Affairs had gone badly in the little brick house. If, at fourteen,
Saint had been a problem to his mother, he was now, at eighteen, her
despair. It was not that he was unwilling to work. On the contrary, he
hailed each new position that was found for him with shy eagerness. But
the habit that had been given to him in school had deepened rather than
dissipated when met by the harsher realities of life. The immediate and
inexorable array of facts that faced him with each new vocation brought
bewilderment to his untrained mind. His thoughts veered from the task
of meeting and arranging them, leaped the gap between the bottom and
top of the ladder, and solaced him with a fool’s paradise of pictured
triumphs.
Unfortunately there were only certain occupations that a gentleman
could follow in Charleston without sacrifice of family dignity, and if
one were handicapped by the lack of a professional training these were
reduced to a minimum. One could work in a bank, or one of the bond and
real estate offices on Broad Street. One could become a cotton expert,
or even a broker in the wholesale district along East Bay. Strange
to say, in spite of the unholy stench and overalls, one could seek
employment in the great fertilizer factories beyond the city limits.
But a gentleman seeking a livelihood in the early nineteen hundreds
could not engage in any branch of the retail business without imposing
upon his humiliated family the burden of incessant explanation.
Through the intercession of a distant relative, an outdoor clerkship
with one of the banks had been obtained for Saint. It had been a fatal
beginning. He had approached it with enthusiasm, slightly blurred by
his distrust of arithmetic, but genuine nevertheless. Now he could see,
after the short period on the street, a high standing desk in the big
banking room, then a roll-top desk in a small outer office, and finally
the directors’ room with himself seated in the massive chair at the end
of the table. On the first day he had stood looking down that alluring
perspective until he had to be spoken to twice by the cashier before he
heard. This so distressed him that he penalised himself by memorising
a cotton warehouse receipt, although he could not make head or tail of
the legal verbiage. His outdoor work took him to the cotton offices
on the wharves, and therein lay his complete undoing, for there were
the ships and the negroes waiting to betray him into long unexplained
absences. At the end of the first week his banking career came to an
abrupt end.
Other jobs followed: a swift disillusioning procession of them.
Bewildered and baffled, the boy met them, groped among their intricate
mechanisms, felt them slipping through his hands, and was powerless
to retain them. Finally, on a dark winter morning, he stood before a
door with a panel of ground glass, upon which was painted in large
black letters, PRIVATE. The palms of his hands were wet and cold, his
tongue felt like a withered pea in a dried pod, and his kneecaps were a
quaking jelly. In the distance St. Michael’s chimed and struck eleven.
He made a solemn vow to himself to stick it out for another quarter
hour. If he did not get in then and have it over with, he could not
keep his body there any longer. The last man who had hired him had
smiled over his head at another occupant of the room all the time that
he had talked. He had been sitting where he could not see the other
man, but his back had quivered under the derisive answering smile. He
prayed now that this man would be alone and that he would not ask him
where he had worked before. Fertilizers! This was about the end of the
procession; the last stand. He’d have to get it, and he’d have to
stick it out when he had it. His thoughts touched on his mother and
her hope for the success of the interview. A warm, tender wave swept
upward from the pit of his stomach and broke in a blinding mist before
his eyes. The big, black PRIVATE on the door swam and quivered. Panic!
Suppose the door should open now! He dashed his knuckles across his
eyes and gritted his teeth.
A low-pitched man’s voice had been rumbling monotonously in the room
beyond the door that he was watching. Now it stopped. He heard the
sound of a chair pushed over a bare floor; then the words: “That will
do now. Tell the young man outside that I will see him.”
The door with its shaking letters swung inward. A woman passed him and
said: “You may see Mr. Raymond now.” He set the machinery of his legs
in motion, and the woman closed the door behind him.
The room was large and bare. It smelled faintly of phosphates. In its
centre a heavy man sat in a swivel chair behind a flat-top desk. Behind
rimless spectacles his eyes were keen and appraising.
“So you are Katherine Wentworth’s boy,” he said in a deep,
hearty voice. “I am glad to know you. Knew your father too--boys
together--fine, both of them. Got a lot to live up to, Son.” He shook
hands cordially and waved his guest to a chair at the end of the desk
where the light struck his face, and took a good look at him. What
he saw was a tall, slender lad with loosely hung arms and legs and
a sallow face that flinched away from his look like an open wound
under a probe. He saw brown hair with a cowlick over the forehead,
and slate-coloured eyes that were too conscious of their own tragic
admissions to meet his glance.
Mr. Raymond busied himself deliberately with a silver cigar-cutter
and a long, black cigar. He scratched a match, applied it, and blew a
funnel of smoke toward the ceiling. He threw a sidelong glance at the
boy. Yes, the respite had helped. They could talk now.
“Think you’d like to try the fertiliser business, eh?” There was a
twinkle behind his glasses.
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t mind starting at the bottom?”
“No, indeed, sir, almost anything. That is, I don’t mind doing anything
at all.”
“That’s the proper spirit!” exclaimed the big man. “Now, how’d you like
to start just where I did and work up?” The deep voice filled the room
with warm vibrations; they entered into the boy’s body and started
something glowing there. No one had been so understanding before. He
felt suddenly that he would like to show this friend what he could
do. Perhaps there would be a riot at the factory, all of the other
white men gone, and he there alone reasoning with the mob. Or perhaps
it would be a fire. He saw himself grown suddenly to splendid stature
smashing down a barrier with an axe, manning the hose. He saw the flame
leap, gather headway, and roar down the great funnel of a building.
Horrors! Mr. Raymond had been talking to him. The big hand slapped the
table, and across Saint’s vision crashed the words: “What do you say to
that?”
What had it been? Saint groped back among the spent words that had
scarcely grazed his consciousness. It was no use, they were gone. His
benefactor was leaning forward expectantly, waiting for an answer.
“Thank you very much, Mr. Raymond,” he said lamely, and wondered wildly
what he was being grateful for.
“Good! You accept, then?”
“Yes, indeed, sir.”
“Well, we’ll start you with five dollars a week. I am going out to
the mines myself to-morrow, and I’ll take you along. Be here at nine
o’clock and bring your grip, so that you won’t have to come back for
your clothes.”
The big man got to his feet and put his hand on the bewildered boy’s
shoulder. “Started with one myself, ended up with a chain, then came on
in here. So you see it can be done,” he said, smiling.
In the street Saint stopped and looked up at the window of the room he
had left. “Ended up with a chain,” he muttered dubiously. “What kind of
a chain, I wonder.”
* * * * *
The next morning found Saint occupying a third of a seat in a dirty
little day coach, with a shabby telescope bag tucked behind his legs.
The remaining two thirds was snugly filled with the substantial bulk
of Mr. Raymond, bulwarked behind an outspread copy of the _News and
Courier_. During the half hour of train travel the boy remained in
ignorance of their destination and the nature of that chain which
apparently represented the goal toward which he was to fight his way.
When they arrived at the little station the paper was folded and
stuffed into the man’s overcoat pocket, and they climbed into the rear
seat of a waiting buckboard. Then the employer turned his attention to
the business of the moment. He had a straight man-to-man way of talking
to the boy that both put him at ease and held his attention. He watched
him closely but kindly, and he drove his ideas in with short, pointed
sentences that ended with “_understand?_” It kept his listener’s wits
on tiptoe. There were no heroic visions now. It developed that he had
been engaged as storekeeper in the commissary for the negroes at one
of the mining camps. There were other camps, each with its commissary
in charge of a storekeeper, and over all of them there was a general
manager. One of the storekeepers was destined some day to rise above
the others to the managerial position and have the direction of the
chain. So there it was at last! Saint experienced a feeling of relief.
“In the meantime,” the genial voice informed him, “you must watch your
stock, send in requisitions for supplies when they run low, and stop a
nigger’s credit when it runs through his next week’s wages. Think you
can manage it?”
Out of the bitter past a fear leaped upon the boy. “The money--making
change--keeping accounts. Do I have to do that too, Mr. Raymond?” he
faltered.
“Oh, that’s no bother. Everything’s charged, and you won’t be hurried.
It don’t matter how long you keep the niggers waiting.”
The road that had approached the mines through the woods now left the
trees behind and passed between abandoned fields that had been left
to go to broom straw. The brisk January wind changed and veered over
the warm brown expanse, roughening its surface like a squall at sea.
Presently through the silence of the country there came to Saint a low
insistent rumble.
Mr. Raymond pointed: “That’s the washer,” he explained, “where the rock
is cleaned for shipment.”
Saint followed the pointing finger with his gaze and saw, far out over
the marshes where the river drew a thin S of silver, a great building
crouched at the water’s edge like an antediluvian monster that had gone
down to drink.
Before them the road widened. The ancient negro who was driving drew to
one side of the open space and brought his mule to a standstill.
“Well, here we are,” said Mr. Raymond.
Saint looked up and saw before him a small clapboarded building with
its front gable covered by the false square that always denotes the
country store. Across its front ran a low, wide piazza, and upon the
piazza three curs and an old negro were dozing in the sun. Behind
the little building a wide broom-straw field travelled east until
it merged its gold-brown with the silver-brown of the winter marsh,
carrying the vision in an uninterrupted flight on to the bright thread
of the Ashley River. North, south, and west the little clearing was
walled with virgin long-leaf pine. The towering trees swayed gently on
their long naked trunks and stopped the shrill cry of the wind down to
a grave sustained monotone. Overhead swung a vast empty sky, blue-green
over the treetops and almost purple where it dipped behind the warm
line of the marsh.
“All out,” commanded Mr. Raymond. “Well, how do you like it, Wentworth?”
The boy stood looking about him. His mouth had dropped a little
open, giving his face an expression of vacuity, almost stupidity. In
a clairvoyant flash he saw himself from outside his being; as his
mother would see him, a failure facing this disgraceful surrender,
conventionally respectable only because in his penny traffic with
negroes he was safely out of sight, and could be spoken of vaguely as
being “in phosphates,” and he pitied her terribly. He saw himself with
the eyes of his employer, and he knew what he was thinking at that
moment: that he’d never go any higher; that he would stay here until he
rotted down into the very soil of the camp. And yet, deep within him,
a frozen core was melting; warm new currents were stirring. Standing
there, he almost caught the first faint answers to the passionate
questions that his youth had flung against the wind. He turned to his
employer and gave a strange answer for a man who presumably had his
foot on the bottom round of the commercial ladder. He said: “Thank you,
sir. I’ll stay. I will be happy here.”
* * * * *
On a certain frosty January night Mamba sat in her immaculate room in
the servants’ quarters over the Atkinsons’ coach house and took stock
of her gains and losses. With the blinds carefully drawn she had
allowed herself the luxury of stepping out of character. Her teeth, to
which she had never grown accustomed, and which had become symbolic
of the innumerable restraints and prohibitions of her servitude, had
been cast aside for the solacing stem of her clay pipe. About her the
Atkinson air, no longer clean and naked, coiled and eddied intimately
in a visible garment of smoke. A familiar gurgling sound rippled the
hated quiet of the Atkinson premises. As she sat relaxed in a golden
oak rocker with her bare feet thrust from the folds of an old wrapper
straight before her upon the spotless bed spread that Mrs. Atkinson
was wont to inspect at regular intervals, she gave an impression of
physical well-being. But under the veiling fog of smoke her eyes had in
them the look of an unsatisfied hunger.
Six years had passed since she had turned her back on the delights of
a bland and care-free senility among her own kind and had bound her
forces together for her final adventure with life. In the big white
house on Church Street her enterprise had been crowned with unqualified
success. She had to an amazing degree the racial adaptability that
even age cannot stiffen into a set pattern, and in the part that she
had played so long and sedulously she was now letter perfect. She was,
in fact, more than that, for she lived with that complete immersion
in her impersonation that made her for the time being the character
itself. With the passing years the old almost unendurable longings had
dimmed to a faint nostalgic yearning so far beyond attainment that
it was as impersonal as the hunger of some remote acquaintance. The
real pang of separation had come two years ago, when it had become
necessary for her to leave her quarters with Hagar and Lissa, and
live in a room over the Atkinsons’ kitchen so that she could be near
the children when the master and mistress were away in the evenings.
Those first days had been cruel. She had missed the strong talk of
the court, the broad, frank humour, the smells, the clashing colours,
the curs, goats, buzzards, and tumbling black babies. She had missed
her pipe in the long summer dusks with the old men and women who were
drifting happily with the days, gossiping and scolding the young
negroes to their heart’s content. But later her wild longings had found
a tame consolation in retrospection. Then she was able to see her
compensations. She had a genuine fondness for her white children. She
was proud of them. There were moments when she doubted whether she was
making a lady of Gwen, but she had at least made a man of Jack, for he
could outswear and outfight any boy in the neighbourhood. Yesterday she
had seen him meet the neighbourhood bully in the alley beneath her back
window, pound him gloriously, and scorch his retreating back with a
collection of epithets that would have won the reluctant admiration of
Catfish Row. Yes, in spite of Mrs. Atkinson, Jack would do. Now there
were food and clothing in abundance. Every week she returned half of
her wages to Mrs. Atkinson to put in the bank for her, until now she
had a tidy sum awaiting the inevitable emergency. And above and beyond
all other considerations, she now had her white folks to stand between
Hagar and Lissa and the impersonal justice of the state should evil
fortune bring them to that.
But if Mamba had moulded her life according to her plan as far as the
big Church Street house was concerned, the same could not have been
said of the course of events in the East Bay tenement. Hagar had been
in trouble several times. There had been nothing serious; no charges
that involved a stay of more than a fortnight, or perhaps a month, at a
time in the county jail. But she was getting a bad name with the police.
When Mamba had told Mrs. Wentworth that her motive for seeking
permanent white folks of her own was that she had a girl who was born
for trouble, she had been as wise as she was prophetic. In the building
with Hagar there lived a dozen women who made trouble. In the great
honeycomb to the south, as many again. But they had attained the high
art of complete invisibility in time of peril. Hagar, on the other
hand, with her huge frame and her big wondering child’s face, stood
dangerously out of the picture. Also the police knew where she could
be found. Mamba had given the woman a religion in Lissa. Deep into the
simple intelligence she had driven the need to care for the child,
to give it a chance. A Saturday night would come when the mercurial
spirits of the neighbourhood would leap beyond bounds. There was always
a quantity of the peculiarly deadly corn whisky, marked with the seal
of the great commonwealth of South Carolina, and known among the
negroes as rotgut. Hagar would drink with the rest, and her enormous
body, released from its slight control, would become one of the
gesticulating, whooping dervishes in the ensuing orgy that inevitably
resulted in a riot call.
In the panic the big woman could be counted upon to rush to her room
to see if Lissa was safe. The police knew this. A fruitless raid was
humiliating to the force. There must be something to show for it at the
recorder’s court in the morning. All else failing, the officers would
stand at the bottom of the steps leading to Hagar’s room and whoop for
her to come out. At the sound of the summons she would become suddenly
cowed. Still a bit dazed by the liquor, dumb and bewildered, she would
come down the steps looking like a great child in disgrace. Then some
one would go to the Atkinsons’ gate and whisper to Mamba, who would
come with money and arrange with a neighbour to care for Lissa until
Hagar’s return.
* * * * *
And while Mamba sat in her room on that certain January night dwelling
on the past and speculating upon the hazards of the future, in a very
different room six blocks away in the black belt Hagar was putting her
child to bed. Lissa was a well-grown child for her six years, with a
faint colour in her cheeks under the light bronze of her skin. This
seemed miraculous to her dark mother, who loved to stroke it with her
finger tips. She got the little figure into bed, and sat beside it,
singing in her deep contralto which, with her eyes, made up the sum
total of her physical heritage from Mamba. It was a week-night, and
the court was quiet. Far away on the tracks of the East Shore Terminal
a switch engine laboured with a heavy burden. Hagar was singing a sad
little lullaby full of minors:
“Hush, li’l’ baby, don’ yuh cry,
Mudder an’ fadder born tuh die.”
The soft tossing sounds beside her ceased and were followed by the
rhythm of faint steady breathing. The mother tiptoed over, dimmed the
kerosene lamp, picked up a large bundle of clean wash, stepped out of
the room, and closed the door behind her.
Across the street and down the dim perspective of the wharf her gaze
travelled and rested on a side-wheel river steamer lying at the pier
head. The boat was motionless, but a steam exhaust beside the funnel
wheezed and blew a film of mist between her and the frosty stars. Steam
was up. An hour now and perhaps the boat would be under way. Her wash
was for the fire-room crew, Sam and Abel. She had never seen the men
before they had brought the clothes to her. And she did not know the
boat. Perhaps it was just touching port for supplies and was going
South. She did not trust the men altogether. Her eyes must be kept
open; one could not tell about strange river niggers.
When she arrived at the pier head she saw that the fire-room hatch was
open--just a square hole flush with the deck. She looked down and saw
an iron ladder that descended into flickering orange light and sounds
of low laughter. She stooped over the hatch and called:
“Yuh Sam an’ Abel. Heah Hagar wid yo’ wash.”
The laughter stopped and a lazy voice called: “All right, Sistuh, bring
um down.”
Silence for a moment, then: “No, I ain’t gots de time. Come on up an’
bring yo’ two dollah.”
Sam appeared at the bottom of the ladder with his face thrown up toward
her. His voice was beguiling. “Aw, come ’long down, Sistuh. Whut mek
yo’ so onsociable?”
The thought came to Hagar that they might touch at the port regularly
and that customers were not to be discouraged. She still felt vague
misgivings, but she lowered her heavy bulk through the opening. It was
so low between decks that she could not stand upright. The men, who
were both shorter than she, laughed openly and good-naturedly at her.
This served to allay her suspicions. She chuckled at her own expense,
and her teeth sent a white flash across the darkness of her face.
Seating herself on an empty box, she said: “Well, dar’s yo’ cloes.”
Abel had not moved when she entered, but continued to sit on the edge
of a bunk with a guitar in his lap. He had a round face with a spurious
expression of ingenuousness upon it. Now he bent over his instrument
and plucked a chord.
Sam said: “Dat’s right, go on an’ play fuh de comp’ny while Ah git de
money.” Then, as though on second thought, he lifted a pint flask from
behind him and handed it to Hagar. “Go on, Sistuh,” he urged, “he’p
yo’self.”
Abel was picking away steadily now: not a tune, but the intricate
improvisation of chords so loved by the negro. The music filled the
close space. Before Hagar the red fire box, cut into segments by
the black grate bars, grinned like a friendly mouth, and above her
the winter stars beyond the hatch showed infinitely remote and pale
through the warm light of the fire room. She drew the cork from the
flask, and instantly the air was pungent with the rank fumes. She
tipped the bottle and took a long pull, then passed it to Abel. He
drank sparingly, returned the flask to Hagar, then took up his playing
again. The music beat through the woman in recurrent waves of ecstasy.
One broad foot commenced to tap the floor. She lifted the flask, and
it seemed as though she would never put it down. Her eyelids dropped
slowly, narrowing her eyes to bright slits, then closing them. One
might have thought her asleep but for the fact that she remained erect
on her box and swayed slowly from the hips with the rhythm of the music.
Through the hatch fell a hail from a passing tug, and the vessel’s wash
travelled landward under the waiting steamer, lifting it, thrusting it
forward, allowing it to settle back, then lifting it again. Across the
harmony of the guitar chords rang the bright, certain notes of a ship’s
bell--seven crystal beads of sound strung with beautiful precision on
a thread of music. Sam and Abel exchanged meaning glances, and Sam
grimaced the words “Not yet.” Overhead a crisp, authoritative step
smote the deck, then another, and rapid footsteps dwindled away forward.
Suddenly the shattering blast of a steam whistle filled the night.
It stilled the guitar which dropped from Abel’s hands. It galvanised
the two men into intense activity. They seized Hagar by the arms and
hoisted her up until her head struck the ceiling. She opened bewildered
eyes and looked blankly about her.
“Step it, Sistuh,” Sam commanded. “Dat’s de cast-off whistle.”
Hagar blinked. Where was she--what was it all about? Her fingers were
asleep. They opened slowly and let an empty flask fall to the floor.
Sam hustled her up the ladder that eluded her groping hands and feet.
Then she was on deck with the cold night air washing over her hot body.
Her conductor gave her a final shove and she was on the wharf. Behind
her a negro threw a painter from a bullard, and it fell overboard with
a heavy splash. The steamer’s rail was commencing to slide past her
now, close, where she could still touch it with her extended hand.
Sam’s face came into her range of vision. He was leaning against the
rail, and as she looked at him he threw back his head and laughed. She
saw the wide mouth and white teeth. Suddenly a thought was thrown out
sharp and clear from the slow moiling in her brain. They were going
now. They had tricked her out of the two dollars. The money that she
needed for Lissa. Red passion burst deep within her and flooded her
body. Her eyes were fixed on the laughing face that was drifting away
from her into the night. Across the yard of space that divided them
her long arms flashed, and her hands closed on the shoulders of the
man. He was wearing a tightly buttoned coat. The stuff balled up in
her palms, giving her a firm grip. The face that stared into hers
changed ludicrously from laughter to fright. She set her knee against a
bullard, and threw her whole weight into a backward heave. The man made
a frantic clutch at the rail, but the pull on his shoulders jerked his
arms up, and he missed. A second later he lay sprawled upon the wharf
with Hagar standing astride of him. Behind them sounded a bright jingle
of engine-room bells and the noisy threshing of the paddles. The boat
regarded its former fireman with a green and sardonic starboard eye,
then gathered speed and was engulfed by the aqueous darkness.
Hagar never nursed a grudge. Always her anger was defensive rather than
punitive. Had the man kept his head and made payment of what he owed
her it is likely that she would have let the matter drop there. But
fatal panic was upon him, and he was smitten with that madness which
the gods lay upon those whom they are about to destroy. He scrambled
to his feet and attempted to make a dash. A swift, clubbing stroke
caught him between the shoulders and hurled him forward against a pile
of barrels. He cannoned off at an oblique angle and again tried to
bolt, but it was too late. The negro who had cast off the steamer heard
the noise and came running. A single lantern hung suspended from the
ceiling and only served to make the vast cavern of the shed a place
of reeling shadows and elusive half lights. The wharf hand rounded a
double tier of barrels and was brought up standing by what he saw.
Hagar had her man in a cul-de-sac between two rows of piled freight.
She was not blaspheming like other fighting negresses, nor was she at
it with teeth and nails. But there was something strangely, almost
grotesquely feminine about her, for she was sobbing loudly and
bitterly, and through the sound ran a monotone of two words said over
and over, and the words were “two dolluh.” Her victim was attempting
to speak, but she would not let him, and presently he was so beset
that he gave over trying. The watcher saw him emerge from the shadows
and balance before the woman. He was small, but quick and wiry. He
seemed obsessed with a single idea, to pass the woman and escape into
the open. Hagar stood braced across the exit like a Colossus, her arms
moving in swift downward strokes from the shoulder as a labourer works
with a sledge. The terrified wharf hand saw the man venture too near.
A blow took him on the forehead and hurled him back into darkness.
“Godamighty!” exclaimed the onlooker, and with eyes showing high lights
in the faint lantern glow he turned and raced to give the alarm.
Out of the shadows emerged Sam, driven forward by a single
idea--escape. And waiting for him was another fixed and unalterably
opposed idea that had possessed itself of the devastating human machine
that barred his way. They met, but this time the smaller figure struck,
and remained impinged upon the larger one, smashing terribly up at the
big sobbing face. Down they went together, striking a pile of boxes
that toppled and fell with a crash.
People were coming now, the white watchman swinging his lantern, and
men from the boats. They drew together in a little circle and waited.
The bundle that rolled in the shadows lay quiet for a moment, then
resolved itself into two individual parts that staggered uncertainly
upright. They faced each other, and their breathing sounded above the
slap and suck of waves against the bulkhead. Then the man drew himself
together and launched himself at the opening in a last desperate
attempt. Hagar bent forward and met him with a thrust of the shoulder,
her whole tremendous weight flung into the effort. Shock--recoil. The
man’s body described an arc, struck the planking, and lay where it fell.
The woman’s lips moved inaudibly. She bent over the inert body, turned
it over, and fumbled laboriously through its pockets. At last she found
some bills, opened them, retained two, and returned the remainder with
an air of detachment. Then she rose, sighed heavily, drew her arm
across her face with an incredibly weary gesture, and started home.
In the tricky lantern light the men saw her coming, a gigantic figure,
her massive torso bare to the waist, the great breasts of a woman, and
the knotted man’s shoulders, blood on her face, and in a dark rivulet
between her breasts. No one attempted to stop her. The circle opened as
she approached, and with the fixed stare of a somnambulist she passed
through, crossed the street, went up to her room, and closed the door
behind her.
Twenty minutes later when a policeman came for her she was sitting on
the edge of her bed with Lissa pressed to her breast. She was swaying
back and forth crooning her lullaby:
“Hush, li’l’ baby, don’ yo’ cry,
Mudder an’ fadder born tuh die.”
She raised her face and looked at the officer over the laxed form in
her arms. Then she rose, placed the child on the bed, and tucked in
the covers with meticulous care. Without a word she got a long coat
from a hook, slipped it on, and buttoned it over her nakedness. The
officer stood patiently in the doorway watching her. He had slipped his
gun back into the holster. He had come for her before, and he knew the
woman with whom he had to deal. There would be no trouble.
Hagar got several garments from a trunk and bundled them together. Then
she returned to the bed and stood looking down at Lissa.
“Come along, Big Un,” the officer said not unkindly, “let’s get it over
with. It don’t get no better from waitin’!”
His prisoner bent and pressed her wounded mouth against the smooth
cheek of the child. Then she turned obediently and went to the door.
While the policeman stood waiting for her to precede him down the
steps, she paused and looked back into the familiar room. It was not
until then that the realisation seemed to dawn upon her that this was
different from the other departures. From behind the blind veil of the
future a faint prescience of some vast disaster flickered its warning.
Slowly her eyes filled, and through the tears she looked upon the big,
dim room with its familiar disorder, the bed, and the slim form of the
child. In the half light of the lowered kerosene lamp she could see
the imprint of her farewell kiss showing dark against the light tan of
the cheek. She turned and felt her way down the dark stairs with the
policeman clumping heavily behind her.
* * * * *
There was nothing of the chameleon about George P. Atkinson. His ten
years spent in the South had not blurred his Mid-Western outline in
the smallest particular. Two years in Virginia had left him guiltless
of a broad A, and now he went about the Charleston streets obliviously
rolling his R’s before him. He refused to attend formal functions
because formality bored him. For the same reason he neither played
golf nor shot. But he knew cotton-seed oil from the seed to the
olive-oil label. He could tell you the Texas cotton crop for 1907,
the best market for linters, the advantages of “cold pressing,” and
the crude-oil market for any given day in the past half year. Every
morning he would breakfast at eight o’clock, read the paper for fifteen
minutes, walk briskly to his office and say in that snappy tempo with
which employers launch a busy day:
“Morning, Johnson. Yesterday’s reports ready?” He would have told you
that he was a specialist, and, as such, he was not to be despised
even by his wife, for the net result to the family was ten thousand a
year in a city where many of the socially distinguished families were
existing at a shade above life’s stark necessities. He might well have
been a problem to Mrs. Atkinson in her social ascension, for his ego
was strongly marked and assertive, and he showed in raw contrast to
the urbane, rather ceremonious, and commercially unambitious men whom
he would have met in most of the Charleston drawing rooms in the early
nineteen hundreds. But fortunately he asked only to be left at home
when she sallied forth on her career, and refused to attend dinners
except in his own home. Even on these occasions, Mrs. Atkinson decided
that he might have been much worse, for while he said little, she
noticed that the men gave him respectful attention when he spoke. He
offered cigars and liqueurs to her guests with a natural quiet dignity,
insisting on taking them from the butler, and making a little ceremony
of passing them himself after they had adjourned to the drawing-room
fire. He had the clean-cut “Gibson type” of figure, which was then at
the height of its vogue, and he looked well leaning against the Adam
mantel. It is true that at times he would break through her restraint
and militantly pronounce a spade a spade. But he had mellowed in his
fortieth year, and now, at forty-five, did most of his bristling with
his close-cropped moustache, no longer giving her the lie when she
offset one of his breaks with: “Mr. Atkinson has such a droll sense of
humour.”
On a murky morning two weeks after Hagar’s arrest George P. Atkinson
sat with his paper open before him. It was then in the eighth minute
of the fifteen allotted to that daily rite, and he had not yet been
allowed to commence. He made what he hoped was a decisive effort to
dispose of the interruption.
“I can’t see it, my dear,” he told Mrs. Atkinson. “We go out and hire
a woman to work for us. Very good. We pay her adequately. If she is
injured in our employ we may be responsible under the Employer’s
Liability Law, but, in South Carolina, I doubt even that. Not that I
would not do the right thing by Mamba. She’s a good soul and, white or
black, I’m fond of her. But when a disreputable creature of the slums
with a police record is dragged in, claimed to be her daughter, and
goes to court to take her medicine for setting upon and breaking up a
law-abiding negro, I am out. Business is business. Charity is charity.
Once in a thousand years justice is even justice. I would be an ass to
interfere. I won’t. That’s final.”
“But, George dear, you miss the point. It won’t be going out of your
way to do it. It’s the thing to do. The right sort of people here do
look after their negroes. They take pride in it. Most likely you will
not be the only one there. You’re as apt as not to find a Ravenal,
Waring, or Pinckney doing the same thing. The other afternoon at the
Saturday Club some of the ladies had the most entertaining stories of
scrapes that their husbands had gotten their negroes out of.”
“Their negroes! Am I to assume that this person charged with aggravated
assault and indecent exposure of the person is my negro?”
“Of course, George. Everybody knows that Mamba’s people used to belong
to the Atkinsons, and now, since the South Carolina branch of the
family has died out, you are in a way the head.”
The head of the Atkinson clan balled his paper up in a knot and threw
it on the floor, looked his wife in the face, and said rudely: “Bah!”
Then he cleared his throat, raised his voice, and deliberately repeated
the offensive monosyllable.
It was the secret of Mrs. Atkinson’s success that she never lost either
her temper or her head. Now, in a voice like a cold douche she said:
“You can’t bah away an obligation, George, and you know it.”
Thirteen minutes of newspaper time gone. Was ever a man so put upon!
He snapped: “You know as well as I do that there never was an Atkinson
plantation on Cooper River. Why, I asked some of the men at the club
about it the other day, and I could see that they were laughing at me.”
To many wives this would have meant utter rout, but not to this
adroit campaigner. She veered suddenly and took her husband in a most
vulnerable spot. “Very well, then,” she said, as though the matter were
concluded, “be inhuman, and while you are enjoying your pride that
justice is being done, imagine your own daughter in desperate trouble
with no one to help her, and then perhaps you’ll know how poor old
Mamba feels.”
“Eh, what’s that?” exclaimed Atkinson in a startled voice.
“And you don’t know the whole story, either. You just read what your
hateful paper says. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Just let Mamba come in
and give you her version of the tragedy; then, if you refuse to help,
I’ll promise never to say another word about it.”
Atkinson emitted a short grunt that was intended to convey scepticism
of his wife’s promised silence, but she seized it and interpreted it as
assent. Opening the pantry door, she summoned Mamba.
The old woman entered with a promptness that suggested prearrangement,
and advanced until she stood before her master, then waited with bowed
head and hands that clenched each other tightly before her.
“Go ahead,” he said, “I suppose I’ll have to listen before I can get
any peace.”
Mrs. Atkinson said in her crisp compulsive voice: “Now, Mamba, tell him
exactly what happened.”
When Mamba finished her recital she was sobbing into her apron, and her
listener was sitting forward in his chair with his moustache bristling.
“So he tried to rob her, did he?” he exclaimed. “When’s the trial?”
“To-morruh mornin’, suh. Ah ain’t want foh bodder yuh ’til Ah can’t
wait no longer.”
“Very well, we’ll see what can be done.”
Into his overcoat, then, and out of the door on his last word. He’d be
ten minutes late at the office. Wouldn’t do. Bad example. Loose morale.
Rotten position he’d be in to-morrow, too. Tacitly backing up his wife
in that absurd fiction about the plantation Atkinsons. They’d have a
damned good right to laugh at him at the club now. Pretending himself
a Carolina aristocrat. Pretence, of all things that he hated. But that
poor old nigger and her story about her girl. Well, he was in for it.
* * * * *
When Atkinson entered the courtroom on the following morning he saw
Mamba waiting for him just inside the door. Then he noticed that she
was accompanied by a child--a mulatto girl about six years of age. It
was the old woman’s attitude toward her charge rather than the child
herself that first caught his attention. The entrance was jammed
with negroes who elbowed their way to the spectators’ inclosure, and
a bailiff was attempting to clear the doorway. In the confusion of
opposing bodies Mamba was managing to keep the space about the child
free. She was silent, but stood with the slender form held before her
and gazed into the faces of the milling negroes with an expression of
such cold ferocity that they instinctively drew back. Then he noticed
the girl. He saw a slender, delicately made body, a small sentient
face, and eyes that seemed to note everything that passed before them
with that precocity which is characteristic of children with negro
blood.
A trial was already in progress; a jury trial at that. It would be
afternoon before they could get to Hagar’s case. A whole day gone. Five
perfectly good business hours. Well, he was in for it. He’d stick it
out. Might pick up something that would be of use when the woman’s time
came. With characteristic economy of movement, he went straight to one
of the swivel chairs behind the attorneys’ table and motioned Mamba to
a seat behind him. From under level brows his keen gray eyes appraised
the room.
Against the rear wall of the courtroom were the two sections reserved
for the public. There was a scattering of nondescripts behind the
railing of the rectangle occupied by the whites. Across the aisle, the
coloured space was packed to the walls. Black, brown, yellow, with
intent faces and wide eyes, the crowd appeared as thought welded into a
unit by its common and utter absorption. The overheated air was tinged
with a faint exotic odour compounded of fertiliser dust, fish, and
unwashed negro bodies inseparable from such a gathering. It offended
the visitor at first, but soon he lost consciousness of it, for he
followed the gaze of the crowd to the prisoner in the dock.
She was a big yahoo of a girl about sixteen years of age, very black,
and with heavy negroid features. Her eyes set wide apart, and with the
broad, flat nose between them, gave her an expression of bucolic calm.
She was a creature for the simple rhythms of the country, and seemed
out of place in the complex machinery of a city court.
Continuing his survey of the scene, Atkinson met the eyes of the
prosecuting attorney, who was seated at a table directly in front of
his own. He had a pleasant acquaintance with the young court official,
but was unprepared for the informal and cordial reception that he
received. The attorney was a man in the early thirties, blond, with
that instinctive graciousness of manner toward a guest that Atkinson
always admired, and secretly envied, in the men of his adopted city.
“Delighted to see you here, Mr. Atkinson,” he said, extending his hand
across the table. “Just looking us over, or are you interested in one
of our cases?”
Atkinson explained that he was there to do what he could for Hagar.
“Splendid!” exclaimed the young lawyer. “One can’t help liking
the woman. She’s not a criminal type. Do you know whether she is
represented by counsel?”
“I think not. As a matter of fact, Mr. Dawson, the woman is guilty of
the charge. I understand that the man is still in the hospital, and
there is no doubt as to who put him there. But there are extenuating
circumstances, and I’m here to vouch for them.”
The prosecutor leaned forward and gave his instructions briefly: “You
must make her plead guilty. Whatever you do, do not agree to a jury
trial. We’ll talk it over with the judge when her case is called and
see what can be done.”
The bailiff bawled for order in court, and the judge inquired formally
if counsel for prosecution and defence were ready to proceed with their
speeches in the case of the negro girl. Both men rose and bowed. The
state’s attorney traversed the ten feet of the space that separated
him from the jury box and faced its occupants over the low railing.
Instantly the suave and urbane individual who had been talking to
Atkinson vanished, and in his place stood a tense, truculent figure.
Swiftly, and with a deadly precision, he counted off the salient points
of the case on his fingers. The woman had stolen clothing valued at
forty dollars; three competent white witnesses had nailed down the
evidence; the clothing had been found in her room and identified by
owner. A moment of dramatic silence ensued, then an abrupt transition.
Leaving the damning facts hanging, as it were, in the air before the
jurors, Dawson’s body became electric with that facile violence which
characterises the successful prosecutor and can always be depended upon
to galvanise his auditors into attention. For ten minutes he poured out
a vitriolic arraignment against the type of petty criminal who has the
audacity to engage a lawyer to come and monopolise the valuable time
of the court and the services of a “highly intelligent” jury. “Taking
your time, gentlemen, I submit, to wade through the sordid details of a
case upon the very face of which, I again submit, she is as guilty as
Judas Iscariot.” On then in the teeth of the jury itself, calling upon
them to make a proper example of the case in question, that the culprit
and those of her friends who were present might be impressed with the
dignity and importance of the court. Turning away abruptly as from a
finished task with a foregone conclusion, Dawson took his seat.
“Great Godamighty!” exclaimed a woman’s voice in the negro section, and
“Silence in court,” bawled the bailiff.
Counsel for the defence got to his feet and commenced to speak. He
was a big man with a heavy lethargic body and a stupid face. His lips
were loose and crafty. He gave the immediate effect of one who was
going through a familiar routine, saying the trite phrases with noise
but without conviction. That tension which one expects to find at a
criminal trial, and that Dawson had attained, was now wholly lacking,
except in the tranced attention accorded by the tightly packed negro
section. The jury lounged at ease in their chairs. The judge and clerk
were busy with papers of other cases on the docket.
Atkinson transferred his attention to the prisoner in the dock. She was
sitting forward following every gesture of the lawyer with a hypnotic
gaze. One got the impression that her interest in the proceedings
was impersonal, detached. She was caught by the drama of it but had
not succeeded in relating the obscure process that was under way to
herself. She was in the grip of forces as remote from her comprehension
as are the workings of destiny. Words, words, filling the air with
strange, exciting sound. Later there would come a silence, then that
fate which was approaching, and was already determined, would be
revealed to her. It would make her happy or sad. It would have to be
accepted as had other crises in her uncertain advance through life.
The lawyer ended his speech in a burst of noise, an oratorical
invocation to the blind goddess who held the scales over the portal and
who dispensed justice to rich and poor alike. He turned to his seat
followed by such an admiring and unself-conscious gaze from his client
that for a moment Atkinson feared that she might altogether forget
herself and burst into applause.
The speech over, the court became animate. The judge charged briefly
for conviction. The jury marched out and returned almost immediately
with the verdict of guilty. The clerk ordered the prisoner to arise
and receive sentence. The judge gave her a severe lecture, and, in the
midst of a dramatic pause, seven years in the state reformatory.
A composite involuntary sound that was half wail, half moan, sounded
from the negro section.
“Order in court,” bawled the bailiff.
A deputy led the prisoner from the dock. She cast a final admiring
glance toward her attorney. There could be no doubt about it; he had
delivered a satisfactory performance.
Atkinson gasped at the severity of the sentence; then he went around
and took an empty chair beside Dawson.
“Good God!” he exclaimed. “Seven years for a few dollars’ worth of
second-hand clothes. It’s inhuman.”
The younger man smiled into his earnest face. “I see you haven’t got
the hang of it yet,” he said, “but don’t be too scandalised at us. She
is not going to do her full time. I’ll keep a note of the case, and
later she’ll be let out on good behaviour. You see, there are a lot of
shyster lawyers around here who take the nigger’s money in advance and
promise to clear them when they know there isn’t a chance. The only
way to convince the poor devils that they’re being done is to throw it
into them good and deep every time a case goes to a jury. But God! They
learn slowly.”
Hagar’s case was called, and Atkinson saw her enter, dwarfing the
deputy who led her to the dock. This was his first glimpse of his
charge, and he was at once struck by the candour of the big, childlike
face, and the questioning, live-brown eyes that were so much like
Mamba’s. He was anything but an imaginative man, but in that moment he
had a flash of divination. He saw the court, the officers, the jurymen,
as these simple souls must see them; akin to the High Gods of Greek
mythology, manipulating the vast mysterious force that was the law,
looming suddenly and inexorably against the gaiety of life, to smash
families--even to mark for death.
Dawson was speaking to him, and he turned with a start. “You had better
have a talk with your client,” he was saying. “Tell her to plead guilty
when the clerk finishes reading the indictment and puts the question.”
He beckoned to Mamba, and together they stepped to the prisoner’s
dock. There he commenced an involved explanation of the reasons why
it would be best for her to plead guilty. Hagar did not take her eyes
from his face, but he saw that her look was that of a drowning person
who watches the shore rather than one of understanding. He stopped
speaking. Then she said:
“What dat wo’d Ah’s tuh say?”
“Guilty,” Atkinson told her.
“Berry well, den. Yo’ nod yo’ head at de right time, an’ Ah’ll say um.”
Mamba retired to her seat, and Atkinson joined the prosecutor. The
clerk rose, read the indictment, and put the question. Atkinson nodded
his head, and, in her deep contralto voice, Hagar said clearly,
“Guilty.”
The judge leaned over his desk and raised his eyebrows in
interrogation. Dawson beckoned to Atkinson and stepped forward. “Your
Honour,” he said, “I would like to present Mr. George Atkinson of the
Southeastern Cotton Seed Products Corporation, one of our leading
citizens, who is interested in this case.”
The judge shook hands warmly; then, leaning forward on his elbows,
spoke in a leisurely conversational tone: “I am delighted to know you,
sir. You are from the North, I understand.”
Atkinson had been busy with plans for his client’s defence, wondering
whether he had not better bring Mamba forward and let her tell her
story. The social turn taken by the court jarred him from his line
of thought. He uttered a surprised affirmative to the comment.
The judicial features above the desk smiled pleasantly down upon
him, and the agreeable voice with its almost imperceptible drawl
led the conversation among the amenities that usually preface an
acquaintanceship.
Beyond the small circle of their talk the courtroom waited. Here
and there a chair leg creaked or a foot shuffled. Beyond the window
a huckster cried his fish in a deep baritone song. In the negroes’
section the tension drew out until it became almost tangible in the
air of the room. And at the desk the three men chatted of the relative
merits of the Charleston and New York climates. They might have been in
a club, or at a chance meeting after business hours. Finally the judge
touched on the case.
“And so you are interested in this woman, Mr. Atkinson. Very good of
you to assist us, I am sure. Perhaps you will tell me what you know of
the affair.”
Atkinson explained his connection with Mamba and Hagar. His interest
seemed to be entirely understood by his hearers. The fact that he had
espoused the woman’s cause was taken as a matter of course. As briefly
as possible he told the story as he had got it from Mamba.
When he had finished the judge looked inquiringly at the prosecutor,
and asked: “And what do you know about her, Mr. Dawson?”
“She’s been in the police court several times, Your Honour. Nothing
serious: hot suppers, lodge meetings, and the like. There’s nothing
vicious about her.”
His Honour pondered: “Still, she has a police record. That’s got to be
considered. Evidently the town is no place for her. Ought to get her
out of it and give her another chance.” He continued to speak, but now
his glance took the other two into consultation: “A two-year suspended
sentence ought to do. Give her six hours to get out of the city. Then
put her on her good behaviour. If she is arrested anywhere in the
county, or enters town again for any purpose whatever, the sentence
will become immediately operative. Does that appeal to you as a fair
adjustment, Mr. Atkinson?”
It had never occurred to that gentleman that he would be consulted
in so important a matter as the actual measure of punishment, but he
managed to say that he thought it not only very fair but decidedly
generous.
“I am glad that you feel that way about it, sir,” His Honour replied,
then shook hands over the desk, expressed pleasure in the meeting, and
nodded to the clerk.
An involuntary whisper lifted and died in the negro section. The
bailiff bawled for order in court. The clerk called upon Hagar to arise
and receive sentence.
Slowly and lucidly the judge made his pronouncement and explained its
purport. Then he ordered court adjourned for the day.
The deputy who was to take charge of Hagar until she should leave the
city led her from the room, and a bewildered George Atkinson got to his
feet and made for the open.
When he was on the pavement again he found that Mamba had accompanied
him. She had been so quiet during the proceedings that, in his
absorption, he had forgotten her, and the presence of the child which
she held tightly by the hand struck him with the impact of a fresh
surprise. Mamba caught his hand, shook it, tried to speak, then turned
suddenly and followed Hagar. He stood looking after the strange old
figure. Age with its back to the wall, fighting for something against
great odds. His heart contracted with an unfamiliar spasm of pity, then
expanded with a desire to protect. All feeling of boredom had passed
during the trial. He had espoused a cause. For the moment he had put
his best into it. Now, with the fight behind him, he could not let it
go. It kept tagging along beside him, plucking at the sleeve of his
mind. It made him think about something that had nothing to do with
cotton seed. It started something in his brain like the slow turning
up of a light. This negro business; millions and millions of them.
Race problem. What to do with the whole mass. You came up to that, and
it was there before you like a wall without a gate. One either stood
there battering his hands to pieces on it, or he walked away and made
it his business to forget. But this old woman, now, and her great
ungainly daughter, and that child that they had a way of speaking about
with their voices lowered; this was something different. These three
were not a race problem. They were individual entities battling with
destiny, needing a leg up most terribly. The weak throwing themselves
on the mercy of the strong. Mamba--Hagar--the child--not negroes now:
but to his mind just isolated human beings driven by some obscure urge
toward a vague elusive goal, as he was--his wife--his children. Was
that the feeling behind the law as he had found it in the court that
morning? Was it the key to the puzzling attitude of the men he knew who
could be so callous to the mass, yet who responded with exaggerated
generosity to the need of a known individual?
He came to a street crossing, and his alert mind leaped to grapple
with actualities, suddenly and keenly cognisant of the world about
him. Over the cobbles at his feet a low cart was being dragged by an
aged goat. In it sat a crippled negro. His head was bare to the sun,
and his face wore the vacuous look that is common to both dreamers and
fools. His hat lay upward in his lap, and there were a few pennies in
it. The sight was a familiar enough one to Atkinson. He had seen the
beggar every day, and yet his existence had never impinged upon his
consciousness. Now he saw him differently. “God!” he thought. “What a
hell of a joke for life to play on a man.” He fumbled in his pocket,
drew out a dollar bill, and dropped it in the hat. The face below
him became incredulous. Slow fingers picked the bill up and felt it,
turning it over and over. Atkinson pulled himself together. “Can’t
stand here all day looking like Santa Claus,” he told himself.
He turned on his heel and stepped briskly away, but his half-solved
problem was not to be outdistanced; it was with him again, insinuating
itself between his mind and the image of yesterday’s quotation board.
Individuals--human beings--that’s the answer, perhaps. Can’t lift the
mass. No use to try, it’s too vast. Can’t get hold of the edges of it,
and if one did it would probably drop and smash things to pieces. But
when you know of one who is catching hell, got to be decent, human. And
leave the race problem to God and the great-grandchildren.
He was at his office now. Squaring his shoulders, he took the steps
two at a time, opened the door, and exclaimed briskly, “Afternoon,
Johnson. Got yesterday’s reports ready?”
* * * * *
Saint Wentworth sat in the little room behind the camp commissary, his
brow furrowed with the intensity of his mental concentration. Before
him, propped upon a table, was a self-instruction book of music, and
his fingers were busy finding chords on the neck of a battered guitar.
The open page showed diagrams of the strings with black dots where the
fingers were to fall for each chord. Some of the combinations were
awkward for his unaccustomed hands, but he hung doggedly to each until
he could find it with his eyes lifted from the page before he passed on
to the next. At first glance one would have said that his three years
at the phosphate mines had changed him but little in appearance. As he
sat in the half light of the little room between the fading day against
the small window and the flickering illumination of the open fire, he
showed the same slightly stooping shoulders, the colourless hair with
its flaring cowlick, and the old lack of compression about the mouth
which is to the conventional mind an infallible symbol of weakness.
Only when he finally closed the book, laid the guitar aside, and, with
hands jammed deep into trousers pockets, commenced to wander about the
room, would one have noticed differences. Changes that became evident,
not so much in the physical appearance of the man himself as in his
interrelation with the room. He was one of those not uncommon people
who find expression in the things with which they surround themselves;
people for whom no evaluation can serve that does not take the setting
into account. There were books on a shelf, plays, biography, poetry, a
modern novel or two; the astonishingly varied collection that in age
may mean only the dilettante, but in youth the seeker. An etching was
given one of the four walls to itself: an extremely well done piece of
work by a young Charleston artist--the gateway of old St. Michael’s
with its wrought-iron urns and scrolls. A small but fine plaster of the
Nike was given the mantel. A couch against one of the walls was covered
with brown burlap, and had pillows of orange and lemon upon it. The
draperies at the single window were the colour of sunlight. Now day was
retreating rapidly behind the panes. The fluctuations of firelight grew
more noticeable on walls and furnishings, thrusting mellow shafts under
the table and into corners--possessing the room. Saturday night, and
the negroes would soon be coming to do their shopping.
Wentworth cast a long look about him, sighed, and passed through the
door into the commissary with its familiar odours--kerosene from the
barrel in the corner, cabbages--the smells seeming stronger and more
sour in the dusk. Then he caught a clean wholesome whiff from a pile
of print cotton goods at his elbow. He threw some wood on the coals in
the small open fireplace, lighted the lamps, and stepped through the
outer door onto the little piazza. A cold red sunset burned low behind
the serried pines, and over the eastern marshes the mists thickened and
swirled, bringing night in from the Atlantic wrapped in their folds.
A group of negroes approached, their resonant voices preceding them.
They were in high humour. To-night they could commence to buy on next
week’s wages. The exhaustion of credit that invariably pinched them
during the latter half of each week was now happily at an end until
next Wednesday, or even Thursday if one were careful. Maum Vina, with
her kind, peering eyes, and Reverend Quintus Whaley, fat and unctuous,
were the first to enter. Behind them groups of twos and threes gathered
before the store, climbed the steps, and entered the building. Loud
chaffing and banter filled the air. Most of the women were swinging
bottles by strings to be filled with kerosene for their lamps, and
some brought jugs for molasses. The men were covered with dust from the
mining pits. This was the hour when labour was forgotten, friends met,
and gossip was exchanged. The commissary building glowed hospitably.
The open fire crackled on the hearth, and several oil lamps flickered
in the draught and sent ribbons of smoke up among the rafters.
Wentworth waited on Ned first because he knew that he was in trouble
and ought to hurry back to Dolly. His customer was a small black negro
in late middle life, with a grizzled moustache, and large teeth between
which was clenched a cheroot that added a smell like burning leather
to the other odours in the room. He was pondering over a selection
from several bolts of black and white cambrics and cotton flannels. He
smoked steadily while he held the widths of cloth against a soap box,
black for the outside and white for the lining, appraising the effect
with his head cocked speculatively on one side. From time to time he
would look up and speak to an acquaintance. It seemed to Saint that he
was deliberately protracting his errand, enjoying the importance that
it gave him. And there was a smugness about him that was annoying.
Saint remembered the sounds of weeping that he had heard when he had
passed his cabin, and the stricken face of Dolly as she looked from the
door. Now he spoke sharply, “If you’re sure the box is large enough,
say what cloth you want and get through. I haven’t all night to give
you.”
Ned produced a stick about eighteen inches in length and placed it in
the box, where it fitted nicely. “Ain’t yo’ see, suh, dat he size? He
ain’t but a six mont’ ole baby, an’ he always been puny.”
“Well, come along, then. Cambric or flannel?”
“Gib me dis”--and the man indicated the cambric--“two yahd black and
two yahd white. Dat flannen cos’ too much, anyhow.” He added a package
of tacks to his purchase. His gaze went longingly to a glass jar
filled with large candy balls of striped red and white. “An’ put in
t’ree ob dem candy ball fuh sweeten my mout’,” he concluded. He spat
the cheroot loudly into the fire and put one of the candies in his
cheek, where it looked like the symptom of an acute toothache. Then
around the obstruction he said, “Now, suh, please gib me a cherry
bounce an’ I’ll be gone,” and he started optimistically toward the keg
which contained the sticky sweet drink that the negroes loved.
“No, I don’t,” said Wentworth sternly. “Get on back to Dolly. You ought
to be ashamed to be hanging around the store and your woman alone with
your dead baby.”
“Dolly tek on too much, Chief. Baby is plentiful. Dey comes an’ dey
goes.” And with this philosophical comment he took his departure.
A young woman who was passing behind the speaker heard his remark and
sucked her teeth loudly at him. “Ole rooster wid young pullet oughtn’t
to crow so loud,” she flung after his retreating figure.
There was some laughter from the group at the fire, but an old woman,
Maum Vina, with the bright peering eyes, spoke soberly. “Yo’ hadn’t
ought to laugh at ole Ned like dat. Dat can’t do no good. What if Gilly
Bluton is run after Dolly, he done de same by plenty odder gal roun’
here. When a man know dat anodder man is runnin’ after he ’oman, dat
one t’ing. But when he know dat odder people know, den he goin’ fight.
Yo’ mus’ want to hab killin’ in dis camp, enty?”
“Well, he ain’t gots no right to strut so,” the young woman said
defiantly. “An’ Gilly ain’t no gawd. He can bleed same as any odder
man. What de matter wid dese mens roun’ here, anyhow, dey ’fraid um
so?” She cast a look of scorn around the circle which the men chose to
ignore. But old Vina was undaunted: “Yo’ ain’t use’ to talk like dat
’bout Gilly,” she said. “Mus’ be he done quit goin’ to yo’ house now.”
Saint turned to wait on the next customer, then instinctively followed
her gaze toward the door. A stranger had entered. In the small and
intimate neighbourhood a new face was sure to claim attention, but this
arrival was such a striking figure that her sudden appearance created
a minor sensation. The noise around the fire seemed to recoil upon
itself, leaving a poised question in the air. All eyes were fixed upon
the open door, and the great bulk of the woman who filled it. She stood
for a moment blinking in the light, then crossed with a heavy tread and
faced Wentworth across the counter. In a deep, mellow voice, she said:
“Is yo’ know me, Mr. Saint?”
He shook his head in mystified denial.
“Well, Ah is hear lot ’bout yo’. Ah is Mamba’ gal. Ma sen’ me down here
an’ ax can yo’ fin’ me some work.”
Saint had heard about the trouble during his last week-end in the
city. It had only confirmed him in an antagonism that he had always
felt toward Hagar. She was a thoroughly bad lot. Mamba’s excuses for
her delinquencies had never convinced him of her innocence. She would
undoubtedly be a bad influence in the camp, and if he let her stay he
would be answerable to the company for her behaviour. Mamba had no
right to put her problem up to him in that fashion. Well, anyway, there
was no work for a woman in the camp. He would only have to tell her so
and send her on her way.
“That would be simple enough if you were a man,” he said. “There’s
plenty of work in the pits, but we don’t use female labour. You’ll have
to hunt somewhere else.”
But his visitor did not take his dismissal. Instead, she drew a step
closer and looked at him incredulously out of eyes that might have been
Mamba’s own. “Ma didn’t tell me no other place to go,” she explained.
“All she say was for me to come to yo’ an’ tell yo’ she done sen’ me.”