WHILE Gaston and the men were carrying Flora and Tom to the house, another searching party was formed. There were no women and children among them, only grim-visaged silent men, and a pair of little mild-eyed sharp-nosed blood-hounds. All the morning men were coming in from the country and joining this silent army of searchers.
Doctor Graham came, looked long and gravely at Flora and turned a sad face toward Tom.
The ole soldier grasped his arm before he spoke. “‘Now, doctor wait—don’t say a word yet. I don’t want to know the truth, if it’s the worst. Don’t kill me in a minute. Let me live as long as there’s breath in her body—after that! well, that’s the end—there’s nothin’ after that!”
The doctor started to speak.
“Wait,” pleaded Tom, “let me tell you something. I’ve been praying all night. I’ve seen God face to face. She can’t die. He told me so—”
He paused and his grip on the doctor’s arm relaxed as though he were about to faint, but he rallied.
The kindly old doctor said gently, “Sit down Tom.”
He tried to lead Tom away from the bed, but he held on like a bull dog.
The child breathed heavily and moaned.
Tom’s face brightened. “She’s comin’ to, doctor,—thank God!”
The doctor paid no more attention to him and went on with his work as best he could.
Tom laid his tear-stained face close to hers, and murmured soothingly to her as he used to when she was a wee baby in his arms, “There, there, honey, it will be all right now! The doctor’s here, and he ’ll do all he can! And what he can’t do, God will. The doctor ’ll save you. God will save you! He loves you. He loves me. I prayed all night. He heard me. I saw the shinin’ glory of His face! He’s only tryin’ His poor old servant.”
The broken artery was found and tied and the bleeding stopped. When the wound in her head was dressed the doctor turned to Tom, “That wound is bad, but not necessarily fatal.”
“Praise God!”
“Keep the house quiet and don’t let her see a strange face when she regains consciousness,” was his parting injunction.
The next morning her breathing was regular, and pulse stronger, but feverish; and about seven o’clock she came out of her comatose state and regained consciousness. She spoke but once, and apparently at the sound of her own voice immediately went into a convulsion, clinching her little fists, screaming and calling to her father for help!
When Tom first heard that awful cry and saw her terrified eyes and drawn face, he tried to cover his own eyes and stop his ears. Then he gathered the little convulsed body into his arms and crooned into her ears, “There, Pappy’s baby, don’t cry! Pappy’s got you now. Nothin’ can hurt you. There, there, nothin’ shall come nigh you!”
He covered her face with tears and kisses while he whispered and soothed her to sleep. When the noon train came up from Independence, General Worth arrived. Tom had asked Gaston to telegraph for him in his name.
Tom eagerly grasped his hand. “General I knowed you’d come—you’re a man to tie to. I never knowed you to fail me in your life. You’re one of the smartest men in the world too. You never got us boys in a hole so deep you didn’t pull us out”—
“What can I do for you?” interrupted the General.
“Ah, now’s the worst of all, General. I’m in water too deep for me. My baby, the last one left on earth, the apple of my eye, all that holds my old achin’ body to this world—she’s—about—to—die! I can’t let her. General, you must save her for me. I want more doctors. They say there’s a great doctor at Independence. I want ’em all. Tell ’em it’s a poor old one-legged soldier who’s shot all to pieces and lost his wife and all his children—all but this one baby. And I can’t lose her! They ’ll come if you ask ’em—” His voice broke.
“I ’ll do it, Tom. I ’ll have them here on a special in three hours or maybe sooner,” returned the General pressing his hand and hurrying to the telegraph office.
The doctors arrived at three o’clock and held a consultation with Doctor Graham. They decided that the loss of blood had been so great that the only chance to save her was in the transfusion of blood.
“I ’ll give her the blood, Tom,” said Gaston quietly removing his coat and baring his arm.
The old soldier looked up through grateful tears.
“Next to the General, you’re the best friend God ever give me, boy!”
The General turned his face away and looked out of the window. The doctors immediately performed the operation, transfusing blood from Gaston into the child.
The results did not seem to promise what they had hoped. Her fever rose steadily. She became conscious again and immediately went into the most fearful convulsions, breaking the torn artery a second time.
Just as the sun sank behind the blue mountains peaks in the west, her heart fluttered and she was dead.
Tom sat by the bed for two hours, looking, looking, looking with wide staring eyes at her white dead face. There was not the trace of a tear. His mouth was set in a hard cold way and he never moved or spoke.
The Preacher tried to comfort Tom, who stared at him as though he did not recognise him at first, and then slowly began, “Go away, Preacher, I don’t want to see or talk to you now. It’s all a swindle and a lie. There is no God!”
“Tom, Tom!” groaned the Preacher.
“I tell you I mean it,” he continued. “I don’t want any more of God or His heaven. I don’t want to see God. For if I should see Him, I’d shake my fist in His face and ask him where His almighty power was when my poor little baby was screamin’ for help while that damned black beast was tearin’ her to pieces! Many and many a time I’ve praised God when I read the Bible there where it said, not a sparrow falleth to the ground without His knowledge, and the very hairs of our head are numbered. Well, where was He when my little bird was flutterin’ her broken bleedin’ wings in the claws of that stinkin’ baboon,—damn him to everlastin’ hell!—It’s all a swindle I tell you!”
The Preacher was watching him now with silent pity and tenderness.
“What a lie it all is!” Tom repeated. “Scratch my name off the church roll. I ain’t got many more days here, but I won’t lie. I’m not a hypocrite. I’m going to meet God cursin’ Him to His face!”
The Preacher slipped his arm around the old soldier’s neck, and smoothed the tangled hair back from his forehead as he said brokenly, “Tom, I love you! My whole soul is melted in sympathy and pity for you!”
The stricken man looked up into the face of his friend, saw his tears and felt the warmth of his love flood his heart, and at last he burst into tears.
“Oh! Preacher, Preacher! you’re a good friend I know, but I’m done, I can’t live any more! Every minute, day and night, I ’ll hear them awful screams—her a callin’ me for help! I can see her lyin’ out there in the woods all night alone moanin’ and bleedin’!”
His breast heaved and he paused as if in reverie. And then he sprang up, his face livid and convulsed with volcanic passions, that half strangled him while he shrieked, “Oh! if I only had him here before me now, and God Almighty would give me strength with these hands to tear his breast open and rip his heart out!—I—could—eat—it—like—a—wolf!”
When they reached the cemetery the next day and the body was about to be lowered into the grave, Tom suddenly spied old Uncle Reuben Worth leaning on his spade by the edge of the crowd. Uncle Reuben was the grave digger of the town and the only negro present.
“Wait!” said Tom raising his hand. “Don’t put her in that grave! A nigger dug it. I can’t stand it.” He turned to a group of old soldier comrades standing by and said, “Boys, humour an old broken man once more. You ’ll dig another grave for me, won’t you? It won’t take long. The folks can go home that don’t want to stay. I ain’t got no home to go to now but this graveyard.”
His comrades filled up the grave that Uncle Reuben had dug, and opened a new one on the other side of the graves where slept his other loved ones.
Gaston took Tom to his home and stayed with him several hours trying to help him. He seemed to have settled into a stupor from which nothing could rouse him. When at length the old man fell asleep, Gaston softly closed the door and returned to his office with a heavy heart.
As he neared the centre of the town, he heard a murmur like the distant moaning of the wind in the hush that comes before a storm. It grew louder and louder and became articulate with occasional words that seemed far away and unreal. What could it be? He had never heard such a sound before. Now it became clearer and the murmur was the tread of a thousand feet and the clatter of horses’ hoofs. Not a cry, or a shout, or a word. Silence and hurrying feet!
Ah! he knew now. It was the searchers returning, a grim swaying voiceless mob with one black figure amid them. They were swarming into the court house square under the big oak where an informal trial was to be held.
He rushed forward to protest against a lynching. He could just catch a glimpse of the negro’s head swaying back and forth, protesting innocence in a singing monotone as though he were already half dead.
He pushed his way roughly through the excited crowd, to the centre where Hose Norman, the leader, stood with one end of a rope in his hand and the other around the negro’s neck.
The negro turned his head quickly toward the movement made by the crowd as Gaston pressed forward.
It was Dick!
Dick recognised him at the same moment, leaped toward him and fell at his feet crying and pleading as he held his feet and legs.
“Save me, Charlie! I nebber done it! I nebber done it! For God’s sake help me! Keep ’em off! Dey gwine burn me erlive!”
Gaston turned to the crowd. “Men, there’s not one among you that loved that old soldier and his girl as I did. But you must not do this crime. If this negro is guilty, we can prove it in that court house there, and he will pay the penalty with his life. Give him a fair trial”—
“That’s a lawyer talkin’ now!” said a man in the crowd. “We know that tune. The lawyers has things their own way in a court house.” A murmur of assent mingled with oaths ran through the crowd.
“Fair trial!” sneered Hose Norman snatching Dick from the ground by the rope. “Look at the black devil’s clothes splotched all over with her blood. We found him under a shelvin’ rock where he’d got by wadin’ up the branch a quarter of a mile to fool the dogs. We found his track in the sand some places where he missed the water and tracked him clear from where we found Flora to the cave he was lying in. Fair trial—hell! We’re just waitin’ for er can o’ oil. You go back and read your law books—we ’ll tend ter this devil.”
The messenger came with the oil and the crowd moved forward. Hose shouted, “Down by Tom Camp’s by his spring, down the spring branch to the Flat Rock where he killed her!”
On the crowd moved, swaying back and forth with Gaston in their midst by Dick’s side begging for a fair trial for him. A crowd that hurries and does not shout is a fearful thing. There is something inhuman in its uncanny silence.
Gaston’s voice sounded strained and discordant. They paid no more attention to his protest than to the chirp of a cricket.
They reached the spot where the child’s body had been found. They tied the screaming, praying negro to a live pine and piled around his body a great heap of dead wood and saturated it with oil. And then they poured oil on his clothes.
Gaston looked around him begging first one man then another to help him fight the crowd and rescue him. Not a hand was lifted, or a voice raised in protest. There was not a negro among them. Not only was no negro in that crowd, but there was not a cabin in all that county that would not have given shelter to the brute, though they knew him guilty of the crime charged against him. This was the one terrible fact that paralysed Gaston’s efforts.
Hose Norman stepped forward to apply a match and Gaston grasped his arm.
“For God’s sake, Hose, wait a minute!” he begged. “Don’t disgrace our town, our county, our state, and our claims to humanity by this insane brutality. A beast wouldn’t do this. You wouldn’t kill a mad dog or a rattlesnake in such a way. If you will kill him, shoot him or knock him in the head with a rock,—don’t burn him alive!”
Hose glared at him and quietly remarked, “Are you done now? If you are, stand out of the way!”
He struck the match and Dick uttered a scream. As Hose leaned forward with his match Gaston knocked him down, and a dozen stalwart men were upon him in a moment.
“Knock the fool in the head!” one shouted.
“Pin his arms behind him!” said another.
Some one quickly pinioned his arms with a cord. He stood in helpless rage and pity, and as he saw the match applied, bowed his head and burst into tears.
He looked up at the silent crowd standing there like voiceless ghosts with renewed wonder.
Under the glare of the light and the tears the crowd seemed to melt into a great crawling swaying creature, half reptile half beast, half dragon half man, with a thousand legs, and a thousand eyes, and ten thousand gleaming teeth, and with no ear to hear and no heart to pity!
All they would grant him was the privilege of gathering Dick’s ashes and charred bones for burial.
The morning following the lynching, the Preacher hurried to Tom Camp’s to see how he was bearing the strain.
His door was wide open, the bureau drawers pulled out, ransacked, and some of their contents were lying on the floor.
“Poor old fellow, I’m afraid he’s gone crazy!” exclaimed the Preacher. He hurried to the cemetery. There he found Tom at the newly made grave. He had worked through the night and dug the grave open with his bare hands and pulled the coffin up out of the ground. He had broken his finger nails all off trying to open it and his fingers were bleeding. At last he had given up the effort to open the coffin, sat down beside it, and was arranging her toys he had made for her beside the box. He had brought a lot of her clothes, a pair of little shoes and stockings, and a bonnet, and he had placed these out carefully on top of the lid. He was talking to her.
The Preacher lifted him gently and led him away, a hopeless madman.
THE longer Gaston pondered over the tragic events of that lynching the more sinister and terrible became its meaning, and the deeper he was plunged in melancholy.
Beyond all doubt, within his own memory, since the negroes under Legree’s lead had drawn the colour line in politics, the races had been drifting steadily apart. The gulf was now impassable.
Such crimes as Dick had committed, and for which he had paid such an awful penalty, were unknown absolutely under slavery, and were unknown for two years after the war. Their first appearance was under Legree’s regime. Now scarcely a day passed in the South without the record of such an atrocity, swiftly followed by a lynching, and lynching thus had become a habit for all grave crimes.
Since McLeod’s triumph in the state such crimes had increased with alarming rapidity. The encroachments of negroes upon public offices had been slow but resistless. Now there were nine hundred and fifty negro magistrates in the state elected for no reason except the colour of their skin. Feeling themselves intrenched behind state and Federal power, the insolence of a class of young negro men was becoming more and more intolerable. What would happen to these fools when once they roused that thousand-legged, thousand-eyed beast with its ten thousand teeth and nails! He had looked into its face, and he shuddered to recall the hour.
He knew that this power of racial fury of the Anglo-Saxon when aroused was resistless, and that it would sweep its victims before its wrath like chaff before a whirlwind.
And then he thought of the day fast coming when culture and wealth would give the African the courage of conscious strength and he would answer that soul piercing shriek of his kindred for help, and that other thousand-legged beast, now crouching in the shadows, would meet thousand-legged beast around that beacon fire of a Godless revenge!
More and more the impossible position of the Negro in America came home to his mind. He was fast being overwhelmed with the conviction that sooner or later we must squarely face the fact that two such races, counting millions in numbers, can not live together under a Democracy.
He recalled the fact that there were more negroes in the United States than inhabitants in Mexico, the third republic of the world.
Amalgamation simply meant Africanisation. The big nostrils, fiat nose, massive jaw, protruding lip and kinky hair will register their animal marks over the proudest intellect and the rarest beauty of any other race. The rule that had no exception was that one drop of Negro blood makes a negro.
What could be the outcome of it? What was his duty as a citizen and a member of civilised society? Since the scenes through which he had passed with Tom Camp and that mob the question was insistent and personal. It clouded his soul and weighed on him like the horrors of a nightmare.
Again and again the fateful words the Preacher had dinned into his ears since childhood pressed upon him, “You can not build in a Democracy a nation inside a nation of two antagonistic races. The future American must be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto.”
His depression and brooding over the fearful events in which he had so recently taken part had tinged his life and all its hopes with sadness. He had reflected this in his letters to Sallie Worth without even mentioning the events. His heart was full of sickening foreboding. How could one love and be happy in a world haunted by such horrors! He had begged her to hasten her hour of final decision. He told her of his sense of loneliness and isolation, and of his inexpressible need of her love and presence in his daily life.
Her answer had only intensified his moody feelings. She had written that her love grew stronger every day and his love more and more became necessary to her life, and yet she could not cloud its future with the anger of her father and the broken heart of her mother by an elopement. She feared such a shock would be fatal and all her life would be embittered by it. They must wait. She was using all her skill to win her father, but as yet without success. But she determined to win him, and it would be so.
All this seemed so far away and shadowy to Gaston’s eager restless soul.
The letter had closed by saying she was preparing for another trip to Boston to visit Helen Lowell and that she should be absent at least a month. She asked that his next letter be addressed to Boston.
Somehow Boston seemed just then out of the world on another planet, it was so far away and its people and their life so unreal to his imagination.
But he sighed and turned resolutely to his work of preparation for an event in his life which he, meant to make great in the history of the state. It was the meeting of the Democratic convention, as yet nearly two years in the future. He held a subordinate position in his party’s councils, but defeat and ruin had taken the conceit out of the old line leaders and he knew that his day was drawing near.
“I ’ll take my place among the leaders and masters of men,” he told himself with quiet determination, “I will compel the General’s respect; and if I can not win his consent, I will take her without it.”
THE lynching at Hambright had stirred the whole nation into unusual indignant interest. It happened to be the climax of a series of such crimes committed in the South in rapid succession, and the death of this negro was reported with more than usual vividness by a young newspaper man of genius.
A grand mass meeting was called in Cooper Union, New York, at which were gathered delegates from different cities and states to give emphasis and unity to the movement and issue an appeal to the national government.
When Sallie Worth reached Boston, she found Helen Lowell at home alone. The Hon. Everett Lowell had made one of the speeches of his career at the mass meeting held in Faneuil Hall, and he was in New York where he had gone to make the principal address in the Cooper Union Convention of Negro sympathisers.
George Harris had accompanied him, supremely fascinated by the eloquent and masterful appeal for human brotherhood he had heard him make in Boston. There was something pathetic in the dog-like worship this young negro gave to his brilliant patron. In his life in New England he had been shocked more than once by the brutal prejudices of the people against his race. His soul had been tried to the last of its powers of endurance at times. He found to his amazement that, when put to the test, the masses of the North had even deeper repugnance to the person of a Negro than the Southerners who grew up with him from the cradle. He had found himself cut off from every honourable way of earning his bread, gentleman and scholar though he was, and had looked into the river as he walked over the bridge to Cambridge one night with a well-nigh resistless impulse to end it all.
But Lowell had cheered him, laughed his gloomy ideas to scorn, and more practical still, he had secured him a clerkship in the Custom House which settled the problem of bread. Others had failed him, but this man of trained powers had never failed him. He had taught him to lift up his head and look the world squarely in the face. Lowell was, to his vivid African imagination, the ideal man made in the image of God, calm in judgment, free from all superstitions and prejudices, a citizen of the world of human thought, a prince of that vast ethical aristocracy of the free thinkers of all ages who knew no racial or conventional barriers between man and man.
Harris had published a volume of poems which he had dedicated to Lowell, and his most inspiring verse was simply the outpouring of his soul in worship of this ideal man.
He was his devoted worshipper for another and more powerful reason. In his daily intercourse with him in his library during his campaigns he had frequently met his beautiful daughter, and had fallen deeply and madly in love with her. This secret passion he had kept hidden in his sensitive soul. He had worshipped her from afar as though she had been a white-robed angel. To see her and be in the same house with her was all he asked. Now and then he had stood beside the piano and turned the music while she played and sang one of his new pieces, and he would live on that scene for months, eating his heart out with voiceless yearnings he dared not express.
In his music he made his greatest success. There was a fiery sweep to his passion, and a deep oriental rhythm in his cadence that held the imagination of his hearers in a spell. It is needless to say it was in this music he breathed his secret love.
At first he had not dared to hope for the day when he could declare this secret or take his place in the list of her admirers and fight for his chance. But of late, a great hope had filled his soul and illumined the world. As he had listened to Lowell’s impassioned appeals for human brotherhood, his scathing ridicule of pride and prejudice, and the poetic beauty of the language in which he proclaimed his own emancipation from all the laws of caste, the fiery eloquence with which he trampled upon all the barriers man had erected against his fellow man, his soul was thrilled into ecstasy with the conviction that this scholar and scientific thinker, at least, was a free man. He was sure that he had risen above the limitations of provincialisms, racial or national prejudices.
He had begun to dream of the day he would ask this Godlike man for the privilege of addressing his daughter.
The great meeting at Cooper Union had brought this dream to a sudden resolution. Lowell had outdone himself that night. With merciless invective he had denounced the inhuman barbarism of the South in these lynchings. The sea of eager faces had answered his appeals as water the breath of a storm. He felt its mighty reflex influence sweep back on his soul and lift him to greater heights. He demanded equality of man on every inch of this earth’s soil.
“I demand this perfect equality,” he cried, “absolutely without reservation or subterfuge, both in form and essential reality. It is the life-blood of Democracy. It is the reason of our existence. Without this we are a living lie, a stench in the nostrils of God and humanity!”
A cheer from a thousand negro throats rent the air as he thus closed. The crowd surged over the platform and for ten minutes it was impossible to restore order or continue the programme. Young Harris pressed his patron’s hand and kissed it while tears of pride and gratitude rained down his face.
This speech made a national sensation. It was printed in full in all the partisan papers where it was hoped capital might be made of it for the next political campaign, and the National Campaign Committee of which he was a member ordered a million copies of it printed for distribution among the negroes.
When Lowell and Harris reached Boston, as they parted at the depot Harris said, “Will you be at home to-morrow, Mr. Lowell?”
“Yes, why?”
“I would like a talk with you in the morning on a matter of grave importance. May I call at nine o’clock?”
“Certainly. Come right into the library. You ’ll find me there, George.”
That night as Lowell walked through his brilliantly lighted home, he felt a sense of glowing pride and strength. With his hands behind him he paced back and forth in his great library and out through the spacious hall with firm tread and flushed face. He felt he could look these great ancestors in the face to-night as they gazed down on him from their heavy gold frames. They had called him to high ambitions and a strenuous life when his indolence had pleaded for ease and the dilettante-ism of a fruitless dreaming. His father had cultivated his artistic tastes, dreamed and done nothing. But these grim-visaged, eagle-eyed ancestors had called him to a life of realities, and he had heard their voices.
Yes, to-night his name was on a million lips. The door of the United States Senate was opening at his touch and mightier possibilities loomed in the future.
He felt a sense of gratitude for the heritage of that stately old home and its inspiring memories. Its roots struck down into the soil of a thousand years, and spread beneath the ocean to that greater old world life. He felt his heart beat with pride that he was adding new honours to that family history, and adding to the soul-treasures his daughter’s children would inherit.
Seated in the library next morning Harris was nervous and embarrassed. He made two or three attempts to begin the subject but turned aside with some unimportant remark.
“Well, George, what is the problem that makes you so grave this morning?” asked Lowell with kindly patronage.
Harris felt that his hour had come, and he must face it. He leaned forward in his chair and looked steadily down at the rug, while he clasped both his hands firmly across his lap and spoke with great rapidity.
“Mr. Lowell, I wish to say to you that you have taught me the greatest faith of life, faith in my fellow man without which there can be no faith in God. What I have suffered as a man as I have come in contact with the brutality with which my race is almost universally treated, God only can ever know.
“The culture I have received has simply multiplied a thousandfold my capacity to suffer. But for the inspiration of your manhood I would have ended my life in the river. In you, I saw a great light. I saw a man really made in the image of God with mind and soul trained, with head erect, seeing the weak prejudices of caste, which dare to call the image of God clean or unclean in passion or pride.
“I lifted up my head and said, one such man redeems a world from infamy. It’s worth while to live in a world honoured by one such man, for he is the prophecy of more to come.”
He paused a moment, fidgeted with a piece of paper he had picked up from the table and seemed at a loss for a word.
It never dawned on Lowell what he was driving at. He supposed, as a matter of course, he was referring to his great speeches and was going to ask for some promotion in a governmental department at Washington.
“I’m proud to have been such an inspiration to you, George. You know how much I think of you. What is on your mind?” he asked at length.
“I have hidden it from every human eye, sir, I am afraid to breath it aloud alone. I have only tried to sing it in song in an impersonal way. Your wonderful words of late have emboldened me to speak. It is this—I am madly, desperately in love with your daughter.”
Lowell sprang to his feet as though a bolt of lightning had suddenly shot down his backbone. He glared at the negro with wide dilated eyes and heaving breath as though he had been transformed into a leopard or tiger and was about to spring at his throat.
Before answering, and with a gesture commanding silence, he walked rapidly to the library door and closed it.
“And I have come to ask you,” continued Harris ignoring his gesture, “if I may pay my addresses to her with your consent.”
“Harris, this is crazy nonsense. Such an idea is preposterous. I am amazed that it should ever have entered your head. Let this be the end of it here and now, if you have any desire to retain my friendship.”
Lowell said this with a scowl, and an emphasis of indignant rising inflection. The negro seemed stunned by this swift blow in his very teeth, that seemed to place him outside the pale of a human being.
“Why is such a hope unreasonable, sir, to a man of your scientific mind?”
“It is a question of taste,” snapped Lowell.
“Am I not a graduate of the same university with you? Did I not stand as high, and age for age, am I not your equal in culture?”
“Granted. Nevertheless you are a negro, and I do not desire the infusion of your blood in my family.”
“But I have more of white than Negro blood, sir.”
“So much the worse. It is the mark of shame.”
“But it is the one drop of Negro blood at which your taste revolts, is it not?”
“To be frank, it is.”
“Why is it an unpardonable sin in me that my ancestors were born under tropic skies where skin and hair were tanned and curled to suit the sun’s fierce rays?”
“All tropic races are not negroes, and your race has characteristics apart from accidents of climate that make it unique in the annals of man,” rejoined Lowell.
“And yet you demand perfect equality of man with man, absolutely in form and substance without reservation or subterfuge!”
“Yes, political equality.”
“Politics is but a secondary phenomenon of society. You said absolute equality,” protested Harris.
“The question you broach is a question of taste, and the deeper social instincts of racial purity and self preservation. I care not what your culture, or your genius, or your position, I do not desire, and will not permit, a mixture of Negro blood in my family. The idea is nauseating, and to my daughter it would be repulsive beyond the power of words to express it!”
“And yet,” pleaded Harris, “you invited me to your home, introduced me to your daughter, seated me at your table, and used me in your appeal to your constituents, and now when I dare ask the privilege of seeking her hand in honourable marriage, you, the scholar, patriot, statesman and philosopher of Equality and Democracy, slam the door in my face and tell me that I am a negro! Is this fair or manly?”
“I fail to see its unfairness.”
“It is amazing. You are a master of history and sociology. You know as clearly as I do that social intercourse is the only possible pathway to love. And you opened it to me with your own hand. Could I control the beat of my heart? There are some powers within us that are involuntary. You could have prevented my meeting your daughter as an equal. But all the will power of earth could not prevent my loving her, when once I had seen her, and spoken to her. The sound of the human voice, the touch of the human hand in social equality are the divine sacraments that open the mystery of love.”
“Social rights are one thing, political rights another,” interrupted Lowell.
“I deny it. If you are honest with yourself, you know it is not true. Politics is but a manifestation of society. Society rests on the family. The family is the unit of civilisation. The right to love and wed where one loves is the badge of fellowship in the order of humanity. The man who is denied this right in any society is not a member of it. He is outside any manifestation of its essential life. You had as well talk about the importance of clothes for a dead man, as political rights for such a pariah. You have classed him with the beasts of the field. As a human unit he does not exist for you.”
“Harris, it is utterly useless to argue a point like this,” Lowell interrupted coldly. “This must be the end of our acquaintance. You must not enter my house again.”
“My God, sir, you can’t kick me out of your home like this when you brought me to it, and made it an issue of life or death!”
“I tell you again you are crazy. I have brought you here against her wishes. She left the house with her friend this morning to avoid seeing you. Your presence has always been repulsive to her, and with me it has been a political study, not a social pleasure.”
“I beg for only a desperate chance to overcome this feeling. Surely a man of your profound learning and genius can not sympathise with such prejudices? Let me try—let her decide the issue.”
“I decline to discuss the question any further.”
“I can’t give up without a struggle!” the negro cried with desperation.
Lowell arose with a gesture of impatience.
“Now you are getting to be simply a nuisance. To be perfectly plain with you, I haven’t the slightest desire that my family with its proud record of a thousand years of history and achievement shall end in this stately old house in a brood of mulatto brats!”
Harris winced and sprang to his feet, trembling with passion. “I see,” he sneered, “the soul of Simon Le-gree has at last become the soul of the nation. The South expresses the same luminous truth with a little more clumsy brutality. But their way is after all more merciful. The human body becomes unconscious at the touch of an oil-fed flame in sixty seconds. Your methods are more refined and more hellish in cruelty. You have trained my ears to hear, eyes to see, hands to touch and heart to feel, that you might torture with the denial of every cry of body and soul and roast me in the flames of impossible desires for time and eternity!”
“That will do now. There’s the door!” thundered Lowell with a gesture of stern emphasis. “I happen to know the important fact that a man or woman of negro ancestry, though a century removed, will suddenly breed back to a pure negro child, thick lipped, kinky headed, flat nosed, black skinned. One drop of your blood in my family could push it backward three thousand years in history. If you were able to win her consent, a thing unthinkable, I would do what old Virginius did in the Roman Forum, kill her with my own hand, rather than see her sink in your arms into the black waters of a Negroid life! Now go!”
HARRIS immediately resigned his office in the custom house which he owed to Lowell and began a search for employment.
“I will not be a pensioner of a government of hypocrites and liars,” he exclaimed as he sealed his letter of resignation.
And then began his weary tramp in search of work. Day after day, week after week, he got the same answer—an emphatic refusal. The only thing open to a negro was a position as porter, or bootblack, or waiter in second-rate hotels and restaurants, or in domestic service as coachman, butler or footman. He was no more fitted for these places than he was to live with his head under water.
“I will blow my brains out before I will prostitute my intellect, and my consciousness of free manhood by such degrading associates and such menial service!” he declared with sullen fury.
At last he determined to lay aside his pride and education and learn a manual trade. Not a labour union would allow him to enter its ranks.
He managed to earn a few dollars at odd jobs and went to New York. Here he was treated with greater brutality than in Boston. At last he got a position in a big clothing factory. He was so bright in colour that the manager never suspected that he was a negro, as he was accustomed to employing swarthy Jews from Poland and Russia.
When Harris entered the factory the employees discovered within an hour his race, laid down their work, and walked out on a strike until he was removed.
He again tried to break into a labour union and get the protection of its constitution and laws. He managed at last to make the acquaintance of a labour leader who had been a Quaker preacher, and was elated to discover that his name was Hugh Halliday, and that he was a son of one of the Hallidays who had assisted in the rescue of his mother and father from slavery. He told Halliday his history and begged his intercession with the labour union.
“I ’ll try for you, Harris,” he said, “but it’s a doubtful experiment. The men fear the Negro as a pestilence.”
“Do the best you can for me. I must have bread. I only ask a man’s chance,” answered Harris. Halliday proposed his name and backed it up with a strong personal endorsement, gave a brief sketch of his culture and accomplishments and asked that he be allowed to learn the bricklayer’s trade.
When his name came up before the Brick Layers’ Union, and it was announced that he was a negro, it precipitated a debate of such fury that it threatened to develop into a riot.
One of the men sprang toward the presiding officer with blazing eyes, gesticulating wildly until recognised.
“I have this to say,” he shouted. “No negro shall ever enter the door of this Union except over my dead body. The Negro can under live us. We can not compete with him, and as a race we can not organise him. Let him stay in the South. We have no room for him here, and we will kill him if he tries to take our bread from us!”
“Have you no sympathy for his age-long sufferings in slavery?” interrupted Halliday.
“Slavery! of all the delusions the idea that slavery was abolished in this country in 1865 is the silliest, Slavery was never firmly established until the chattel form was abandoned for the wage system in 1865. Chattel slavery was too expensive. The wage system is cheaper. Now they never have to worry about food, or clothes, or houses, or the children, or the aged and infirm among wage slaves.
“Once the master hunted the slave,—now the slave must hunt the master, beg for the privilege of serving him and trample others to death trying to fasten the chains on when a brother slave drops dead in his tracks.
“No, I don’t shed any crocodile tears over the Negro slavery of the South. It was a mild form of servitude, in which the Negro had plenty to eat and wear, never suffered from cold, slept soundly and reared his children in droves with never a thought for the morrow.
“Then mothers and babes were sometimes, though not often, separated by an executor’s or sheriff’s sale. Now, we know better than to allow babes to be born. Then, a babe was a valuable asset and received the utmost care. Now, we have baby farms which we fertilise with their bones. I know of one old hag in this city who has killed over two thousand babes.
“What chance has your girl or mine to marry and build a home? Not one in a hundred will ever feel the breath of a babe at her breast.
“No!” he closed in thunder tones. “I ’ll fight the encroachment of the Negro on our life with every power of body and soul!”
A hundred men leaped to their feet at once, shouting and gesticulating. The chairman recognised a tall dark man with a Russian face, but who spoke perfect English.
“I, gentlemen, am an anarchist in principle, and differ slightly in the process by which I come to the same conclusion as my friend who has taken his seat. I grieve at the necessity before the workingmen of returning to slavery. All we can hope now for a century or two centuries, is socialism. Socialism is simply a system of slavery—that is, enforced labour in which a Bureaucracy is master. We must enter again a condition of involuntary servitude for the guarantee by the State of food and clothes, shelter and children.
“It is no time to weep over slavery. The one thing we demand now is the nationalisation of industries under the control of State Bureaux which will enforce labour from every citizen according to his capacity, for the simple guarantee of what the negro slave received, the satisfaction of the two elemental passions, hunger and love.”
Again a clamour broke out that drowned the speaker’s voice. A Socialist and an Anarchist clinched in a fight, and for five minutes pandemonium reigned, but at the end of it Harris was tying on the sidewalk with a gash in his head, and Halliday was bending over him.
When Harris had recovered from his wound, Halliday took him on a round of visits to big mills in a populous manufacturing city across in New Jersey.
“These mills are all owned by Simon Legree,” he informed Harris, “and the unions have been crushed out of them by methods of which he is past master. I don’t know, but it may be possible to get you in there.”
They tried a half dozen mills in vain, and at last they met a foreman who knew Halliday who consented to hear his plea.
“You are fooling away your time and this man’s time, Halliday,” he told him in a friendly way. “I’d cut my right arm off sooner than take a negro in these mills and precipitate a strike.”
“But would a strike occur with no union organisation?”
“Yes, in a minute. You know Simon Legree who owns these mills. If a disturbance occurred here now the old devil wouldn’t hesitate to close every mill next day and beggar fifty thousand people.”
“Why would he do such a stupid thing?”
“Just to show the brute power of his fifty millions of dollars over the human body. The awful power in that brute’s hands, represented in that money, is something appalling. Before the war he cracked a blacksnake whip over the backs of a handful of negroes. Now look at him, in his black silk hat and faultless dress. With his millions he can commit any and every crime from theft to murder with impunity. His power is greater than a monarch. He controls fleets of ships, mines and mills, and has under his employ many thousands of men. Their families and associates make a vast population. He buys Judges, Juries, Legislatures, and Governors and with one stroke of his pen to-day can beggar thousands of people. He can equip an army of hirelings, make peace or war on his own account, or force the governments to do it for him. He has neither faith in God, nor fear of the devil. He regards all men as his enemies and all women his game.
“They say he used to haunt the New Orleans’ slave market, when he was young and owned his Red River farm, occasionally spending his last dollar to buy a handsome negro girl who took his fancy.
“Look at him now with his bloated face, beastly jaw, and coarse lips. He walks the streets with his lecherous eyes twinkling like a snake’s and saliva trickling from the corners of his mouth practically monarch of all he surveys. He selects his victims at his own sweet will, and with his army of hirelings to do his bidding, backed by his millions, he lives a charmed life in a round of daily crime.
“How many lives he has blasted among the population of the multitude of souls dependent on him for bread, God only knows. It is said he has murdered the souls of many innocent girls in these mills—”
“Surely that is an exaggeration,” broke in Halliday.
“On the other hand I believe the picture is far too mild. I tell you no human mind can conceive the awful brute power over the human body his millions hold under our present conditions of life.”
There was a tinge of deep personal bitterness in the man’s words that held Halliday in a spell while he continued, “Under our present conditions men and women must fight one another like beasts for food and shelter. The wildest dreams of lust and cruelty under the old system of Southern slavery would be laughed at by this modern master.”
He paused a moment in painful reverie.
“There lies his big yacht in the harbour now. She is just in from a cruise in the Orient. She cost half a million dollars, and carries a crew of fifty men. With them are beautiful girls hired at fancy wages connected with the stewardess’ department. She ships a new crew every trip. Not one of those young faces is ever lifted again among their friends.”
He paused again and a tear coursed down his face.
“I confess I am bitter. I loved one of those girls once when I was younger. She was a mere child of seventeen.” His voice broke. “Yes, she came back shattered in health and ruined. I am supporting her now at a quiet country place. She is dying.
“Think of the farce of it all!” he continued passionately.
“The picture of that brute with a whip in his hand beating a negro caused the most terrible war in the history of the world. Three millions of men flew at each other’s throats and for four years fought like demons. A million men and six billions of dollars worth of property were destroyed.
“He was a poor harmless fool there beating his own faithful slave to death. Compare that Legree with the one of to-day, and you compare a mere stupid man with a prince of hell. But does this fiend excite the wrath of the righteous? Far from it. His very name is whispered in admiring awe by millions. He boasts that dozens of proud mothers strip their daughters to the limit the police law will allow at every social function he honours with his presence, and offer to sell him their own flesh and blood for the paltry consideration of a life interest in one-third of his estate! And he laughs at them all. His name is magic!
“I know of one weak fool, a petty millionaire, whom Legree lured into a speculative trap and ruined. On his knees in his Fifth Avenue palace the whining coward kissed Legree’s feet and begged for mercy. He kicked him and sneered at his misery. At last when he had tortured him to the verge of madness he offered to spare him on one condition—that he should give him his daughter as a ransom. And he did it.
“No, the brute power of such a man to-day is beyond the grasp of the human mind. His chances for debauchery and cruelty are limitless. The brain of his hirelings is put to the test to invent new crime against nature to interest his appetites. The only limit to his power of evil is the capacity of the human mind to think, and his body to act and endure. When he is exhausted, he can command the knowledge and the skill of ages and the masters of all Science to restore his strength, while satellites lick his feet and sing his praises—
“Risk the whim of such a man with the lives of these poor people dependent on me? No, I’d sooner kill that negro you have brought here and take my chances of detection.”
Halliday gave up the task, returned to New York, and sought the aid of the greatest labour leader in America, who had arrived in the city from the West the day before.
“No, Halliday,” he said emphatically. “Send your negro back down South. We don’t want any more of them, or to come in contact with them. I have just come from the West where a desperate strike was in progress in one of Legree’s mines. Our men were toiling in the depth of the earth in midnight darkness, never seeing the light of day, for just enough to keep body and soul together. They tried to wring one little concession from their absent master, who had never condescended to honour them with his presence. What did he do? Shut down his mines, and brought up from the South a herd of negroes who came crowding to the mines to push our men back into hell. We begged them to go home and let us alone. They grinned, shuffled and looked at their white driver for the signal to go to work. I ordered the men to shoot them down like dogs. We made the Governor issue a proclamation driving them back South and warning their race that if they attempted to enter the borders of the state he would meet them with Gatling guns.
“No, send your friend South. The winters up here are too cold for him and the summers too hot.”
In the meantime Harris walked the streets with a storm of furious passion raging in his soul. The realisation of the shame and the horror of his position! He was the son of Eliza Harris who had fled from the kindliest form of slavery in Kentucky. He had a trained mind, and the brightest gifts of musical genius. Yet he stood that day at the door of Simon Legree and begged in vain for the privilege of serving in the meanest capacity as his slave! What a strange circle of time, those forty years of the past!
And then the tempter whispered the right word at the right moment, and his fate was sealed.
“There’s but one thing left. I will do it!” he exclaimed.
He entered the employ of a gambling joint and deliberately began a life of crime. After a month he won five hundred dollars, and went on a strange journey, visiting the scenes in Colorado, Kansas, Indiana and Ohio where negroes had recently been burned alive. He would find the ash-heap, and place on it a wreath of costly flowers. He lingered thoughtfully over the ash-piles he found in Kansas made from the flesh of living negroes. He tried to imagine the figure of John Brown marching by his side, but instead he felt the grip of Simon Legree’s hand on his throat, living, militant, omnipotent. His soul had conquered the world. Yet even Legree had never dared to burn a negro to death in the old days of slavery.
He found one of these ash-heaps at the foot of the monument in Indiana to the great Western colleague of Thaddeus Stevens, and with a sigh placed his wreath on it, and passed on into Ohio.
He went to the spot where his mother had climbed up the banks of the Ohio River into the promised land of liberty, and followed the track of the old Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves a few miles. He came to a village which was once a station of this system. Here strangest of all, he found one of these ash-heaps in the public square.