The Hindered Hand Part 28

"Be not dismayed, Eunice, dear! I am not at the end of my resources. I shall yet burst a bomb in this Southland," said Earl.

Eunice rushed to Earl clutched his arms and looked up wildly into his eyes. "Earl, dear Earl! Tell me! Tell me quickly and tell the truth! Is there, can there be any hope for the Negro here or elsewhere?"

Earl did not answer at once. He looked steadily into her eyes and realized that he was in the immediate presence of a soul about to make a final plunge into the dark, dark abyss of despair. It was to him a holy presence and he could not lie!

"Eunice, dear, there is hope. Slowly, but surely the world is working its way to a basis of justice for all," said Earl.

"My boy! Is there hope for him?"

"The hope of sublime battling, dear," said Earl.

"Is that all there is for my boy? No hope of reward. Only battle!

battle!" asked Eunice.

"Grant me a favor, Eunice. I know what that look in your face means. I see that you are thinking of leaving me, and of taking my boy and your boy with you. You are planning suicide," said Earl.

"Ha! ha!" laughed Eunice, in the uncanny tones of madness. "You guess well. Come with us," she said, casting a look in the direction of a drawer where she knew the pistol to be.

"Grant me this favor, Eunice. Don't die. Spare my boy. Live and let my boy live a little while longer. I have several more lines of attack. If they fail then we can all go."

Eunice whirled around the room gayly and said with childish glee, "You will then die with us, will you? Ha! ha! ha!" A terrible fear stole over Earl as he watched her peculiar behavior.

"Live! Ha! ha! ha! 'n.i.g.g.e.r,' 'darkey,' 'c.o.o.n'--live! Yes, I'll live! I'll live! Whee--poo--poo--wheep!" screamed Eunice, now das.h.i.+ng wildly about the room. She had gone mad.

At the earliest moment practicable Earl bore the raving Eunice out of the Southland, carried her to a sanitarium in a northern city. Giving the physician in charge a history of the case and allowing him time to study it, Earl awaited the verdict as to Eunice's chances of recovery.

"Mr. Bluefield, to be absolutely frank with you, I am compelled to say that, in my opinion, your wife's case is an incurable one. The one specific cause of her mental breakdown is the Southern situation which has borne tremendously upon her. That whole region of country is affected by a sort of sociological hysteria and we physicians are expecting more and more pathological manifestations as a result of the strain upon the people.

"Only one thing could cure your wife and that is the reversal of the conditions that have wrought upon her mind. She has lucid moments, but whenever her mind forcibly recurs to the Southern situation she again plunges into the gulf of despair. If in these lucid moments you could place before her a ladder of hope, I am of the opinion that a cure would be effected. That is equivalent to saying, I fear, that the case is incurable, for I can see no way out of the Southern tangle."

Such were the awful words addressed to Earl Bluefield by the physician in charge of the sanitarium when Earl called to learn of him his opinion concerning Eunice's case.

Earl walked forth from the sanitarium and journeyed hurriedly to the southern border of the city. When the houses of the city were well at his back and he had an un.o.bstructed view to the south, he paused and, holding his right hand aloft, he said:

"Hear, O spirit world, if such there be, that, in the days to come, you may witness how faithfully Earl Bluefield, Humanity's Ishmaelite, kept his word. Non-existent was I until the whim of a Southern white man, trampling upon the alleged sacred canons of his race, called me into being and endowed me with the spirit of his kind. In the race into which I was thrust, I sought to manifest my martial spirit, but met with no adequate response from men grooved in the ways of peace. I found me a wife with spirit akin to mine, and like myself a victim of the bloods.

The two of us withdrew from the active affairs of men, and from our own heath looked out upon the land of our birth, in the very which we had been made aliens. And now we have been dragged from our happy seclusion and gibbeted.

"And thinkest thou, O Southland, that the last has been heard of me? Ha!

Ha! For fear that thou mayest deceive thyself thus, hear the oath of Earl the Ishmaelite:

"By the wrenched chords of the heart of a boy spurned by a contemning father; by the double shame of a mother wickedly wooed and despised in the one breath; by the patience and optimism of the blood of my black forbears; by the energy and persistence of my grant of blood from Europe--by all these mighty tokens, I make oath that this nation shall rest neither day nor night until this shadow is lifted from my soul. And I further make oath, O despisers of the offerings of my higher self, that I shall meet your every fresh wound with face the more uplifted because thereof, and to better meet all that you have to hand out to me, I shall keep company with the Spirit that makes nerve food of disasters and ascension chariots of whirlwinds."

CHAPTER x.x.xVI.

_Enthusiastic John Blue._

In a room of a hotel in the city in which the sanitarium having charge of Eunice was located, Earl Bluefield sat upon a sofa, his hands, with the fingers tightly interlaced, resting between his knees, his head and shoulders bent forward. The intense, haggard look upon his face told plainly of the painful meditation in which he was engaged.

Owing to Earl's peculiar status in the world, Eunice, beloved as a wife, was far more to him than a wife. He looked upon himself as a sort of exotic in the non-resisting Negro race and considered himself a special object of scorn on the part of the white people of the South, who seemed to him to resent his near approach unto them in blood, and to mistrust _his_ kind more than all other elements in Negro life. In the absence, therefore, of a perfect bond of racial sympathy anywhere, Eunice became to him his world as well as his wife, and no more horrible suggestion could be made than that he should go through life apart from her. Here indeed had been a marriage--the welding of two into one.

Earl was not brooding as one who had hopelessly lost his all, but was plotting as one who would save his all. The task of the knight of old upon whom was the burden of rescuing some lovely maiden from imprisonment in a seemingly impregnable fortress, was but child's play compared to the task before Earl, who must scale the walls of the castle of despair and batter down doors that laughed at the feebleness of steel if he would claim Eunice for his own again. He was face to face with the dreadful fact that nothing but the solution of the long standing race problem of America could release to him the one so dear to his heart, so essential to his existence.

As Earl sat canva.s.sing the terrible plight in which he found himself, his mind ran the whole gamut of panaceas that had been proposed for a solution.

His own martial scheme of his earlier, unmarried days pa.s.sed in review before his mind, but failed to appeal to him as it did in the days of yore. So far as he himself was concerned he would have welcomed a death in a glorious cause as an honorable release from the ranks of the advocates of universal justice, who, to his impatient spirit seemed to be marking time in the face of an aggressive foe. But death for himself would not rescue Eunice!

His mind recurred to the impression that seemed to prevail in some quarters that the solution of the problem mainly hinged upon giving industrial training to the Negro ma.s.ses.

"That," said he to himself, "will solve a large part of the Negro's side of the problem, but how great an army of carpenters can hammer the spirit of repression out of those who hold that the eternal repression of the Negro is the nation's only safeguard? What worker in iron can fas.h.i.+on a key that will open the door to that world of higher activities, the world of moral and spiritual forces which alone woos Eunice's spirit and mine? What welder of steel can beat into one the discordant soul forces of willing Negroes and unwilling whites, the really pivotal point of the problem? Really pressing is the need of industrial training for our people, but my peculiar case calls for something that must come from Lincoln the emanc.i.p.ator rather than from Lincoln the rail-splitter."

Earl next thought of Ensal's proposed campaign of education which had been vigorously carried on by Tiara and he said: "It is one thing to produce a Niagara and another thing to harness it. O for a means of harnessing all the righteous sentiment in America in favor of the ideals of the Const.i.tution." Thus, on and on Earl soliloquized, groping for the light.

He stretched out upon the sofa and sought to refresh his tired brain with a few moments of sleep, but sleep refused to visit him. Suddenly he leaped from the sofa and said:

"I have it! I have it! Eunice shall be free."

He now began to make hurried preparations for a trip South. While he is thus engaged we shall divulge to the reader the process of reasoning that at last led him to what he conceived to be daylight.

"Two things must be done," argued Earl within himself. "Repression in the South must die and men with broader visions in that section must take charge of affairs. This is an age of freedom and an age of local self-government. Freedom must obtain in the South, and largely through some agency found or developed therein. The most effective way of killing repression is to make it kill itself and out of the soil nurtured by its carca.s.s will spring a just order of things.

"I will lure repression to its death and then find my force within the South that will lead the South into n.o.bler ways."

Understanding this much of Earl's new plan we are now prepared to follow him and intelligently watch developments.

The scene now s.h.i.+fts from the North to the South.

Fully conscious of the stupendous character of his undertaking, Earl walked slowly up the walk leading to the office of the Governor of M----, a Southern state. He was steadying himself for the coming effort.

When shown to the governor's office he said:

"This is the governor of the state of M----, I believe."

"They say that such is the case," responded the governor, smilingly.

"I am just from the North and am making a tour of the South. I am traveling _incognito_ and would like to be known to you as John Blue. As I shall broach only matters of common public interest in case you honor me with an interview, I shall be pleased to have you excuse me from making myself further known to you in a personal way," said Earl, with great affability.

The governor was captured at once by Earl's suave manner and actually fancied that some Northerner of exceeding great note was paying him a visit.

"Well, I am glad to see you--glad to see you. The more you men of the North see our Southern 'n.i.g.g.e.rs' the more you will sympathize with us,"

said the governor.