where the children sometimes sleep when our tiny house overflows with
guests. He sank down on it and closed his eyes. The lids were blue and
livid as though bruised. He had nothing with him except the ragged
clothes on his back.
When I returned to the house, the philanthropist explained that
Fairfax was a Virginia negro--“You could tell that from his name, of
course”--who had come to New York and fallen into bad ways, “drink,
etc.... But there’s something about him....”
Yes, I agreed to that. There was something about him....
Fairfax lived with us after this for more than four years, the last
years of his life. He was really very ill at first, the merest little
flicker of life puffing uncertainly in and out of the bag of skin and
bones which was his body. The doctor said that rest and food were the
only medicines for him. He lay like a piece of sodden driftwood for
long hours on the edge of the hay where the sun caught it.
The good-natured old Yankee woman who was cooking for me then, used
to take him out big bowls of fresh milk, and slices of her home-baked
bread, and stand chatting with him while he sat up listlessly and ate.
At least, she being a great gossip, did the chattering, and Fairfax
listened, once in a while murmuring the soft, slow, “Ye-e-s’m,” which
came to be the speech he was known by, in our valley.
He seemed to have no interest in getting well, but little by little
the sunshine, the quiet, the mountain air, and something else of which
we did not dream till later, lifted him slowly up to health. He began
to work a little in the garden, occasionally cut the grass around the
house and, borrowing the carpentering tools, built himself a little
room in the corner of the barn. One day I paid him a small sum for his
services about the place, and my husband gave him some old clothes.
The next afternoon he took his first walk to the village, and came
back with a pipe and a bag of tobacco. That evening Nancy, our “help,”
called me to the kitchen window and pointed out towards the barn. On a
bench before the barn door sat Fairfax, smoking, his head tipped back,
watching the moon sink behind the mountain. We agreed that it looked as
though he were getting well.
Nancy had to go home to a sick sister that Fall, and Fairfax moved into
the kitchen to occupy her place. It came out that he had once worked in
a hotel kitchen in Virginia, so that thereafter our Vermont cookstove
turned out Southern food, from hot biscuit to fried chicken.
There is very little caste feeling in our valley, and not a bit of
color prejudice. Many of our people had never even seen a negro to
speak to before they knew Fairfax, and they liked him very much.
He always was very thin, but he had filled out a little by this time;
had gone to a dentist by my advice and had the blackened stumps of his
teeth replaced by shining new ivories; had bought with his first wages
a new suit of clothes, and was considered by our farmer families to
be “quite a good-looking fellow.” He kept his curling gray hair cut
short to his head, his thin cheeks scrupulously shaven, and was always
presentable.
As a matter of course he was invited to all the country gatherings,
like other people’s “hired help,” along with the rest of us. I remember
the first of these invitations: some one telephoned from the village to
announce a church supper, and I was urged, “Do bring down a good crowd.
We’ve got a lot of food to dispose of.”
I stepped back into the kitchen and told Fairfax not to get supper that
night, as we were all going to the village to a church supper.
“Yes’m,” said Fairfax.
“I want you to be ready to start at a quarter to six,” I added,
glancing at the clock.
“Who, _me_?” said Fairfax, with a little start.
“Yes,” I answered, a little surprised. “Didn’t you hear me say I wanted
us all to go?”
Fairfax looked at me searchingly, “Where’ll I get my supper?”
“Why, they usually have the church suppers out on the church green
unless it rains, and then they go down to the basement rooms.”
Fairfax said apathetically, “No’m, they don’t want me.”
I saw now what was in his mind, and said, to set him right, “Oh, yes,
they do. You know the people around here haven’t any of those notions.
Come on.”
“No’m, they don’t want me,” he repeated.
I beckoned him to follow me, went back to the telephone and rang up
the woman who was arranging for the supper. “Do you want me to bring
Fairfax Hunter with us?” I asked her explicitly.
“Why, of course,” she said surprised. “I told you we want a crowd.”
After this Fairfax stood undecided, his sensitive face clouded
and anxious. I had a glimpse then of the long years of brutal
discrimination through which he had lived, and said, feeling very much
ashamed of my civilization, “Now, Fairfax, don’t be so foolish. We
_want_ you to go. Get on your best clothes, so’s to do honor to the
Ladies Aid.”
He went back to the room in the corner of the barn, and half an hour
later came out, fresh and neat in his new suit, closely shaven, his
slim yellow hands clean, his gray hair smooth. He looked almost eager,
with a light in his eyes that was like a distant reflection of gaiety.
But when we cranked up the Ford to go he was not in sight. We called
him, and he answered from the barn that he was not ready, and would
walk in. I was vexed, and shouted back as we rolled down the hill, “Now
don’t fail to come.”
It rained on the way in, and the supper was served in the basement,
with all the neighbors spruced up and fresh, while the busy women of
the Ladies Aid rushed back and forth bringing us salmon loaf, pickles,
Boston brown bread, creamed potatoes, and coffee and ice-cream as from
the beginning of time they always have; but though I kept a chair at
our table empty for Fairfax, and sat where I could watch the door, he
did not appear.
After the supper I went across the street to see my aunt, house-ridden
with a hard cold. She told me that from her windows she had seen
Fairfax come down to the village street, halt in front of the church,
go on, turn back, halt again. She said he had paced back and forth in
this way for half an hour, and finally had gone home.
When we reached the house we found Fairfax there, his good clothes put
away, his cook’s white apron tied around him, eating bread and butter
and cold meat.
I sat down to scold him for not doing as I had said. When I had
finished Fairfax looked at me, hesitated, and said, “If it had been out
of doors, maybe I’d have tried it.” There was an expression on his thin
somber face, which made me get up and go away without venturing any
more comment.
As his health increased, his spirits rose somewhat. My little son was
born that winter, and Fairfax was very fond of the baby, who soon
developed the most extravagant fondness for his company. When spring
came on, and gardening arrived, Fairfax took over a part of that work,
and had a long-running feud with the woodchucks who live in the edge of
the woods beyond our garden patch. It was a quaint sight to see Fairfax
in his white jacket and apron, sitting outside the kitchen door,
peeling potatoes, a rifle across his knees, or to see him emerge in a
stealthy run from the kitchen door, gun in hand, and dart across the
road to get a better sight on the little brown garden thieves. It did
me good to see him stirred up enough to care about anything.
He turned out to be a great reader and worked his way through most of
our library. I know you will not believe me when I tell you who his
favorite author was. But I am not concerned with seeming probable, only
with telling the truth. It was Thomas Hardy, whose philosophy of life
fitted in exactly with Fairfax’s views and experience. He was no talker
and rarely said anything to me beyond the gentle “no’m” and “yes’m”
with which he received orders. But once he remarked to my husband that
Thomas Hardy certainly did know what life was like. He went straight
through that entire set of novels, once he had found them on the
shelves, and all that winter my life was tinged with the consciousness
of Fairfax sitting in the kitchen after his work was done, deep in
communion with Hardy. Our visiting friends used to find the sight so
curious as to be amusing. I did not find it so.
The neighbors grew very used to him, and being sociable, friendly
people, with a great deal of Yankee curiosity about the rest of the
world, they often tried to get Fairfax to tell about life in the south.
When he went out for a stroll in the evening, they would call to him,
from where they were weeding a bed in the garden, or giving the pigs
their last meal, “Hello, there, Fairfax, come on in for a minute.” If
they were in the yard, or on the porch, Fairfax often accepted the
invitation. As we went by in the car we used to see him leaning up
against the porch-railing, talking, or helping some busy woman set out
her cabbage plants. But he never went indoors.
Our corner of the valley is a very cheerful one with a number of lively
children to keep us from “shucking over” into middle age too soon, and
the school-house is often the place where we gather for good times. The
school-benches are pushed back, the lamps lighted, the fiddler tunes
up, and we all dance, young and old, children and grown-ups. Fairfax
was invited as a matter of course to these informal affairs, and some
of the children who were very fond of the kind, gentle, silent man,
used to pull at his coat, and say, “Do come on in, Mr. Hunter! Dance
with me!” But Fairfax only grinned uneasily and shook his head. He
used to stand outside, smoking his pipe and looking in wistfully at
the brightly lighted room. As we skipped back and forth in the lively
old-fashioned dances, we could see him, a dim shape outside the window,
the little red glow of his pipe reflected once in a while from his
dark, liquid eyes. Sometimes when the window was open, he came and
leaned his elbows on the sill, nodding his head with the music, and
beating time lightly with his fingers, his eyes following us about as
we stepped back and forth in the complicated figures.
When we were ready to serve the “refreshments,” some of us went
out into the entry-way, and Fairfax came in to help us with the
uncomfortable work of digging out the ice and salt from the top of the
freezers, and opening the cans. I used to say at first, “Fairfax, why
don’t you go in and dance, too? Anybody can see you know just how to.”
But his invariable answer, “No’m, I guess I won’t,” had in it a quality
which ended by silencing me.
The older people called him Fairfax, as we did, but because he was a
grown man, and a middle-aged man, they thought it not good manners for
the children to call him by his first name, and taught the boys and
girls to call him Mr. Hunter. We thought this perfectly natural, and
none of us, entirely ignorant of Southern ways, had the slightest idea
of what this meant to him.
Once a year, Fairfax took a two weeks’ vacation, and all his earnings
for the year. He went off to the city, clean, and strong, and
well-dressed; and he always came back without a cent, sick, and
coughing, and shabby, with a strong smell of whiskey all over him. Of
course, we took him severely to task for this inexcusable behavior,
getting out for his benefit all the accepted axioms of conduct,
prudence, ambition, self-interest, and so on, showing him how he could
save his money, and put it in the bank, and be prosperous.
He always answered with his invariable soft, “Yes’m,” except on one
occasion, the last year of his life, when he said somberly, with his
soft, Southern accent, “I’ve got no use for money. I can’t buy _what I
want_. I’m a colored man.”
We learned more about him ... a little ... that he had a sister now
married to a sober, hard-working carpenter, living in Buffalo, that
he had lived at home with his mother till long after he was grown up,
working in the hotel, and supporting them both with his wages. That
was the only time I ever saw him show emotion. His thin face suddenly
twisted like a child’s, and tears shone in his eyes. “She was an awful
good woman, my mother was. She had a terrible time to get along when
my sister and I were little. She never had a husband to help her. My
father was a white man.”
“Fairfax, why don’t you think of marrying and having a home of your
own?” I said impulsively.
“To bring up children to be Jim-Crowed?” he asked, shortly.
On another occasion, when I was commenting on the singular excellence
of his writing and figuring, I heard about his school taught by a
northern Negro, who had gone down south as a volunteer teacher after
the war. It was from him that Fairfax had learned his correct speech,
without a trace of what we call the Negro dialect.
When the war in Europe came, and we decided to take the children and
go to France we were confronted with the question of what to do with
Fairfax. He wanted to go with us, and asked for it with more insistence
than he ever showed, and I often now regret that I did not try to take
him. But it seemed impossible to add to the responsibility of little
children in a war-ridden country, the heavier responsibility in a
country flowing with alcohol, for a man with a weakness for drink.
Besides, we could not afford the extra expense.
There was no place for him in our region, where few people keep
help in the kitchen. In the hurry and confusion of our preparations
for departure I simply could not think of anything satisfactory to
do in the United States of America for a proud sensitive colored
man. The best I could devise was to find him a place with a friend,
unfortunately in a city where there were plenty of saloons and plenty
of race prejudice. I can’t see now why I did not think of Canada. But
we knew no one in Canada.
When we separated, he kissed the children good-by, seriously, and
shook the hand which I held heartily out to him. After our last words,
I said, making a great effort to break through the wall of dignified
reserve which his silence built around him, “Fairfax, do keep straight,
won’t you?”
He looked at me with that passive, neutral look of his, which had to my
eye an ironical color, and made a little gesture with his shoulders and
eyebrows that might mean anything.
* * * * * * *
He drank himself to death inside six months. I read the news in a
letter from his sister, the first and only letter I ever had from her.
I had hurried back to the apartment in Paris one evening to be with
the children during an air-raid, found the American mail arrived, and
read it to the accompaniment of that anti-aircraft bombardment which
was so familiar a part of the war to make the world safe for democracy.
My letter from the country of democracy informed me that Fairfax had
died, alone, before his sister could reach him. “He had been drinking
again, I am afraid, from what they told me. I always felt so bad about
Fairfax drinking, but he wouldn’t stop--he was just plain discouraged
of life. He never touched a drop as long as our mother was living. He
was always so sorry for our mother, and so good to her, though she was
only a poor ignorant woman, who couldn’t read or write, and Fairfax was
so smart. The teacher in our school wanted Fairfax to study to be a
minister or a doctor, but he never would. He said he thought the more
colored people try to raise themselves, the worse they get treated. He
felt so bad, always, about the way colored people were treated. He said
white folks wanted them to be low-down, so he was going to be. I used
to tell him how wrong this was, and how the good white people weren’t
like that, but he didn’t have any patience. Colored people have got
to have patience. Our mother was always patient. And my husband and I
manage pretty well. But Fairfax was proud. And colored people can’t be
proud. I don’t believe he ever let you-all know how he liked the way
the folks up your way treated him. He said their folks taught the white
children to call him mister just like a white man, and that the white
people used to ask him to parties and dances. He tried to go, he said,
but at the door, he’d remember all the times when white people made a
scene and called him a nigger and got mad if he even stood near them on
the street, and looked at him that way white people do ... if you were
colored you’d know what I mean. And then he just didn’t dare risk it.
When he was a boy and something like that happened, it used to make him
down sick so he couldn’t eat for days. And when he got up to where you
live, it was too late. My husband and I had Fairfax taken to our old
home town in Virginia and buried there beside our mother.”
The air-raid was over when I finished that letter. The noisy
bombardment of hate and revenge was quiet. The night was as still there
in France as in the graveyard in Virginia. I was very thankful to know
that Fairfax was sleeping beside his mother.
We are back in Vermont now, the curtain lowered over air-raids and
barrages. Everything goes on as before.
The other evening we were all down at the school-house for an
entertainment. The children spoke pieces, and then we had a dance.
About eleven o’clock some of us went out to the entry-room and began
to serve the ice-cream. One of my neighbors said, after a while, “Do
you remember how Fairfax used to get all dressed up so nice, and then
always stayed around outside to watch?”
“Yes,” I remembered.
“Sometimes,” said another one of the women, “sometimes when we’re out
here like this, it seems to me when I look up quick and glance out
there in the dark, as though I could almost see him there now.”
After a time, some one else said, “’Twas a pity he never would come in.”
PROFESSOR PAUL MEYER
“Master of the Word.” I never could remember where I had read that
phrase--perhaps as a child in an old story-book about enchanters; but I
knew whom it described when I first saw Professor Meyer speaking to his
class in the École des Chartes. Not in any metaphorical sense, but in
the plain literal meaning of the phrase, was he Master of the Word. He
made the title “Philologist” put on purple and gold.
The sallow young seminarists in their scant black gowns, keen, pale,
young students who had come from Russia, Italy, Roumania, and Finland,
sat motionless and intent, their eyes fixed on him unwaveringly for the
two long hours of these daily lectures. Words were the living creatures
in that room. They were born before our eyes in the remote childhood
of the race, and swept down through the ages till there they were
in our own language, issuing every day from our own lips, an ironic
reminder that all the days of our lives were no more than an hour in
the existence of those disembodied and deathless sounds.
From his youth the vigorous old man had transferred all his life to the
world of words--and had found it an enchanted kingdom, something sure
and lasting in the quicksands of human existence. From inside the walls
of his safe refuge he watched the world outside suffer and despair and
cry out and die. And he marveled at its folly. He himself knew none
of these fitful moods. He was always of a steady, kind, and humorous
cheerfulness, and always the most compelling of talkers. No impassioned
orator declaiming on an emotional theme could hold more breathlessly
attentive his listeners than this tall, stooping, plain old Jew, when
in his rapid conversational staccato he traced out the life of a word,
told the Odyssey of its wanderings in the mouths of men, so much less
able to withstand death and time than this mere breath from out their
mouths. He did this not with the straining effort of the orator, but as
naturally as he breathed or thought. His mind was constantly revolving
such cycles, and when he spoke he was but thinking aloud, always with
the same zest, day after day, always alert, with never a flagging of
interest, with never a moment of treacherous wonder about the value of
anything. I knew him when I was passing through one of those passions
of doubt which mark one’s entry into adult life, and I never could be
done with marveling at him. I was grateful to him, too, for he showed
the most amused sympathetic kindliness to the foreign girl, groping her
way forward.
I think he was sorry for me, for any one tempted to step into human and
prosaic life. He stood at the door of his ordered, settled, established
life, and called to me to construct one like it, to do as he had done,
to turn away from the sordid comedy of personality, and step into
the blessed country of impersonal intellectual activity. Many things
turned me toward his path: the great weight of his mature personality
(he was over seventy then and I was twenty), my immense admiration
for his learning, my interest in his subject, my intuitive dread of
the guessed-at strain of human emotions. You must not think that his
world was austere or rarefied. He had found there, with no penalties
to pay, all the amusement, the drama, the struggle, the rewards, the
entertainment, which men find in the human world, and pay for so
dearly. He never knew a bored or listless moment in his life, nor did
any one in his company.
Every Tuesday and Thursday, after that two-hour lecture to the
seminarists, there was a half hour intermission before the next
class--eight or ten advanced students--met in his oak-paneled,
half-basement office, rich with precious books, to discuss with him a
curious Old-French manuscript which he had discovered in the library at
Cassel.
I have never in my life known anything more sparkling and stimulating
than those half-hour intermissions. The old man always clapped on his
hat, talking incessantly as usual, and, stretching his long legs to a
stride which kept me trotting like a little dog at his side, started up
the Boulevard St. Michel towards the Odéon, to the pastry-shop which
calls itself “of the Medicis.” As soon as his tall form showed in the
distance, and the inimitable, high, never-to-be-forgotten squeak of
his voice could be heard, one of the elegant young-lady waitresses
bestirred herself--for the pastry-shop was proud of its famous patron.
She always had _babas au rhum_ waiting for us, as this was the only
pastry Professor Meyer considered worth eating. I do not like _babas
au rhum_ myself, but who was I to set up my insignificant opinion
against so great a man? So I ate the wet sop docilely, considering it
a small price to pay for the stories that went with it, stories that
blew the walls away from around us, and spread there the rich darkness
of the Middle Ages. There were stories out of medieval manuscripts
as yet unattributed and unedited, heaped in the upper rooms of the
Ambrosiana at Milan, of the untold riches, unclassified and unarranged
of the Bodleian, which Paul Meyer described with apostolic fervor;
of priceless scripts discovered in impossible places, by incredible
coincidences; of years of fruitless work on an obscure passage in the
Grail-cycle, suddenly cleared up because a Greek priest in Siberia had
discovered a manuscript bound in with an old Bible.
Or if he were in a playful mood, the mood the waitresses adored and
hoped for, he would begin juggling with the names of things about
us, the trim shoes on their feet, the brooches at their throats, the
ribbon in their well-kept hair; and with a pyrotechnic display of
laughing erudition, would hunt those words around and around through
all the languages where they had tarried for a time, back through
history--the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, Late Latin,
the Empire--till they ended in the long-drawn sonorous Sanscrit chant
of an early Aryan dialect, which Professor Meyer rendered with a total
disregard of onlookers.
After one of these flights, we came to ourselves with a start, looking
around with astonishment at our everyday dress and surroundings and
bodies.