When Dr. Levin returned later that day to change the dressing, he found
Hamilton still asleep. He was also asleep the next day; but the third
time, Dr. Levin found him awake, his dark eyes fluttering restlessly
about the ward, like caged birds.
Hamilton, Dr. Levin decided, might be twenty-five or twenty-six, an
athlete and a person of social position--analyzing people who came
under his observation was one of the surgeon’s hobbies. Weeks of
unconsciousness had left Hamilton pale and weak, but there was an
appearance of strength in his restless eyes and firm, ambitious lips.
His nose was slightly arched and the bridge at the highest point
a trifle thick as though it had once been broken; his jaws broad,
but tapering to a pointed cynical chin; his brow high and narrow;
his eyebrows thick without being shaggy--one of them was scarred. A
compromise between the intellectual and the physical, Levin thought. He
might have made the Harvard football team or Phi Beta Kappa, depending
on his inclinations.
As a matter of fact, Hamilton had not made Phi Beta Kappa, although he
had come comfortably near it, and had made the football team--trying
out for it only on the insistence of a physical training instructor
after he had watched Hamilton for a few minutes on the wrestling mat.
Hamilton believed thoroughly in the old Greek ideal of a sound mind in
a sound body, but he held no exaggerated idea of the importance of his
ability to tuck a leather ball under his arm and hammer his way through
a line of opposing men. He burned no incense at the altar of his egoism
as he had seen so many other football heroes do and he expected no
tribute. He enjoyed the game for its own sake--the nervous expectation,
the united purpose to win, the quick strategy, the unexpected
opposition, the physical clash, the tug and strain of muscles, the
smell of keen autumn air and of blood and leather. But football was
only a game--only part of his carefully planned scheme of education. It
helped provide the sound body.
His studies were the studies that a gentleman of leisure of the old
school might select for his son, with a few allowances for modern
standards. He had pursued the study of Greek, for instance, only
through Homer and of Latin through Horace. He had taken the minimum
science requirement, a single year of physics, and had then gone in
for contemporary literature and history. He had chosen French for his
foreign language. These studies he had sprinkled with a few courses
here and there in fine arts, psychology and philosophy. Some were
admittedly cinch courses. He applied himself to these with reasonable
zeal, without, at the same time, endangering his social position by
being mistaken for a grind. He was giving himself a foundation not so
much for the establishment of a career, but for the enjoyment of life.
As the son and heir of Robert E. Hamilton, owner of extensive cotton
plantations, cotton mills and hardwood forests in Georgia, Robert, jr.,
had no particular need to establish a career, and, although literature
attracted him, he preferred to enjoy rather than to try to produce it.
“There are too many writers already,” Hamilton would say. “What we need
are more persons who can distinguish between good and bad writing. We
need a larger dilettante class, for the sake of the writers themselves,
and as I have no real inspiration I might as well belong to the
dilettantes.”
This might have been either a streak of laziness or of candor. Or
again it might have been only the result of his peculiar conception of
aristocracy.
Hamilton was aristocratic as only a thorough Democrat can be--that is a
Southern Democrat. And his ideas came by heredity. He believed, first,
in the absolute supremacy of the white race, as distinguished from the
colored races; second, of the Anglo-Saxon as distinguished from the
rest of the Caucasian race; third, of the residents south of the Mason
and Dixon line, as distinguished from the rest of the Anglo-Saxons;
and fourth, of the Hamiltons. Although he no longer attended church
regularly, he was a firm believer in God--a deity not unlike the oil
paintings of the ancestral Hamilton, who had received the grant from
Oglethorpe--only infinitely more powerful and grand. Hamilton’s God
was a god of the cotton plantations and the mills, although Hamilton
himself would have been the first person to deny it. His voice was
heard in the thunder and His rain made the cotton plants to grow. His
hand could be seen ruling the waters and turning the wheels of the
cotton mills. His anger flashed in the lightning and was seen in the
uprisings of white men to stamp out transgressions of His law.
Yet it was a just God and a beneficent one; for though it had been God
who had created the different races and classes and who had destined
some to rule and others to be ruled, He gave to all alike the beauty of
sunsets and sunrises, of misty mountain peaks, of majestic expanses of
ocean, of flowers and forests. And He allowed the rain to fall alike on
the highest white man in His caste, and upon the lowliest black.
At college Hamilton’s conceptions had broadened sufficiently for him
to admit that all of God’s people were not concentrated south of the
Mason-Dixon line--though they might be more thickly settled there.
His first contact with theories of evolution advanced fifty years ago,
but new to him, for a time threatened to shake his belief in the god of
the clan, but eventually he absorbed the new teachings and catalogued
them as part of the inscrutable plan, the mysterious ways in which God
moved His wonders to perform.
All this sounds very ponderous for a young man at the threshold of
life. As a matter of fact, these concepts played but a small part in
his actual life. He was fond of outdoor sports, tennis and golf, had
gone on several fishing trips in northern Maine with a Harvard chum,
and was a fair horseman. He had belonged to an exclusive club at
Harvard and held a membership in the best club in Corinth. He attended
all the dances in his set, sometimes led a cotillion, flirted lightly
with the belles, took them motoring, was the life of house-parties and
had a reputation as one of the keenest hands at poker in Georgia.
He drank like a gentleman and had an utter contempt for anyone
who couldn’t. Women liked him naturally, because he was tall and
athletic, conversed interestingly and could make love--of the mock
variety--delightfully. But he had never carried his mild philanderings
to the dangerous stage--far less violated the code that holds a woman’s
honor inviolate--_in his own set_.
Robert was preparing to succeed his father in the control of the
Hamilton interests gradually. But neither father nor son had any
illusions about the inherent value or nobility of learning the business
from the bottom. Father and son planned that when the time came for the
younger man to step into control that a competent staff should continue
to attend to all the details of the Hamilton enterprises, leaving to
the son only the outlining of broad policies. This arrangement would
leave Hamilton free to live his own life, according to his own theories
and untrammeled by business cares.
Hamilton was living in a New York apartment, learning the details of
the distribution of cotton from the New York office, and incidentally
learning how to pick a Follies girl from the first row, when the United
States entered the World War. He immediately applied for a commission
in the army and was accepted as an officer candidate at Plattsburg.
Here his ideas of inherent aristocracy received a jolt. In the bunks
adjoining his were a Jew who had worked his way through the College
of the City of New York and had just entered the practice of law,
and an Italian-American who had formerly been a mounted policeman in
Pennsylvania. He found neither particularly greasy, as he might have
expected. Near him were men of German, French, Norwegian and Southern
European descent. Best of all, however, he liked William McCall, New
York correspondent for a Chicago newspaper, a clever, whimsical sort
of fellow of Robert’s own age--a dreamer and a holder of startling,
but interesting, theories of art, poetry and life. He was a brother
dilettante, with an added knack of _doing_ things--besides.
McCall and Hamilton received second lieutenancies and were assigned to
the same company in the New York division of the national army (the
draft army). Here Hamilton’s ideas received another jolt, for men and
officers represented every nation and creed. And here for the first
time the idea of such phrases as “the melting pot” and “the army of
democracy” began to sink into his consciousness.
His engagement to Margaret Forsyth had come quite suddenly and
logically. Since childhood they had frequented the same circles. They
had attended the same dances and receptions. They had played, as
children, in each other’s homes, and made faces at each other across
the same table. When Robert was eight and riding through the streets of
Corinth on a white pony that caused all the children in sight to shout
envious “ohs” and “ahs,” he formed the plan of eloping with Margaret.
She agreed with alacrity. When they had reached the outskirts of the
city, however, and Margaret discovered that it wasn’t a make-believe
elopement, she began screaming so loudly that Robert was obliged to
turn back. From that time on he pretended to have a supreme disdain
for the opposite sex. In his fifteenth year, however, while home on a
vacation from “prep” school, he had once more succumbed to feminine
wiles--and intermittently thereafter.
The imminent departure of the troops for France, and to what perils no
one could say, stimulated the dormant sentimentalism in Hamilton and,
like half the young lieutenants in the division, he woke up one day to
find himself engaged to Margaret, after she had come to camp with her
mother to visit him.
Now, as his eyes moved restlessly about the room, as if looking for a
means of escape, little incidents of his past life came popping out
from unexpected hiding places in his brain. His mind had a trick of
confusing two events--present and past--and he felt vaguely he had been
in this ward before. Then he remembered the operation on his nose,
after it had been broken in the Princeton game. It made him suddenly
homesick.
“You’re looking fit to fight,” said Dr. Levin cheerfully, leaning
over the bed and preparing to slip back the jacket of Hamilton’s
pajamas so that he could get at the wound. “Just move your arm back a
little--that’s the way. I suppose you know it’s all over now?”
Hamilton nodded.
“You don’t know what a close call you had, I’ll bet.” The surgeon
deftly removed little strips of adhesive plaster.
“No,” Hamilton’s eyes were turned on the doctor. “Only this infernal
wound hurts like the devil. Nurse said that--that nigger over there
saved me.”
Dr. Levin turned around. The negro was asleep.
“Yes, he and a white officer picked you up near Chartreux Woods.”
“Chartreux Woods? How’d I get there? That wasn’t our objective, and
anyway there weren’t any nigger troops around. Last thing I remember I
was heading across no man’s land. Then something hit me.”
Hamilton scowled and noticed the quick skill with which Dr. Levin was
tearing bits of porous plaster and sticking them on the edge of the
bed, where they would be handy.
“I don’t know a thing about that,” said the surgeon, intent upon his
work. “Now just a minute while I wash this. It won’t hurt. Did it?
There now.” The dressing was complete.
“If your chest hurts too much have Meadows call me, but I think it will
be all right.”
“Who’s Meadows?”
“That’s the little dark-haired nurse. They call each other by their
last names and sometimes we do too.”
“I’ve noticed her,” Hamilton’s eyes suddenly wandered off into space.
“Looks a lot like a girl I know back home.”
Dr. Levin smiled and patted Hamilton’s shoulder.
“You’ll be with that girl back home sooner than you think. Here, take
this cigarette. A little smoking won’t hurt you.”
“I’m dying for a smoke,” said Hamilton, thrusting out a trembling hand.
“It’s my first smoke in--What is the date?”
Dr. Levin told him.
“In six weeks! Six weeks! God!”
The surgeon was off to visit his other patients and, after a few puffs,
Hamilton extinguished his cigarette and was ready to sink back into
sleep.