PART II
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:
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:
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?”