uncomfortable.
"I used them to reason you out of the danger," he replied. "If the
argument does not appeal to you I am ready for your orders."
"Then let's go over," said Elise, prompted half by the challenge in his
eyes and half by her subconscious desire to see him vindicate his
feminine grace.
"I admit I am a coward," Rutledge remarked as he turned the canoe toward
the island.
"Oh, if you confess to being afraid!" said Elise in mingled surprise and
pity. "I certainly cannot insist. Let's return to the hotel."
"You mistake me," Rutledge replied as he sent the light craft on toward
the rapids. "My cowardice is in permitting you to bully me into
carrying you into some danger. I should have the courage to refuse."
"You would have me believe in your courage, then, whether you choose
danger or avoid it. That is artful," Elise rejoined.
The word "artful" nettled Rutledge, and he put his resentment into the
strokes which sent the canoe forward. If Elise Phillips could believe
of him that he would attempt to establish a reputation for courage by a
trick of words, words would be inadequate, of course, to defend him from
the imputation. There was no chance now to convince her, he thought,
save to try the passage. So, despising the weakness which would not let
him point the canoe homeward, he set his strength against the increasing
current, and soon lost thought of the argument in the zest of sparring
with the river.
Elise became absorbedly interested in the contest and in his handling of
the boat. The interest of both became more and more intense as the
water began to slap the canoe viciously and toss them with careless
strength. A wave rolling over a sunken rock rushed upon them with a
gurgle and swash and passed under the canoe with a heave and splash that
tilted them uncomfortably and threw a hatful of water over the side.
Another came with a more impatient toss, and Elise crouched upon the
seat to preserve her equilibrium. Rutledge looked round at her face,
which was unsmiling but without fear, and asked:
"Shall we go back?"
"No," the girl answered.
They soon found that the water was swifter than they had judged it from
the shore, and that they had not put across far enough up-stream to make
the island easily. They were nearing it, but the current was becoming
boisterous and they were drifting faster and faster down-stream.
Swifter water and rougher met the canoe at every paddle-stroke.
Rutledge with his back to Elise dropped on one knee in the water in the
canoe bottom and gave every energy to his work. If Elise had not been
with him he would have liked nothing better.
As for the girl, she would not insist on this wild ride again, but,
being in, she was having many thrills of pleasure. Rutledge's manner
gave her confidence that they would reach the island, but with how much
discomfiture she was as yet uncertain. She was drenched with water from
the slapping waves and the swiftly flying paddle, which was Rutledge's
only weapon against the wrath of the river. She saw in his resolute
efforts that their situation was at least serious if not dangerous, and
she hardly took her eyes from him; but with her closest scrutiny she did
not detect the slightest indecision or apprehension.
Only once did fear come to her, and that but for a moment. The struggle
was now quick and furious. They were in the mad whirl of crushing water
that tore alongside the island and was ripped and ground among the
bullying rocks. She heard Rutledge stifle a cry as he sent the canoe
out with a back-stroke that almost threw her overboard, and the rioting
current slammed them past a jagged vicious-looking rock just under the
river's surface which would have smashed their cockle-shell to
splinters. When she looked down upon it as they were shot past she
thought for an instant of death and dead men's bones. Then--
"Out! Quick--now!" yelled Rutledge, as with a strength that seemed as
much of will as of muscle, he shoved the canoe's nose up against the
island and held it for a moment against the fury of the water.
Elise rose at his sharp command and leaped lightly out upon a bare rock,
giving the canoe a back kick which sent it swinging around broad across
the current. As it swung off Rutledge, seeing no favourable place below
him to make another landing, quickly gave his end of the boat a cant
toward the island, dropped the paddle in the canoe, grabbed the mooring
chain and jumped for the land. He jumped and alighted unsteadily but
without further mishap than so far capsizing the canoe that it shipped
enough water to more than half submerge it and threaten to sink it. With
his effort to draw it up on the rock and save it from sinking entirely,
the water in the canoe rushed to the outer end, sending that completely
under and floating the paddle out and away. He yanked the canoe up on
the island and, turning, looked straight into Elise's eyes for ten
seconds without speaking.
"Why don't you say it?" the young woman asked with amused defiance.
"Say what?" inquired Rutledge.
"What you are dying to tell me."
"I love you," answered Rutledge simply.
"Oh! You--you--impudent--you horrible!" cried Elise with a gasp. "To
presume I would invite you to tell me--that! How dare you!"
"I dare anything for you," said Rutledge. "I love you and--"
"Stop! Not another word on that subject--lest your presumption become
unbearable! You know very well, Mr. Stupidity, that I expected you to
say 'I told you so.'"
"I have told you--so--your--exp--"
"Stop, I say! I will not listen to another word. Your persistence is
almost--insulting!"
"Insulting!" said Rutledge in amazement. "Then pardon me and I'll not
offend again;" and he turned to take a look at the fast-riding paddle as
it turned and flashed far down the river.
Elise was glad of the chance to gather her wits together and prepare a
defence against this abrupt method of wooing. Indeed she was on the
defensive against her own heart. One fact alone, however, would justify
her deliberation: that she was not certain of her own mind. Friendship
may halt and consider, admiration may sit in judgment; but love that
questions, or is of two minds, or hesitates, is not love.
She turned away from him and the river to give attention to this new
problem which was of more immediate interest to her than the question of
how they were to get away from the island. Rutledge came to her after
awhile.
"Miss Phillips," he said, "I have the honour to report that, while we
are prisoners on this island now, our imprisonment will not be lengthy.
Fortunately I saw Jacques on the other side of the river and made him
understand, I think, that we have lost our paddle. At any rate he put
off toward the hotel at great speed, and will be down with another canoe
I hope before you become tired of your island." And he added, as if to
relieve the tense situation: "While we wait I shall be glad to show you
over the premises and to talk about anything that you may prefer to
discuss."
Elise could not tell from the formal manner of Rutledge's words whether
he was really offended or humourously stilted in his speech. She could
be as coldly polite as any occasion demanded; but, believing that she
had effectually put an end to his love-making for the day, she met his
formality of manner in her naturally charming and friendly spirit.
"Sit down here then, and tell me where you learned to handle a canoe. I
did not know canoeing was a Southern sport."
"It is not," Rutledge said, taking the place she gave him at her feet.
"I was never in a canoe till I came here this summer."
"Now, Mr. Rutledge, don't ask too much of credulity. One surely cannot
become skilful without practice."
"I did not mean that I have never been on the water before," said
Rutledge; "but in my country we do not have these curved and graceful
canoes. We navigate our rivers with the primitive dugout or pirogue. I
have used one of those on my father's Pacolet plantation since I was a
boy. The dugout is made by hollowing out a section of a tree. That
makes the strongest and best boat, for it never leaks or gets smashed
up. It is very narrow and shallow, however, and it takes some skill to
handle it in a flood."
"Were you ever in a flood?--a worse flood than this?" asked Elise.
"Yes. When our little rivers get up they are as bad as this or worse.
I have seen them worse. During the great flood on the Pacolet some years
ago, when railroad bridges, mill dams, saw-mills, cotton mills, houses,
barns, cotton bales, lumber, cattle, men, women and children were all
engulfed in one watery burial, the little river was for six hours a
monster--a demon."
"Tell me about that," Elise said; and to entertain her Rutledge told her
at length the story of that cataclysm of piedmont South Carolina. He
went into the details without which such description is only awful, not
interesting. Many were the incidents of heroism and hairbreadth escapes
and unspeakable calamity which he related; and he told the stories with
such vividness of portraiture, dramatic fire and touches of pathos that,
with the roar of many waters actually pounding upon her ear-drums, Elise
could close her eyes and see the scenes he depicted.
In looking upon the pictures he drew with such living interest she found
herself straining her tight-shut eyes in search of his figure among the
throng that lined the river-bank or fought the awful flood. Time after
time as he described an act of heroic courage in words that burned and
glowed and crackled with the fire that could stir only an eye-witness or
an actor in the unstudied drama he was reproducing, she would clothe the
hero with Rutledge's form, identify his distinctive gestures and
movement and catch even the tones of his voice as it shouted against the
booming of the waters: but with studied regularity and distinctness
Rutledge at some point in every story, incidentally and apparently
unconsciously, would make it plain that the hero of that incident was a
person other than himself.
He might have told her, indeed, many things to his own credit:
especially of a desperate ride and struggle in one of those dugouts
which he had volunteered to make in order to prevent an old negro man
adrift on a cabin-top from going over Pacolet Dam Number 3, where so
many unfortunates went down and came not up again; but at no time could
Elise infer from his speech that he was the hero of his own story. Her
word "artful" still rankled in his memory, and he swore to his own soul
that she should never, never hear him utter a word that might show he
possessed or claimed to possess courage.
The only method by which Elise could deduce from his words the
conclusion that Rutledge was of courageous heart was that courage seemed
such a commonplace virtue among the people of his section that he
probably possessed his share of it. Her curiosity was finally aroused
to know whether by any artifice she might induce him to tell of his own
exploits, which his very reticence persuaded her must be many and
interesting, and she brought all her powers into play to draw him out:
but to no purpose. She refrained from any direct appeal to him in fear
that a personal touch might turn the conversation along dangerous lines;
and Rutledge, having been properly rebuked, waited for some intimation
of permission before presuming to discuss other than impersonal themes.
While indeed it only confirmed her woman's intuition, Elise was
unconsciously happier because of Rutledge's blunt statement of his love,
for it made certain a fact that was not displeasing to her. Yet she
would hold him at arm's length, for she could with sincerity bid him
neither hope nor despair. The glamour of her day-dreams made the
reading of her heart's message uncertain. Rutledge had not the
glittering accessories that attended the wooer of her visions; and yet
as he talked to her she was mentally placing him in every picture her
mind drew of the future, and was impressed that whether in the soft
scenes where knightly gallantry and grace wait upon fair women, or in
the stern dramas where bitter strength of mind and heart and body is
poured out in libation to the god of grinding conflict, he, in every
scene, looked all that became a man.
Rutledge's flow of narrative and Elise's absent-minded reverie were
broken in upon by the hail of Jacques, who was approaching them from
almost directly up-stream. His canoe was doing a grapevine dance as he
pushed it yet farther across the river and dropped rapidly down to a
landing on the far side of the island.
"Sacre! Wrong side!" he exclaimed when he came across and saw where
Rutledge had pulled his canoe out of the water. "Here I lose two canoe
sometime. How you mek him land?"
Rutledge did not answer the question but set about getting his canoe
across the island to the point designated by Jacques as the place for
leaving it. He had no desire to stay longer since all hope of further
_tete-a-tete_ with Elise was gone; and in a few minutes they were ready
to embark.
"No hard pull, but kvick paddle lak feesh-tail," said Jacques in
explaining the course by which they were to return, the which was
plainly beset with numberless rocks and shoals.
"Sweem out seex times befor I lairn road," he added as a comforting
proof of the thoroughness of his knowledge. The return was a simple
matter of dropping off from the far side of the island, floating down a
few rods, and then picking along through the rocks across the river as
the canoe gathered speed down-stream.
"Miss Phillips," Rutledge said when they were ready, "perhaps you had
better take ship with Jacques. He knows the road."
Their rescuer looked pleased at the honour, and turned to pull his canoe
within easier reach.
"No, thank you," she said to Rutledge. "I prefer to go with you."
Rutledge caught his breath at the loyalty and the caress in her voice,
and ungratefully wished Jacques at the bottom of the river. He handed
her into his canoe with a tenderness that was eloquent; and Jacques,
seeing through the game which robbed him of the graceful young woman for
a passenger, put off just ahead of them, saying:
"I go fairst. Follow me shairp."
It was no easy task to follow that canoe; and Elise, as she watched the
precision with which Rutledge used the "kvick paddle lak feesh-tail,"
was convinced that such skill had not gone to waste at the Pacolet
flood. As she looked at him when the rough water was past and he was
sending the canoe up the river with even swing again, graceful as
before, her eyes had a light in them that would have gladdened his heart
to see.
They landed near the hotel and hurried straight to it upon Elise's plea
that she was late and must hurry to dress for her train. Rutledge
walked beside her down the long hall of the hotel, and at the foot of
the stairway, feeling that opportunity was slipping past him, he stopped
her short with--
"Your answer, Elise! In heaven's name, your answer!"
Elise was again startled by his abruptness, and her unrestrained heart's
impulse sent a look of tenderness to her eyes that would have crowned
Rutledge's life with all happiness, had not that glamour of her
daydreams, fateful, insistent, overclouded and banished it in a moment.
She looked at him confusedly a moment more, then took a quick step away
from him, hesitated, and, turning quickly, said:
"There is no answer,"--and fled up the stairs.
Rutledge turned away dazed by the reply to his heart's question. "There
is no answer!"--as if he were a "Buttons" who had carried to her
ladyship an inconsequential message which deserved no reply. He could
not get his mind to comprehend the import of it; and he was walking back
down the hallway with a vexed frown upon his face trying to untangle his
thoughts, when Helen Phillips passed him and, seeing him in such a mood
after his parting ride with Elise, prodded him with--
"None but heroes need apply, Mr. Rutledge. I warned you."
Rutledge passed on with an irritated shrug of the shoulders; and Helen,
laughing, ran to tease Elise for a history of the morning's ride and the
reason "why Mr. Rutledge is so grumpy." Little satisfaction did she get
from Elise, however, for that young woman evinced as much of reticence
as Rutledge had shown of irritation.
"I told him none but heroes need apply," laughed Helen.
"What do you know of heroes?" asked Elise with a snap.
*CHAPTER IX*
Within a week after Evans Rutledge and Elise Phillips parted at the St.
Lawrence resort, the newspapers told the people that at a Saratoga
restaurant Colonel Phillips and his wife and daughter, and Doctor
Martin, a negro of national reputation, had sat down to dine together.
It was soon after this that one evening, at his home in Cleveland, Ohio,
Colonel Phillips happened upon a mixed quartette (all negroes) who had
been brought over from New York to sing at a sacred concert in one of
the fashionable churches, but who could not obtain what they considered
a respectable lodging-place. With characteristic impulsiveness the
Colonel, who heard of it, invited the two men and two women up to his
house and entertained them overnight.
On those occasions Mrs. Phillips had shown unmistakable opposition to
the acts of her liege lord. Elise had more than seconded her mother in
haughty indignation; though with her superb training in obedience she
could not be openly rebellious. When he had brought the quartette into
his home Mr. Phillips could not fail to see the pain in his wife's eyes
as she asked:
"Was that necessary?"
"Why, can you not see," he replied with some hot feeling in his tones,
"that it was the only thing to be done? They are very respectable
people, all of them. They are intelligent and well-bred, as you can see.
Why should the simple matter of colour alone keep me from doing what I
just as quickly might have done for a white man?"
The unconscious humour of this way of putting it did not reach Mrs.
Phillips, and the Colonel's tone and manner, not his words, kept her
silent when he had finished. She could not quarrel with him; and he
thought he had answered her reason, though he admitted inwardly that her
prejudices were unconverted. Nevertheless he did not open the discussion
again.
Helen, however, naturally siding with her father, did not hesitate to
bring it up repeatedly, and youthfully to descant at length and with
some elaboration of ideas on the propriety and admirableness of her
father's act. Mrs. Phillips, with the sole purpose of preserving
parental discipline and not wishing even slightly to encourage
insubordination, had very little to say to Helen about it; while Elise
answered all the younger girl's effusions with sniffs of disdain.
* * * * *
These incidents and Elise's womanly perversity and curiosity really gave
Evans Rutledge a great opportunity if he only could have read the
portents of circumstance and calculated to a nicety the eccentricity of
a woman's heart. The entertainment of negro guests at the mansion of an
aspirant for the presidency was given wide publicity by the press and
was the subject of universal though temporary notice by newspapers and
editorial writers of every class. Rutledge, in his capacity as
Washington representative of a half-dozen newspapers over the country,
contributed his share to the general chorus of comment.
When Elise read in a Cleveland paper a clipping accredited to "Evans
Rutledge in Chicago American," she suddenly became desirous of seeing
that young man again. The sentiments, stripped of the tartness in their
expression and a seeming lack of appreciation of her distinguished
father's dignity, were so in accord with hers that she was startled at
the exact coincidence of thought--while still resentful of the free and
fierce criticism.
Resentment and thoughts of coincidences were pushed out of her mind,
however, by the question, "Would he tell me again he loves me?" This
was both a personal and a sentimental question and was therefore of
chief interest to her woman's mind. Not that she had a whit more of
love for him than upon that last day upon the St. Lawrence--oh, no; but
his love for her? his willingness to avow it? was it still hers? was it
ever hers really?--for not a word or a line had he addressed to her
since the day they fought the river. She would confess to a slight
curiosity and desire to meet him when she should go to Washington on
that promised visit to Lola DeVale.
Rutledge assuredly had escaped none of the untoward influences which the
Phillips-negro incidents might have had upon his love for Elise. His
good mother religiously attended to the duty of impressing upon him the
disgraceful horrors of those affairs. She found no words forceful enough
properly to characterize them, though she applied herself with each new
day to the task. What might have been the result if her son's heart had
been inclined to fight for the love of Elise of course cannot be known.
His mother's philippics effected nothing, for the good reason that he
had lost hope of winning Elise before the negro incidents occurred, and
the personal turn his mother gave them was only tiresome to him.
Elise's last words to him, "There is no answer," had put their affair
beyond the effect of anything of that sort. She had not only refused
him, but had flouted him, treated him with contempt: yes, had said to
him in effect that his proffer of love was not worth even a negative
answer. He had gone over every incident of their association, and, with
a lover's carefulness of detail, had considered and weighed her every
word and look and gesture; and, with a lover's proverbial blundering,
had found as a fact the only thing that was not true.
* * * * *
When Elise came to Washington on her visit Rutledge knew of course that
she was in town, and he kept his eyes open for her. His pride would not
let him call upon her, for he had meditated upon her treatment of him
till his grievance had been magnified many fold and his view had become
so distorted that in all her acts he saw only a purpose to play with his
heart. Yet, he wished to see her, wished very much to see
her--doubtless for the same reason that a bankrupt will look in upon
"the pit" that has gulfed his fortune.
They met unexpectedly at Senator Ruffin's, where only time was given
them to shake hands in a non-committal manner before Mrs. Ruffin sent
them in to dinner together. If each had spoken the thoughts in the
heart a perfect understanding would have brought peace and friendship at
least, but no words were spoken from the heart. All of their
conversational sparring was of the brain purely. They fenced with
commonplaces for some little time, each on guard. Rutledge, without a
thought of Doctor Martin or the negro quartette, formed all of his
speeches for the ear of a woman who had mocked his love; while Elise
talked only for the man who had written the article in the _Chicago
American_. She saw the change in his manner, in his polite aloofness,
his insincere, careless pleasantries.
"It is delightfully kind of you, Miss Phillips, to come over and give
Washington some of those thrills with which you have favoured
Cleveland."
"What is the answer?" asked Elise blankly.
"My meaning is no riddle surely," said Rutledge. "The Cleveland
newspaper reporters have taught us to believe that you are the centre of
interest in that city and that, as one signing himself 'Q' wrote in
yesterday's _Journal_,--something to the effect that you radiate a sort
of three-syllable waves which make the younger men to thrill and the old
beaux to take a new lease on life. When I read that, I could see a lot
of small boys crowding around an electric machine, all wanting to get a
touch of the current but fearful of being knocked endways."
"Now diagnose the form of your dementia," said the girl. "You not only
read but you _believe_ the statements of the penny-a-liners. Your case
is hopeless."
"I must read somewhat of such things--to know my craft. I must believe
somewhat of them--to respect my craft."
"Is either knowledge or respect necessary, Mr. Rutledge? The craft is
admitted; but I had thought the purpose of all this craft was the
penny-a-line,--not knowledge or truth--which are not only incidental but
often unwelcome. Why read or believe the line after the cent has been
paid?"
"You are unmerciful to us, Miss Phillips. It is true every news item of
interest has its money value for a newspaper man, but you must
understand that we try to use them honestly and say no more than we
feel--often far less than we feel."
Rutledge's manner was serious when he had finished; and Elise, feeling
sure that the same incident was in his mind as in hers, had it on her
tongue's end to reply with spirit and point, when he continued lightly:
"But that is shop. It is good of you to come over now and gradually
accustom us to those Q-waves instead of giving us the sudden full
current when Colonel Phillips rents the White House. You will not care
if some few become immune before that time, for there will be no end of
rash youths to get tangled up with the wires."
Elise had not been a woman if Rutledge's impersonal "we" and "us" and
suggestion of persons immune to her charms had not piqued her. He need
not put his change of heart so bluntly, she thought. Yet what incensed
her was not the loss of his love, but that that love had been so poor
and frail a thing.
"I am glad you guarantee a full supply of the raw material, Mr.
Rutledge. It is a very interesting study, I think, to watch the effect
of the--current--on youths of different temperaments: on the
black-haired, black-eyed one who raves and swears his love--to two women
in the same month; or the light-haired, blue-eyed one who laughs both
while the current is on and when it is off; or the red-headed lover who
will not take 'no' for an answer; or the gray-eyed, brown-haired man who
would appear indifferent while his heart is consuming with a passion
that changes not even when hope is gone. I will depend on you to see
that they all come along, Mr. Rutledge--even to that young Congressman
over there who is so devoted to Lola," she added in an undertone, "if he
can be persuaded to change his court."
"Oh, he will come. His present devotion does not signify. There is
nothing true but Heaven," Rutledge replied, not to be outdone in
cynicism by this young woman who had quite taken his breath away with
her impromptu classification of lovers. His own hair was black and his
eyes, like hers, were gray; and he saw she was making sport of him under
both categories and yet betraying not her real thought in the slightest
degree.
"Beware, Mr. Rutledge. Only woman may change her mind. Men must not
usurp our prerogative."
"True," said Rutledge; "but a man does not know his mind or his heart
either till he's forty. He is not responsible for the guesses he makes
before that time. After that, he knows only what he does _not_ want
which is much; and, if undisturbed, can enjoy a negative consistency and
content."
"I may not defend the sex against such an able and typical
representative," said Elise as the diners arose.
Neither of these wholesome-minded young people had any taste for such a
fictitious basis of conversation; but each was on the defensive against
the supposed attitude of the other, and the moment their thoughts went
outside conventional platitudes they were given an unnatural and cynical
twist. Both felt a sense of relief when the evening was past. But
despite this condition, which prevailed during Elise's visit, Rutledge
could not put away the desire to see as much of her as an assumption of
indifference would permit, if only with the unformulated hope that he
might catch unawares if but for a moment the unstudied good camaraderie
and congenial spirit which had won his heart on the St. Lawrence. But
the sensitive consciousness of one or the other ever had been present to
exorcise the natural spirit from their conversations.
Rutledge lived bravely up to his ideas of what a proper pride demanded
of him, but his assumption of indifference was sorely tried from their
first meeting at Senator Ruffin's. The mischief began with Elise's
offhand little discourse on the colour of eyes and hair as indicia of
the traits and fates of lovers--particularly with her statement that a
red-headed man will not take a woman's "no" for an answer. The point in
that which irritated the cuticle of Mr. Rutledge's indifference was that
Mr. Second Lieutenant Morgan had a head of flame.
Now man--natural man--usually has the intelligence to know when a thing
is beyond his reach, and the philosophy to content himself without it.
He rejoices also in his neighbour's successes. But natural man, with
all his intelligence and all his philosophy and all his brotherly love,
cannot look with patience or self-deceit upon another's success or
probable success where he himself, striving, has failed. In the whole
realm of human experience there are exceptions to this rule perhaps; but
in the tropical province of Love there is none. There a man may
conclude that the woman he wants would not be good for him, even
perforce may decide he loves her not: but the merest suggestion of
another man as a probable winner will surely bring his decision up for
review--and always to overrule it. So with Rutledge: from the moment of
Elise's unstudied remark he conceded to his own heart that his
indifference was the veriest sham and pretence--while still a pretence
necessary to his self-respect.
*CHAPTER X*
Hayward Graham, with an honourable discharge from the service of the
United States buttoned up in his blouse, was taking a look at Washington
before going back to re-enlist. He liked the army life, with all its
restrictions; and having by his intelligence and aptitude attained the
highest non-commissioned rank, he was optimistic enough to believe he
could win a commission before another term of enlistment expired. In
this hope he was not without a fair idea of the obstacle which his
colour placed in the path of his ambition; but in weighing his chances
he counted much on the friendliness of the newly inaugurated executive
for the negro race generally, and most of all on the President's
according his deserts to a man who had saved his life. He would keep
his identity in that respect a secret till the time was ripe, so that
the President's sense of obligation, if it existed, might not be dulled
by the granting of any premature favours--and then he would see whether
gratitude would make a man do justice.
He had more than a month yet in which to re-enlist without loss of rank
or pay, and his visit to Washington was intended to be short, as he had
several other little picnics planned with which to fill out his
vacation. He had been there ten days or more and he had walked and
looked and lounged till he was thoroughly tired of the city and was
decided to leave on the morrow.
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...."
[Illustration: "HIS WHIP WAS DESCENDING AGAIN WHEN JOHN'S PISTOL
FLASHED."]
"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.
"I am so glad to get away from Washington and back to Hill-Top," she
wrote to her Cleveland chum. "It was awful dull down there. Five whole
days in the week I had to spend trying to catch the style dispensed at a
Finishing School for Young Ladies there, where it is possible to take
lady-like sips and nibbles at literature and music and art and things
like that, but where the real purpose seems to be to teach young women
to descend from a carriage gracefully. Just think! Another whole year
of finishing touches will have to be applied to me before Miss Eugenia
can in good conscience certify that I may be depended upon properly to
arrange myself upon a chair in case it ever becomes necessary for me to
sit down."
Helen's tastes were along lines widely different from the Finishing
School's curriculum. She preferred above all things else a talk or a
walk, a ride or a romp with her father. She had no brother to share her
pranks and enthusiasms, her little sister Katherine was much too young
to be companionable, and her father was her necessary and natural ally.
Him did she not only love, but him did she glorify. Tall and straight,
seemingly lacking in flesh but tough as whip-cord, with a patrician
face, prematurely gray hair and moustache, Helen thought he was the
model of all manly beauty. None in life or in fiction was to her
thinking so brave or strong or good as he. Being in her esteem strong in
body, unerring in wisdom, pure in purpose, fearless in spirit, he
touched the periphery of her ideal of manhood at every point. Her mother
and Elise often were amused at her headlong championship of him upon the
slightest intimation of criticism, and rightfully were astonished at her
information upon public questions as they affected or were connected
with his political fortunes or good name. Helen devoured the newspapers
(a limited number it is true) with no other purpose, seemingly, than to
know what people said of him. Of those that favoured him and his
policies she thought well, and mentally commended their good taste and
excellent sense: but those that criticized! Woe to them had she had
power to utter condemnation!
* * * * *
One morning in midsummer Hayward brought the saddle-horses to the door
for the father and daughter to take a canter and prove Helen's new mount
before the mother and Elise were up. They were about ready to be off
when a telegram was brought out to Mr. Phillips by the operator who had
an office in the house.
"I was ordered not to wake you, sir, but to give it to you at once when
you were up."
Mr. Phillips read it over slowly. Then he turned to Helen.
"Well, little girl, you must miss your ride again. I'm sorry, but it
can't be helped."
"Oh, no, papa! Let the country go play till we come back. You promised
me this ride sure when we missed the last one."
"Can't do it, little woman. Take the horses back, Hayward," he said,
and turned to follow the telegraph man. But seeing the great
disappointment in Helen's face, he called to the man.
"Here, Hayward. Get into a proper coat and on my horse and see that
Miss Helen has her gallop round the Inlet and back without damage. Can
you ride?"
"Yes, sir," answered Hayward.
"I thought so. You seem to be able to do everything else. Now you are
fixed up, old girl," he said as he chucked Helen under the chin. "Don't
let the mare all the way out. You don't know her yet,"--and he was
gone.
Most of Helen's pleasure in the ride was lost with her father's absence,
and yet there was much enjoyment in it for her. She felt the liberty to
choose her own road, and decided to do a little exploring. She set out
at a good canter, with Hayward swinging along a protective distance in
the rear; and with the exercise her spirits rose and she gave herself up
to the full joy of it. She forgot her father's injunction and sent the
mare along several stretches of road with little restraint.
Hayward, on Mr. Phillips' favourite saddler, was having the time of his
life, and for himself wished nothing better than that his young mistress
would keep up the pace; though he did not altogether approve of her
speeding down-hill. He did not like the way the mare managed her feet
on the down grades. When Helen pulled up to ask him where a certain
road led, he spoke, unconsciously with decision, out of his experience,
but with all deference, and said:
"Pardon me, Miss Helen, but it is a little dangerous the speed with
which you ride down-hill. I'm afraid your mount is not so sure-footed
as she might be.... This road you speak of leads out by Mr. Radwine's
cottage into the Lake Drive. It is worse riding than those you have
tried."
Helen thought Hayward's apprehensions were creatures of his discomfort
in keeping pace with her, and she was nothing more than amused at his
attempts to limit the speed to his abilities under pretence of care for
her safety. She thought she would give him one more shaking-up to tell
her father about--and plunged off down the Radwine road, leaving him to
follow as best he might.
Hayward had passed over that cross-road but a few days earlier and he
knew its present condition. Helen heard him call to her, but her spirit
of mischief was fully aroused at the thought of his bumping along after
her, and she gave the mare free rein.
They were going down a longer and steeper hill than any they had passed,
near the foot of which the summer rains had washed out the roadway.
Hayward, knowing of this dangerous place ahead, and seeing that it was
impossible to stop the young woman in his front before she reached it,
sent Prince William after the mare under pressure of the spur and with
the hope to come up with her in time. He arrived on the very moment of
fate. The thundering horse tore alongside the flying mare just as she
reached the washed-out road. Either through feminine excitability at
being overtaken or because of the defective foot action Hayward had
noted, the mare, when she struck the rough road, stumbled and went down.
In that instant the open-eyed Prince William cleared the washout with a
magnificent stride, and the ex-cavalryman swept his right arm about
Helen and lifted her out of the saddle.
Slowly reining in his horse, Hayward brought him to a standstill and
gently lowered his astonished young mistress to the ground. She was
almost too overcome to stand, and walked unsteadily a few steps before
she recovered herself. Hayward had thrown himself off Prince William
and was leading him back down the road to where the mare had fallen.
She had already picked herself up, minus a saddle and plus a few
bruises, and was standing in the road comparatively unhurt but shaking
as with an ague.
Hayward approached her quietly and she came eagerly up to him as if to
escape from her fears. He looked her over carefully, and finding no
serious damage done, set himself about brushing the dust from her with
wisps of weeds and grass. Helen came down while he worked with the
mare, and watched him some minutes without speaking. She hardly could
think of anything civil to say. She knew that she had disobeyed orders
and that he had warned her--and that made her angry. The very silence
of the man became irritating to her.
When he had done all he could to put the mare in order he picked up
Helen's saddle and started to put it on, but stopped to ask whether he
should exchange mounts with her.
"No," his young mistress replied. "I've ridden her here and I will ride
her home."
The negro put her saddle on the mare while the girl looked on. When he
came to buckle the girth he found that the leather tongue was torn off.
He lengthened the girth on the other side and proceeded to bore with his
pocket-knife a new hole in the short broken tab. Helen's eyes fell at
length on the knife. She looked at it uncertainly a few moments, and
then lost interest in everything else. Finally she could keep quiet no
longer.
"Where did you get that knife, Hayward?" she asked with something like
accusation in her voice.
"Miss Helen, I got this knife in--that is, this knife belongs to--"
"Wait a moment," interrupted Helen. "Let me see it.... Yes, it's the
same. I gave my father this knife on his birthday four years ago. I
had the carving done at Vantine's. How long have you had it?"
"Miss Helen, I have had it long before I entered your father's service.
I--"
"Yes, I know; but just how long have you had it, Hayward?"
"Well, Miss Helen, to be accurate, I've had it three years and--four
months."
"Hayward, were you ever in the army--the cavalry--the 10th Cavalry?"
"Yes, Miss Helen."
"You were in the battle of Valencia?"
"Yes, Miss Helen."
"You took this knife from an officer whose life you had saved, didn't
you?"
"Yes, Miss Helen."
"Papa says the negro trooper saved his life and stole his knife."
"But I did not steal the knife, Miss Helen--I did not know I had it till
two months after the battle, when they gave me back my clothes in the
hospital. There was--"
"That stealing part is one of papa's jokes, Hayward. But you didn't
know it was papa, did you?"
"Yes, Miss Helen. I knew him when I saw him fall."
"What? And you've never let him know? Why have you kept it secret?"
Hayward did not answer. She continued.
"He would be very grateful. He does not know who it was, for I've heard
him say so. All that he knows is that it was a trooper of the 10th."
She stopped and waited for an answer, but he stood in silent indecision
as to what he should say to her. If he should now disclose himself the
President would doubtless weaken the force of his obligation by giving
him in token of his gratitude some appointment which not only would fall
far short of the lieutenant's commission to which he aspired, but also
would remove him from the young woman who in the last minute had become
so simply and earnestly sympathetic in her manner. He weighed the pros
and cons quickly.
"Why haven't you told him?" persisted Helen.
"I have preferred not, Miss Helen. In fact there are reasons why I
cannot--must not--now."
"What reasons?" demanded Helen.
"Please, Miss Helen, I cannot tell you--nor him."
"You are not ashamed of it, surely?"
"No, Miss Helen. I would do it again this morning--willingly--at any
cost to myself. But do not ask me to tell of it."
Helen regarded him narrowly for a minute in silence.
"And you kept me from--death--also. Am I not to tell him of that
either?"
"Please no, Miss Helen. If I have done you a service and you think it
worth reward, I ask that you repay me by telling no one that I am either
your father's rescuer or your own."
Mystery always annoyed Helen unbearably, and she looked at Hayward as if
uncertain whether to peremptorily demand his secret or to inform him she
herself would acquaint her father with the facts he sought to conceal.
Hayward saw something of her purpose in her eyes, and pleaded with her.
"Miss Helen, I beg you. My reasons are imperative--and honourable.
When the time comes that I may I will gladly tell your father, but if
now you would do me the greatest favour you will say nothing of it."
While Hayward was speaking it occurred to Helen that she willingly would
have her father remain in ignorance of her disobedience and reckless
riding and its consequent narrowly averted disaster. This
consideration, together with Hayward's earnestness in his mystifying
request, finally prevailed upon her.
"Very well, Hayward, if you insist. You only will be the loser. It is
puzzling to me.... But tell me about your rescue of papa."
Hayward, glad to buy her silence, gave her a modest account of his very
creditable bit of heroism, and in response to Helen's interested
questioning he was still recounting incidents of the battle and his
hospital experiences when they reached the Lake Drive and quickened
their pace into a fast canter for home. They arrived and alighted and
Hayward got the horses away to the stable without any one's seeing the
dust-splashed mare.
Helen could hardly contain herself with her knowledge, but she was as
scrupulously honest as she was impulsive, and stood by her promise not
to divulge the footman's secret. She vainly tried to imagine some
satisfactory explanation of his strange request, but could conceive none
that seemed plausible. She finally came to believe that he was a heroic
soul whom some implacable misfortune had denied the right to the fruits
of his heroism, and in her heart she pitied him.
Hayward was not certain just how far his young mistress credited him
with good and honest reasons for wishing his identity to remain
undisclosed to her father. He feared that she must think any reason
inadequate. He was very much afraid that in all her interested
inquiries she would discover that he was not using his real name. If
she became possessed of that knowledge she doubtless would think the
circumstance sufficiently suspicious to warrant her laying all the facts
before her father. This matter of his name perplexed him no little. He
gladly would have Helen acquainted with the facts relating to the
crimson pennant, and yet he must guard against it. That would reveal
his masquerade, as she certainly would remember the name of the Harvard
man who had saved his college from defeat. He heartily regretted the
excess of caution which had made him place himself in this dilemma.
* * * * *
In the long and lazy summer days that came after that morning's ride
Helen was given without seeking it some little opportunity to question
the footman about the ever interesting matter of her father's rescue and
allied incidents of battle and campaign. Her father insisted, on a few
occasions when he could not accompany her, on her riding alone, with
Hayward as a guard. In her sailing parties, also, in which Hayward was
usually skipper of sailboat or launch, she was thrown occasionally with
him alone before she had picked up, or after she had dropped off, her
guests at the several landings around the Inlet.
She had a child's interest in listening to the ex-trooper's
reminiscences of the battle of Valencia, the Venezuelan campaign, and of
his world's-end following of the flag. The footman, never for a moment
lacking in deference or presuming upon the liberty of speech allowed
him, was an entertaining talker. He had used his eyes and his ears in
his journeyings through the earth, and the lively imagination
characteristic of his race and his negro knack of mimicry, together with
his intelligence and his ability to use the English language with
precision and skill, made him a raconteur of fascinating charm. Helen
quite often wished to acquaint her father and mother and Elise with some
of the things he recounted to her, but the tales were always so mixed in
with his experiences as a soldier that she could not re-relate them
without breaking her promise to respect his secret....
And thus the summer days dragged slowly to an end, with Helen and her
footman becoming at odd times better acquainted with the thoughts and
personal views each of the other on a wider and ever wider range of
subjects. Helen was too unsophisticated in her thought to notice
anything unusual in a lackey's being possessed of Hayward's intelligence
and ease of manner. The ever present mystery of his refusal to exploit
his heroic deeds dwarfed or overshadowed all other questions that might
have arisen in her mind as to anything out of the ordinary in him. She
did believe that he was suffering some sort of martyrdom in silence, and
her womanly sympathy grew stronger as she knew more of him. Not for a
moment was the relation of mistress and man lost sight of by either; but
the revelation of the real woman and man, each to other, went steadily
on.
*CHAPTER XIII*
The era of good feeling seemed to have been ushered in along with Mr.
Phillips' inauguration. The country was prosperous to a degree. Labour
was receiving steady employment and a fair wage and uttered no
complaint. Capital was adding surplus to per cent., and was content.
The Cuban skirmish with Spain and the trial-by-battle with Germany had
cemented again in blood the sections divided by the Great War--so
closely indeed that nobody, not even Presidents on hand-shaking junkets,
thought to mention it. Any sporadic "waver of the bloody shirt" was
considered an anachronism and laughed at as a harmless idiot. It was
true that the negro question, being present in the flesh and incapable
of banishment, was yet a momentous problem: but it was considered in
cooler temper as being either a national or a local question--not
sectional in any sense.
President Phillips in his first message to Congress, as in his inaugural
address, felicitated his countrymen upon the unity of the American
people and the American spirit, and on both occasions gave a new
rhetorical turn and oratorical flourish to the statement that his father
was from Massachusetts and his mother a South Carolinian. In sections
of the South where his party was admittedly effete or undoubtedly
odorous he hesitated not to appoint to office men of political faith
radically differing from his own--and all good citizens applauded.
Partisanry was settling itself down for a good long sleep, and strife
had ceased. The lion and the lamb were lain down together, and there was
none that made afraid in all the holy mountain of American good-will and
fair prospect.
Into this sectionally serene and peaceful situation, which Mr. Phillips
deemed largely the result of his personal effort as a non-sectional
American executive, he deliberately or impulsively pitched an issue
which set one-third of his admiring countrymen by the ears.
The good commonwealth of Mississippi was in a state of upheaval. A
peaceable revolution was being attempted there which would have changed
the essential nature and purpose of the State government. Incited by the
wordy eloquence of a provincial governor, with a few scraps of
statistics gone mad, good men, honest men, men of intelligence were
seriously considering the proposition to so amend the State constitution
as to put upon the negro in his ignorance and poverty the whole burden
of his own education--by a division of the school fund between the races
in proportion to the taxes each paid to the State.
This reactionary and truly astonishing proposition of Governor
Wordyfellow was commonly known as the Wordyfellow Idea. It was giving
great concern to the sober statesmanship of the entire nation, North and
South--indeed greater concern to the thoughtful men of the South who
realized its momentous import, its far-reaching effect upon Southern
white people, than to the thoughtful outsiders who viewed it
philosophically as having a speculative interest but no actual part in
its settlement or effects.
The proposition to so divide the school funds indeed found its most
violent and active opposition, as it found its strongest advocates, not
only among the men of the South but even in the very State of
Mississippi itself. The fact soon developed that this was to be the
greatest political battle that was to be fought concerning the negro.
All prior conflicts had been white man against negro. This was white
man against white man, with the negro as an interested onlooker.
The lines were drawn roughly with the church, the schools and the
independent press allied against the politicians, the political press
and the less intelligent citizenship. Notable individual exceptions
there were to this alignment--which all men remember--but the line of
cleavage, taking it by and large, was as stated. Though the matter of
an actual constitutional revision was presented as yet only to the
people of Mississippi, the battle was being waged in serious purpose to
a no less actual finish in every State from the Potomac to the Rio
Grande.
It was into this situation, fraught with dire possibilities of course,
but full of promise to the negro's friends, that the new President
projected his impulsive and forceful personality. Anxious as always to
be in the fight and leader in the fight, he set about to devise some
plan for helping along the black man's cause. That he might do this
more intelligently he conferred often with his most trusted advisers.
It was on the occasion of the memorable Home-Coming Week at Cleveland in
191- that he held the famous conference which gave that great civic
celebration a fixed place in history. He stood loyally by his home city
in its effort to enjoy and advertise itself, for he betook himself and
family and several friends, including two members of his cabinet, away
from busiest Washington for two days, and opened up his Cleveland home
at great expense for that brief stay.
Doctor Woods, a negro of national reputation, also claimed Cleveland as
his birthplace, and he had journeyed thither from afar to swell the
throng of loyal sons of the city, and had brought with him Doctor
Martin, now a bishop of the A.M.E. Zion Church, to add dignity and
strength to the negro end of the programme. Meeting officially with
these two dignitaries of colour suggested to Mr. Phillips a discussion
of the Wordyfellow disturbance, and he called an impromptu consultation.
In between the review of a morning parade and luncheon, therefore, on
the second day of his stay, he sandwiched this hurried conference. At
it, beside Martin and Woods, were Secretary of the Navy Mackenzie, whose
wisdom seemed to cover all politics and statecraft, and the Secretary of
Agriculture, Baxter--himself a Mississippian, but thoroughly opposed to
the Mississippi governor's policy.
The conference, which was held at Mr. Phillips' home, rejoiced his
heart. He was pleased at the favourable reports which Bishop Martin and
Doctor Woods gave of the situation in the several Southern States. He
accepted with approval the suggestions of the sapient Mackenzie; and
when he saw with what earnestness and vigour and assured personal
knowledge of the situation Baxter was putting his energies into the
fight and predicting victory even in Mississippi, his enthusiasm knew no
bounds. The conference was of such interest that luncheon was announced
before a definite plan of action was threshed out.
"By George, I'm hungry as a wolf!" exclaimed Mr. Phillips. "Come along
to the dining-room, gentlemen, and we'll wind this thing up while we
replenish our stores."
While this invitation was quite unexpected by the bishop and Doctor
Woods, it completely confounded Secretary Baxter who was right in the
middle of a little speech when the interruption and invitation came. He
looked confused for a moment, and began mumbling some excuse as Mr.
Phillips held open the door and his other guests passed out into the
hall.
"Oh, you don't have to go," said Mr. Phillips. "Come on and finish up
your idea. I know you have no other engagement, for you were to lunch
with me to-day to discuss that Williams matter."
The Secretary of Agriculture saw he was caught, and his manner changed
in a moment as he decided to meet the issue squarely.
"You will please excuse me, Mr. President," he said formally and
finally.
"Why, Baxter, surely I do not have to explain to you that--"
"You certainly do not, Mr. President," interrupted the Secretary. "Good
morning, gentlemen,"--and he bowed himself out.
President Phillips turned in ill-restrained anger and followed his
guests to the dining-room. They found Mrs. Phillips and Helen awaiting
them. With these Mr. Mackenzie shook hands, and to them the President
introduced Doctor Woods. The bishop was already acquainted, and spoke
of the dinner at the Saratoga restaurant.
Mrs. Phillips had long been accustomed to the surprises her husband made
for her, and had too good control of her faculties to show any annoyance
on beholding her unexpected and unwelcome guests.
Any possible shade of restraint in her manner would not have been
noticed, however, in the general feeling of constraint which Mr.
Baxter's abrupt departure had left on Mr. Phillips and his other guests.
The host set himself to the task of throwing off this feeling by
plunging volubly into a resume of the discussion they had been having.
His vigour and enthusiasm were such that by their very physical force he
was bringing a wholesome situation to pass, when Elise came humming down
the hall with Lola DeVale, stopped short in the doorway--and turned
quickly back.
[Illustration: "ELISE ... STOPPED SHORT IN THE DOORWAY--AND TURNED
QUICKLY BACK."]
While there was nothing unusual or pointed in Elise's manoeuvre her
father felt and resented her protest. He talked away for a few minutes
in nervous hope that his supposition was wrong and that she would come
and bring Lola in to lunch. When she did not his choler rose at this
open mutiny in his own household, and he awkwardly tossed the ball of
conversation to Mackenzie and busied himself keeping his indignation
within bounds.
From this point the meal progressed uncertainly. In the midst of the
embarrassment of it all there was brought to the President a note, upon
opening which he read:
"SIR:--I have the honour to present my resignation as Secretary of
Agriculture, to take effect at the earliest moment you may be able to
relieve me of the duties of the office.
"With assurances of my highest consideration and sincerest good wishes
for yourself and the success of your administration, I am
"Your obedient servant,
"W. E. BAXTER."
At the bottom of the page there was added:
"P.S.--I am willing to assign any plausible reason for this resignation
that you may desire, or that may suggest itself to you as likely to
relieve you of any embarrassment as a result of it. W.E.B."
Mr. Phillips punctuated his first hasty perusal of the note with a snort
of contempt, and checked an outburst of sarcastic, wrathful comment to
read it over a second time. Fortunately at this moment Bishop Martin
and Doctor Woods rose and apologized for having to withdraw in order to
catch a train.
Their host was loth to have them go, and expressed regret that they had
not been able to arrive at some definite plan of campaign. He asked
that they inform him if they should come to Washington, so that he might
discuss the subject further with them. Expressing their great pleasure
that the chief executive took such a lively and intelligent interest in
the weal and progress of their race, the two negro worthies withdrew,
Mrs. Phillips dismissing them with a formal bow and smile and Helen,
following her father, giving them a cordial hand-shake as they retired.
When they had gone Mr. Phillips thrust the letter of resignation at
Mackenzie, and exploded:
"Mac, just read that! The provincial, patronizing, postscript-writing
popinjay! Could you have imagined the impudence of it! Does not wish
me to be embarrassed as a result of his quitting us--the conceited ass!
I wonder if he thinks I care a rap, or that the people care, for his
cheap little melodramatics. I might have known that it was too much to
have expected a sensible secretary from that cursed negro-phobia State!
But he was so strongly pressed for a cabinet appointment, and really did
appear to be such a strong fellow. I might have guessed his apparent
excellences were too good to be true! Oh, but the patronizing insolence
of his offer to hush it up for us! I swear it's unbearable. Damn the
superior high-and-mighty airs these Southerners assume! My mother was a
South Carolinian, but I can't feel a sympathetic tremor in my blood for
any such damnable bigotry. I'll give Mr. Baxter and all his hide-bound,
moss-backed, supercilious gang to know that this is one administration
that proposes to make a democratic government a reality in this
democratic country. A man shall be measured by the essential qualities
of manhood he possesses, and dealt with accordingly, whatever his
position, pull, size, sentiments, claims or colour! What do you think
of that infernal note?"
"He does show great consideration for us--distinguished consideration, I
may say. He will not tell it on us," sarcastically commented Mackenzie.
"The devil take his distinguished consideration!" snapped Mr. Phillips.
"I'll accept his little resignation before he can wink, and give the
papers a full statement of the circumstances just as they occurred. I'll
show the upstart what a small potato he is--damn his impudence! And
then just to think, Mac, of the inexpressible insult in refusing to
lunch with persons that I deem worthy to dine with my wife and
daughters! It really makes it almost too damnably personal to be
overlooked. He must understand that respectability, presentability,
acceptability, in my home is a matter that is as sacred to me as such
things are to him with all his Bourbon notions!--but thank God he may
understand also that such acceptability is based on true merit, and that
a man's colour has absolutely nothing to do with it.... Come along with
me to the library and we will accept this little resignation before it
gets cold, and have it at his hotel before he gets cold!"
*CHAPTER XIV*
Mrs. Phillips, ill at ease during the luncheon, had taken the
opportunity to retire offered by the departure of the negro guests, and
had taken Helen with her; but that young lady, feeling the electric
condition of the atmosphere and full of lively curiosity, had returned
to hover around the dining-room door and learn what all the row was
about. She heard her father's outburst with great interest--being no
little shocked at his sulphurous words, but no less deeply concerned at
the suggestion of embarrassment to him politically, and forcibly and
enthusiastically impressed with his fine scorn of subterfuge and manly
decision to fight out his battles in the open.
When President Phillips came in to dinner and asked for his daughters,
their mother told him Helen was in her room and Elise had gone driving
with Lola. "I did not like Elise's conduct at lunch. It was too
pointed, entirely too pointed. I shall talk to the young lady very
plainly."
"Now, Hayne, don't worry the child with this affair. It is bad enough
as it is. I hope--"
"Bad enough as it is! Why, one would think you wished to resign also.
Were you insulted, too?"
"Not insulted, Hayne; but ever since you sent me to the pinelands of
North Carolina that winter for Elise's throat I have not been able to
think of a negro as I did before--and Elise feels the same way, I know.
It is so plain down there: the negroes are so many and so--different. I
can't receive them with any sort of pleasure. Just think of what the
Southern papers will have to say. The awful things they said about your
negro quartette were almost unbearable, and I know that was mild to what
this will be. I do wish you had not brought them in to lunch, Hayne."
"Why, May, you are surely not going over against me with those
supercilious Southern fanatics?"
"Hayne! That is almost insulting. You know that I am for you against
the world, whatever comes. No one, not even Elise or Helen, has ever
heard me offer the least criticism of anything you have done--and no one
ever will, my dearest"--she spoke simply and earnestly as she held her
hands up toward him in a gesture eloquent of abiding love--"but I cannot
have pleasure in receiving negroes. I have seen the negro as he really
is, and I cannot feel that some soap and water and a silk hat make a--"
"Stop, May, right there"--Mr. Phillips' arms went about his wife in
tenderness as he placed a hand upon her lips. "Listen to me. You dear
women are creatures of impulse and sentiment--and thank Heaven for that,
too: for when the time ever comes that you shall judge men from your
heads instead of your hearts, woe to us!"--and he kissed her hair in
reverent gentleness---"but--"
"Well, this is an idyllic scene!" exclaimed Elise, coming into the room
with Helen. "It is better than a play. Daddy dear, you do it
beautifully. You should have gone on the stage."
Mr. Phillips' state of mind, his bottled-up vexation because of Elise's
behaviour at luncheon, his impatience at the interruption of his
conversation with his wife at the point where she seemed to have made
out her case against him and before he had opportunity to demolish her
sentiment with masculine logic, added to Elise's lightness of manner and
speech, which nettled him in his serious concern over Baxter's
resignation, were, all together, too much for moderation.
"Now look here, young lady," he growled out ungraciously, "you have
presumed entirely too much upon your privileges to-day. When did you
become too good to dine with people your mother and sister were
entertaining?"
"Why, papa!" the girl exclaimed in amazement at the roughness of his
manner;--but the sternness of his face did not relax, and she stumbled
along seeking some excuse. "Lola and I did not want any lunch, and all
those men--"
"Stop! Don't be a dodger! You know very well, miss, that you declined
to lunch because Bishop Martin and Doctor Woods were there. Now you
must unde
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