Howard Pinkney did come, as Margaret had predicted, and, as she had
likewise predicted, he wore his captain’s uniform. He made some sort of
explanation. He was either coming from an affair or going to one which
all the officers of the home guards were to attend or had attended,
and there was no time left for changing into “civies.” He was very
apologetic about it and very effulgent in his praise of the returning
captain.
Hamilton’s dislike for Pinkney was reborn. He had disliked him in
childhood because Howard had rosy cheeks--an unforgivable offense in
a boy. He had punched his nose for that reason many, many years ago,
although the announced reason was that Pinkney “was too darned smart.”
And having harmed him for no legitimate reason, he naturally disliked
him still more. Pinkney, however, in spite of Robert’s opinion, had
turned out disappointingly successful. He had stepped out of college
into a large lumber firm, showed a precocious grasp of business
principles and within two years had been made vice-president. During
the war he had made his spectacular coup of cornering most of the
available Southern walnut used in fashioning rifle stocks.
For a young man he had a peculiarly set--Hamilton called it
“ossified”--mind. He accepted traditional ideas as firmly as do men of
twice his years and without youth’s questioning of them. In business he
had a whole set of principles that Hamilton never knew existed. He had
ideas about the position of the South in industry and about the South’s
contribution to world commerce. Things that no healthy young man would
think twice about. Where Hamilton would be interested in discussing a
football game or a play, Pinkney would discuss the extension of the
federal reserve system.
To Robert, business was a mere incident in life, a necessary evil
whereby one provided one’s self with the means of enriching and
enjoying it. To Pinkney, business was one of life’s essentials. He took
it quite as seriously as tennis or riding. A surprising fellow.
Tennis and riding he did well--efficiently--that was the word. Just
as he did everything else. It was part of his physical life. He had
departments--physical, mental, moral, social, and all separated from
each other like boxes in a vault. In order to succeed one must give so
much time and effort to each of these divisions. One must play tennis
or take some other suitable form of exercise every day so as to keep
in trim for the more serious duties of life. When Pinkney went for a
walk, he didn’t say: “I’m going out to commune with nature,” which is
sentimental, but understandable, or “I’m going along a picturesque
road,” or simply “I’m going for a walk,” but “I’m going to get an
hour’s exercise.”
He had an annoying way of keeping up with the times in everything. He
even subscribed to the New York Times so that he might profit by the
book reviews and bought the volumes there recommended.
He attended church and the most important social functions with
regularity and was looked up to everywhere. He was pointed out as an
example of the Southern young man in business. On public committees he
frequently represented the young business man. Nothing could keep him
from becoming in time president of his firm, a bank director, president
of the Chamber of Commerce and a college trustee.
It was only characteristic that Howard Pinkney should still aspire
to Margaret’s hand long after she had chosen Robert, and it was
also characteristic of him that he should neither show nor feel the
slightest animosity towards his successful rival. He treated him with
all the charity that he used toward a formidable business competitor.
Pinkney was undeniably handsome in his concentrated, alert way. He was
nearly as tall as Robert, slighter-framed but heavier, with straight,
light brown hair combed back from a sloping forehead. His features
were more regular, less rugged than Robert’s and his gray eyes were
intelligent and intense. Hamilton noticed all this as Pinkney first
entered the room and wondered why Margaret had so often rejected him in
favor of himself. It was Howard’s only failure.
Howard, as an officer of the home guard, somehow supererogated to
himself the function of reintroducing Hamilton to his townsfolk.
“Judge, here is Captain Hamilton. Isn’t he looking splendid after his
harassing experiences in France? We must have him recount them to us
some evening at the club. Lieutenant Brownlow--Mr. Brownlow is one
of the lieutenants in the guards. He was exempt because of fallen
arches--Lieutenant Brownlow has been longing to see you and I have
taken the liberty of inviting him. Of course he knows all about your
splendid exploits. Mr. Jarvis, our hero has come back again. Have you a
card with you? We must bring him into the Trick Track Tribe. Yes, here
it is. Thank you. Give it to me when you have filled it out.”
Hamilton slipped the card into his pocket without reading it. He was
becoming tired of meeting so many people. He had always looked forward
to his home coming as to an opportunity for unlimited rest. And here
he was in the midst of a buzz of many conversations, shaking hands,
answering a hundred questions, standing up, moving around to different
groups, always smiling. Of course, he understood, this was his first
night at home. One had to sacrifice one’s self to the duties of
society. But he heartily wished that it was over. He wished, above all,
that the home guard would suddenly mobilize for some reason and that
Pinkney would be called out.
In Paris he had enjoyed the salons, the stimulating exchange of ideas;
but in his own home he wished to be alone with his parents, and perhaps
with Margaret. His parents, he perceived, were probably wishing the
same thing. They kept throwing little smiles at him and to each other
and Mrs. Hamilton kept coming over to squeeze his hand. How beautiful
his mother really must have been when she was, say, Margaret’s age. He
loved her soft gray hair. And how distinguished his father looked, with
his immaculate moustache and goatee.
Robert moved to a little group of men who were discussing some subject
animatedly and sat down.
“There’s only one solution for this problem,” the fat, bald-headed
little man, who had been introduced to him as Mr. Jarvis, was saying,
“and that’s Americanization.”
“Americanization?” It was Pinkney’s father speaking, a heavy moustached
man, with hawk-like features--Howard “took after” his mother.
“Americanization? What they need is a good dose of tar and feathers.
Yes, sir, good old tar and feathers. What do you think about it,
Captain Hamilton?” He leaned forward in his chair.
“What is that?” asked Robert.
“Those damned foreigners,” the older Pinkney drawled. “The niggers are
bad enough. But now these damned foreigners are getting too strong
here.”
Mr. Pinkney was the sort of man who never referred to foreigners, save
as “damned foreigners,” nor to women without adding “God bless ’em.”
“Do you know what some of those Jews are doing? Yes, sir, let me tell
you! They’re bringing business up Telfair Avenue. When my father built
there, yes, sir, it was the finest district in Corinth. He thought he’d
leave it for his children and his children’s children. Never thought
the town would grow to it. Now, sir, just take a drive past the place.
I had to sell it three years ago. What are they doing? Putting up
apartments, yes, sir, apartments.”
He looked fiercely at Hamilton as if to see whether Robert could
possibly have any sympathy with a foreigner who put up apartment
buildings.
“Five years ago that Jew real estate man, Abrams, came to me. Said
it was inevitable that business must expand and that it would march
up Telfair Avenue. Said he was negotiating for some leases there and
advised me to convert my property into something that would pay. Pay,
sir, pay! I told him that my father hadn’t built his house to pay, but
to live in. Ha, Ha!”
Jarvis and Pinkney and the other gentlemen laughed.
“That’s a good one, all right,” said Jarvis.
“Yes, sir, live in. Well, he said that as the lower part of Telfair
Avenue became a business section, the value of the upper part would
fall because it would lose its exclusiveness. And he advised me to tear
down the home or at least remodel it into an apartment building, and
move out in Fairview. Said he was moving there himself.”
Pinkney looked about sharply and paused a moment to accentuate the
effect of the denouement of the incident.
“What did I tell him? I said, ‘So you’re moving out to Fairview? Well,
that’s every reason in the world why _I shouldn’t_! Just like that,
sir. Shut him up, right off, like that.’”
“That’s the way to fix ’em!” said Jarvis, nodding his head.
“But wasn’t the real estate man right after all?” Hamilton asked
timidly after the laughter had subsided. “Wasn’t it good advice?”
“Good advice? Why, if it weren’t for Abrams and his kind Telfair Avenue
would still be an exclusive residence district. Yes, sir. Everybody
else sold and moved out, but I stuck to my property until they built up
all around it. When they tried to get my place I put up a stiff price.
I didn’t want ’em to come there in the first place with their apartment
houses and, if they wanted it bad enough I thought they could pay for
it. But the shrewd rascals wouldn’t buy. They went ahead with their
plans. Well, sir, when I moved I offered the land at their price, but
they wouldn’t take it. No, sir, wouldn’t take it. We had some words,
and I told Abrams what I thought of him and the Jerusalem he was
bringing to Corinth.”
The older Pinkney went into a detailed and often vituperative account
of his real estate dealings, the upshot of which was that the “damned
Jew” wouldn’t buy, the Pinkney property was sold piecemeal to other
dealers for a song, sold in turn to some other “damned Jew” and a large
apartment building erected.
Someone else capped the story with an account of how a Jewish merchant
was enlarging his department store, the few original merchants whose
fathers or grandfathers had founded their businesses having been slowly
forced out of business by competition.
“You’ve been away so long, young sir,” said Mr. Pinkney, “that you
don’t realise what’s been happening here. But we’ve got something to
remedy that. Yes, sir, remedy it. It’s the good old remedy of tar
applied externally with a lot of feathers. It cured the carpetbaggers
after the War and it’ll cure the niggers and foreigners now. Maybe
Howard has told you something about it. My son has been up against
un-Americanism here while you were fighting the enemy over in France.
And he’s one of the leaders in reviving the Trick Track Tribe.”
Mr. Forsythe, Margaret’s father, a gray, small man of uncertain
gestures and opinions, darted him a swift look. He had greeted Hamilton
previously with a subdued warmth, which had puzzled his prospective
son-in-law.
“Is it?” he was going to say ‘safe,’ thought better of it, “that is,
does he know?”
“Oh, yes, he’ll be one of us. We’re all Trick Tracks here, aren’t we?
Jarvis has given Robert an application card. Ordinarily we wouldn’t
use the name, but Robert’s all right. Yes, sir. We all know where he
stands.”
Reassured, Mr. Forsythe spoke about Mill Town, a suburb which had
sprung up during the war for the housing of workers in Corinth
factories.
“You don’t appreciate this, young man,” he began. “When our supply of
labor ran low meeting war orders, we tried an experiment, brought a
few foreign laborers from Baltimore through an agency. Now we’re sorry
we did it. We paid them high wages and they settled down with their
families. There’s quite a colony of them now. They’re a vicious lot.
They wouldn’t stand for a cut of wages after the armistice, because,
they said, prices hadn’t come down yet. And they actually had the
audacity to insist on our continuing to recognise the union.”
“It’s the same all over. All over. Yes, sir,” Mr. Pinkney cut in. “But
we’ll crush the unions. They’ve no place in a free government. They’re
un-American.”
“Un-American” was one of the most frequent words in Mr. Pinkney’s
vocabulary and it took the place of argument. It was enough to call a
thing un-American to condemn it immediately. Thus he never said that
labor unions are a bad thing because they interfere with freedom of
contract, or because they tend to form a monopoly of labor under the
control of a few men, or because they engender class consciousness. He
never raised arguments, even bad arguments, against them! They were
simply un-American.
Socialism was not even discussable, because it “bore the stamp ‘Made in
Germany,’” and was moreover the theory of a Jew. It was so un-American
that its mere mention caused him to turn purple with rage. And having
decided that Socialism was un-American, there was a whole category of
other institutions that were tabooed as Socialistic. He had viewed with
alarm the control by the government of the railroads during the war,
“because it was Socialistic.” He never argued that it expedited or
delayed the transportation of men and materials to the sea-board. He
never argued that it raised or lowered freight rates. He never argued
that it increased or lowered the morale of the workers. He never argued
that it aided or hindered the financial condition of the roads. Not
he. No, sir. With a single word he knocked down the fallacy of all
government ownership. It was socialistic.
Foreign language papers were _per se_ un-American and the use of a
foreign language an open insult. No matter whether the offender had
been imported into this country only a few years before, had been
working too hard in the steel or textile mills to learn English and was
gaining his conceptions of Americanism through the foreign papers and
in a foreign tongue, or whether he had lived in this country thirty
years. It was un-American.
Un-American, Hamilton perceived, as Mr. Pinkney rattled on, were the
meetings of labor unions and the speeches made there. Mr. Pinkney
had _not_ attended them, the idea, sir, and he had no intention of
doing so, but he knew that no good could come of them. Drinking in a
saloon as the foreigners did and drinking beer with their meals were
un-American, although partaking of beverages in one’s club or drawing
room was proper. The graduated income tax with its damnable surtaxes
was confiscatory, Socialistic and un-American. The tariff, except on
cotton, certain kinds of lumber and a few articles in which he was
interested, was un-American. Even the Republican party was a party of
nigger-lovers and foreigners, an un-American institution, foisted on
the nation by the North and to which no gentleman of standing belonged.
Mr. Pinkney’s tirade amused Hamilton. It was what he had heard in his
father’s drawing room and at his club before the war, only stronger
than ever. The war had liberalized his own ideas, but evidently it had
increased the conservatism of those who had remained at home. He had
accepted the Germans for the time being as a foe, but as a worthy foe
and one to be treated according to ideas of chivalry traditional with
white civilization. Here they held an exaggerated hatred for things not
only German, but even foreign. Hamilton recalled with a smile Levin’s
description of the hundred per centers who remained at home and refused
to eat German fried potatoes.
In Paris, too, he had heard Socialism discussed on every hand. He was
not a Socialist. The persons who discussed it were divided in their
opinions. Some were bitter opponents. Others were ardent supporters.
Still others believed in a modified Socialistic program. It was the
same way with other ideas--with Bolshevism, with the League of Nations,
with post-impressionism, with _vers libre_. Men and women discussed
these subjects animatedly on both, sides; but he had never heard anyone
condemn an institution or an idea simply because it was un-French or
condemn the discussion of it.
Of course, Paris had its Bourbons, but even they did not seem quite so
intolerant.
In Paris, in fact, he had witnessed an excess of liberality--in
morals, in art, in literature, as well as in political philosophy.
It had even made Hamilton uncomfortable. He felt that in contrast
Mr. Pinkney’s philosophy was sound. It had, at least, the soundness
of conservatism--the unwillingness to change what time has proved to
be good, for the new and untried. There was no danger that a city of
Pinkneys would ever tolerate any of the shocking spectacles that he
had seen in the Paris concert halls. There was no danger that a city
of Pinkneys would ever hold ideas of free love. It was inconceivable
that any Pinkney would ever aid in razing a bastile or setting up
a commune or a system of soviets. It was inconceivable even that a
state of Pinkneys would attempt to operate public cotton mills, as
some Socialistic western state was trying to operate grain elevators.
Pinkney was certainly safe and sane--so insanely sane. Come what might
he would forget nothing of his principles of Americanism. And would
never learn anything.
Hamilton mildly expressed the view that practically every inhabitant
of the United States was as American as even Mr. Pinkney would have
him. The exceptions were so few that one could disregard them. But the
holding of a different opinion on political, economic or even social
questions did not at all interfere with their Americanism. If the
opinion was wrong, full discussion of it, even a little experimentation
of certain theories, would prove them wrong.
“A lie must fall of its own weight,” said Hamilton.
“But we’ll help push it over,” said the younger Pinkney coming up at
this point, “won’t we dad? And we need men like you, Captain Hamilton,
to help us. There are abuses that must be corrected. The Negro must be
kept in his place. The supremacy of the white man must be maintained.
The Constitution of the United States must be upheld. Unwarranted
strikes must be prevented. Law and order must prevail.”
It was rather pompous nonsense, Hamilton thought. Certainly, law and
order should prevail and unwarranted strikes be prevented and the
Constitution upheld. As for the Negro, of course he must remain in his
place. But what was his place? Two years ago he would have said that
the Negro’s place was on the plantation and in the less skilled classes
of labor exclusively. In Paris he had been ready to defend that theory
fiercely. Now he was not so sure. He remembered the reception where
Williams had been received on even terms with the white guests and
he wondered what would happen should Williams suddenly walk into the
room. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Margaret approaching with
refreshments of some kind.
Neither Chlorabelle nor Chlorine had appeared that evening. Ordinarily
they would have distributed the trays. Instead, Mrs. Hamilton, assisted
by Margaret, was performing that service. Mammy Chloe and George were
the only servants visible and they, from time to time, appeared with
plates of sandwiches or cakes or ices or to renew the punch bowl.
Hamilton listened impatiently to Pinkney.
“When I was in Paris,” he began, “I saw something that I suppose would
have shocked you all. It was at a reception, one of a number that I
attended in the Champs Elysées. The hostess, the Countess Montfort....”
Hamilton went on to describe the reception.
“And who do you think was the center of attraction? Not any Frenchman,
nor any of the foreign generals or ambassadors--but a Negro officer!”
Mr. Jarvis puffed out his cheeks.
“Horrible! Horrible!”
Mr. Forsythe shook his head vaguely. The elder Pinkney looked as though
he had barely escaped swallowing his moustache. His son clenched his
fists and puffed out his chest importantly.
“Really not,” exclaimed Margaret. “I hope you didn’t stay there.”
“No,” he replied, “I didn’t. I flew into a rage, said something that
I’m afraid might have been misconstrued as rude and left.”
The Pinkneys uttered their approval and the others added their smaller
voices.
“Splendid! That was exactly what I should have done!” declared
Margaret, her brown eyes blazing. She looked like a reincarnation of
Dixie aroused--lithe, beautiful, impassioned.
“But,” Hamilton gulped. He was aware that he was about to spoil the
tableau. Of course he realised that he might explain that Williams
had saved his life, which would make his feelings excusable. But why
should he do that? The fact that a colored man had or had not rescued
him really ought not to affect their attitude. He would not tell them.
“But,” said Hamilton, “the queer thing about it was that later I felt
ashamed of myself. Not right away, but a few days later. I felt ashamed
that I, as an American, as an officer in an army which had gone over
there with the avowed purpose of making the world safe for democracy,
had held that attitude to another American, to a brother officer in the
same army.” Hamilton watched Margaret’s face turn pale and then red and
her eyes fall in embarrassment, but he went on. “I felt ashamed that of
all the people there, representatives of every race and nation, that
an American should have been the only one to express so un-American an
attitude.”
He warmed to his subject as he noticed his hearers exchange uneasy
glances. His mother, too, had come up to look for him, and he noticed
her in a little fringe of guests who had been attracted by the
discussion. She was listening.
“It isn’t as though I don’t think my race the finest on earth,” he
went on. “But it seems that in some things we haven’t always been
just--haven’t lived up to that high standard that we ought to maintain.
To the outside world we have proclaimed our democratic ideals,
our moral support of the different people of Europe in obtaining
representative government. Have we been as just to our own citizens--to
the Negro?”
Hamilton’s father looked surprised and tugged at his moustache.
“Robert doesn’t mean exactly what he--m’m, a--implies,” he offered a
verbal straw at which his son might grasp. “Perhaps in some places the
Negro isn’t accorded, what shall I say, kindness, or, perhaps better,
human treatment. But not here in our city.”
Young Pinkney threw out a life preserver.
“There’s something in what Robert has said. I find that you can get
more out of a Negro if you treat him considerately. For instance, in
one of our lumber mills we found that the Negroes work best when they
are allowed to sing. For a time we made them work quietly, but we found
by a series of tests that they actually did more work when permitted to
sing, so we reinstituted the custom and our output rose nearly 10 per
cent.”
“Nobody in the South really mistreats the coon,” put in Jarvis, shaking
his head. “In the North, maybe, where they don’t understand his nature.
But not in the South.”
Mrs. Hamilton looked appealingly at him. Margaret still stared at the
floor, but Hamilton could no more stop himself than he could that night
in Paris.
“No,” he said. “That’s not what I mean at all. Only a brute treats
human beings cruelly. I don’t mean to say you--we--that most of us do
that. But I do mean to say that perhaps we haven’t given him a fair
chance. We don’t let him vote, and we complain that he’s not a loyal
citizen. We don’t provide equal educational facilities for him with
the white child, and we complain that he’s ignorant. We don’t give him
a fair trial in our courts and we accuse him of being a criminal. We
crowd him off our sidewalks, we make him sit in Jim Crow cars, we treat
him like a dog, and we complain that he’s less than the highest type
of human being--and in Paris, the cream of European society shaking
hands with a colored man and listening to him sing.”
There was a sound of clearing throats. Margaret turned her eyes from
one side of the circle to the other, but there was no escape. The
Hamiltons looked self-consciously at each other.
“Well, those Parisians,” began Mr. Forsythe in a small voice, as if his
impending relationship with Robert made it incumbent upon him to say
something that would relieve the tension; but young Pinkney, with a
swift glance toward Margaret, took up the cudgels for white supremacy
and the South.
“The French,” he began in his confidential manner, as though the French
were the Smiths who lived in the next block, “the French, as you know,
Robert, hardly ever see a Negro. He’s a novelty to them. The Frenchman
invites him to his receptions just as--as a New York society woman
might have an ape at a dinner. He sees only the Negro in a million with
a gift for poetry or writing--and he’s never full-blooded. He has not
seen the masses.” His voice suddenly became intense. “He hasn’t lived
where there are three blacks for every white and breeding faster every
year; where his whole white civilization is trembling on a foundation
of lazy, ignorant, dirty, diseased, unruly niggers.
“You say, give them the vote. Give it to them, and they’ll fill every
office in the state in time and make and enforce the laws that govern
white men. For it’s only a matter of time when they’ll be outnumbering
us in every locality throughout the South, only a matter of more time
when they’ll be controlling politics throughout the country.
“Let them sit on the benches of our courts, and they’ll dispossess us
of our property and our rights. Give them higher education, and they’ll
become dissatisfied with their lot and revolt. Take away your Jim Crow
cars, let them into the hotels and restaurants, and they’ll enter
the club and the home. Bring them into the home, give them social
equality, wipe cut the anti-marriage laws, and they’ll drag the white
race down to their stinking level. Cruel are we?--unjust? Remember
there’s only one crime for which a nigger is ever lynched in the South.
“I’ve been brought up by a Negro mammy and our family’s had colored
servants. They stuck to us through the Civil War and after. There is a
place for that kind of nigger--the good nigger, the nigger who knows
his level and keeps it, the nigger who respects white authority and
white supremacy. To him the Southerner’s heart is always open. He’ll
find him the best friend in the world. But there’s no place for the
smart nigger, the white-collared nigger, the nigger who wants what he
calls equal rights.
“What does France or, for that matter, the North, know about the
colored man? We here, in defense of white supremacy, pure womanhood
and law and order, know that we have to make the nigger walk the mark.
We know that the strong arm of justice--but the white man’s justice,
with bullet, noose and torch, if need be--is the one thing that will
keep this country from being overrun by an inferior race. It is a case
of ruling or being ruled. We have had our experience, a brief one, at
being ruled, by niggers and carpetbaggers after the war. We’re through.
“Maybe you don’t know what the colored races are doing? Japan coming
into the conference on equal terms with the great Christian nations.
The Hindus revolting. The Turks ready to strike back at the white
nations which have shut her back into Asia, where she belongs, and
spreading the doctrine of Islam throughout the brown and the black
world of Asia and Africa. And now the same thing in America. The
colored races outnumber us. Only our brains, our ability to rule, by
word and by sword, keeps us on top. But let us once relax our grip, let
the nigger only make the United States the mulatto paradise of which
he dreams, and the agitator and nigger lover will wish to God he’d
never started. The Red, the Yellow, the Brown and the Black people,
outnumbering us ten to one, will rise like a black wave--dark water,
that’s it--and sweep the white world away.”
Hamilton sat flushed and conscious of the glances directed at him.
Pinkney had addressed all his remarks to Robert, as though he were the
attacker of the white race and himself the defender. Robert was not
particularly keen for an argument, especially with a guest in his own
house, for the discussion had grown into that now and threatened to
become even more heated. He noticed that Margaret’s eyes were intent
upon Pinkney. He was tired from traveling and wished to be alone.
Confound these receptions anyway! Why didn’t Pinkney change the subject
or yield the floor to someone else? A score of answers came to him. He
wondered what Dorothy was doing. He fell to comparing her with Margaret.
He was conscious of murmuring a few hazy affirmations or denials
to Pinkney, while his mind was somewhere else. “Well, perhaps”; or
“I don’t know about that.” He heard some one making apologies--not
exactly apologies, but speaking about his services overseas and
complimenting him. They were saying that he was all right anyway and
that he was simply taking a side for an argument. Pinkney was still
talking. Margaret was still hanging on to his words. He was quoting Du
Bois. He was telling Hamilton to read him. He was telling him about
diverse threats against the peace of the white world by more or less
responsible writers of color. He was quoting Japanese militarists and
Hindu pacifists as well as Georgia blacks.
“No, we need you, Hamilton, Captain Hamilton, in the fight for a
higher and purer Americanism,” Pinkney was saying. “We need your type
to carry on our fight for white supremacy, for the protection of pure
womanhood”--his eyes were flashing proudly at Margaret. Hamilton was
watching his little gestures without catching all the words. But for
some time the circle had broken up into smaller groups and now Pinkney
was simply inviting Robert to see him in his office at his earliest
convenience. There was an arrangement he wished to discuss which might
prove profitable.
“Oh, yes, of course,” said Hamilton, “I’ll drop in,” although he
wondered how Pinkney could possibly discuss a profitable arrangement of
any kind with him.