Virginia Part 36

"Well, they've got to hang when they commit hanging crimes," replied Cyrus stubbornly. "There's no way out of that. It's just, ain't it?"

"Yes, I suppose so," admitted Gabriel, "though, for my part, I've a feeling against capital punishment--except, of course, in cases of rape, where, I confess, my blood turns against me."

"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth--that's the law of G.o.d, ain't it?"

"The old law, yes--but why not quote the law of Christ instead?"

"It wouldn't do--not with the negroes," returned Cyrus, who entertained for the Founder of Christianity something of the sentimental respect mingled with an innate distrust of His common-sense with which he regarded His disciple.

"We can't condemn it until we've tried it," said Gabriel thoughtfully, and he went on after a moment:

"The terrible thing for us about the negroes is that they are so grave a responsibility--so grave a responsibility. Of course, we aren't to blame--we didn't bring them here; and yet I sometimes feel as if we had really done so."

This was a point of view which Cyrus had never considered, and he felt an immediate suspicion of it. It looked, somehow, as if it were insidiously leading the way to an appeal for money.

"It's the best thing that could have happened to them," he replied shortly. "If they'd remained in Africa, they'd never have been civilized or--or Christianized."

"Ah, that is just where the responsibility rests on us. We stand for civilization to them; we stand even--or at least we used to stand--for Christianity. They haven't learned yet to look above or beyond us, and the example we set them is one that they are condemned, for sheer lack of any finer vision, to follow. The majority of them are still hardly more than uneducated children, and that very fact makes an appeal to one's compa.s.sion which becomes at times almost unbearable."

But this was more than Cyrus could stand even from the rector, whose conversation he usually tolerated because of the perverse, inexplicable liking he felt for the man. The charm that Gabriel exercised over him was almost feminine in its subtlety and in its utter defiance of any rational sanction. It may have been that his nature, incapable though it was of love, was not entirely devoid of the rarer capacity for friends.h.i.+p--or it may have been that, with the inscrutable irony which appears to control all human attractions, the caged brutality in his heart was soothed by the unconscious flattery of the other's belief in him. Now, however, he felt that Gabriel's highfaluting nonsense was carrying him away. It was well enough to go on like that in the pulpit; but on week days, when there was business to think of and every minute might mean the loss of a dollar, there was no use dragging in either religion or sentiment. Had he put his thoughts plainly, he would probably have said: "That's not business, Gabriel. The trouble with you--and with most of you old-fas.h.i.+oned Virginians--is that you don't understand the first principles of business." These words, indeed, were almost on his lips, when, catching the rector's innocent glance wandering round to him, he contented himself with remarking satirically:

"Well, you were always up in the clouds. It doesn't hurt you, I reckon, though I doubt if it does much toward keeping your pot boiling."

"I must turn off here," said Gabriel gently. "It's the shortest way to Cross's Corner."

"Do you think any good will come of your going?"

"Probably not--but I couldn't refuse."

Much as he respected Cyrus, he was not sorry to part from him, for their walk together had left him feeling suddenly old and incompetent to battle with the problems of life. He knew that Cyrus, even though he liked him, considered him a bit of a fool, and with a humility which was unusual in him (for in his heart he was absolutely sure that his own convictions were right and that Cyrus's were wrong) he began to ask himself if, by any chance, the other's verdict could be secretly justified. Was he in reality the failure that Cyrus believed him to be?

Or was it merely that he had drifted into that "depressing view" of existence against which he so earnestly warned his paris.h.i.+oners? Perhaps it wasn't Cyrus after all who had produced this effect. Perhaps the touch of indigestion he had felt after dinner had not entirely disappeared. Perhaps it meant that he was "getting on"--sixty-five his last birthday. Perhaps--but already the March wind, fresh and bud-scented, was blowing away his despondency. Already he was beginning to feel again that fortifying conviction that whatever was unpleasant could not possibly be natural.

Ahead of him the straight ashen road flushed to pale red where it climbed a steep hillside, and when he gained the top, the country lay before him in all the magic loveliness of early spring. Out of the rosy earth innumerable points of tender green were visible in the sunlight and invisible again beneath the faintly rippling shadows that filled the hollows. From every bough, from every bush, from every creeper which clung trembling to the rail fences, this wave of green, bursting through the sombre covering of winter, quivered, as delicate as foam, in the brilliant suns.h.i.+ne. On either side labourers were working, and where the ploughs pierced the soil they left narrow channels of darkness.

In the soul of Gabriel, that essence of the spring, which is immortally young and restless, awakened and gave him back his youth, as it gave the new gra.s.s to the fields and the longing for joy to the hearts of the ploughmen. He forgot that he was "getting on." He forgot the unnatural depression which had made him imagine for a moment that the world was a more difficult place than he had permitted himself to believe--so difficult a place, indeed, that for some people there could be no solution of its injustice, its brutality, its dissonance, its inequalities. The rapture in the song of the bluebirds was sweeter than the voice of Cyrus to which he had listened. And in a meadow on the right, an old grey horse, scarred, dim-eyed, spavined, stood resting one crooked leg, while he gazed wistfully over the topmost rail of the fence into the vivid green of the distance--for into his aching old bones, also, there had pa.s.sed a little of that longing for joy which was born of the miraculous softness and freshness of the spring. To him, as well as to Gabriel and to the ploughmen and to the bluebirds flitting, like bits of fallen sky, along the "snake fences," Nature, the great healer, had brought her annual gift of the resurrection of hope.

"Cyrus means well," thought Gabriel, with a return of that natural self-confidence without which no man can exist happily and make a living. "He means well, but he takes a false view of life." And he added after a minute: "It's odd how the commercial spirit seems to suck a man dry when it once gets a hold on him."

He walked on rapidly, leaving the old horse and the ploughmen behind him, and around his energetic little figure the grey dust, as fine as powder, spun in swirls and eddies before the driving wind, which had grown boisterous. As he moved there alone in the deserted road, with his long black coat flapping against his legs, he appeared so insignificant and so unheroic that an observer would hardly have suspected that the greatest belief on the earth--the belief in Life--in its universality in spite of its littleness, in its justification in spite of its cruelties--that this belief shone through his shrunken little body as a flame s.h.i.+nes through a vase.

At the end of the next mile, midway between Dinwiddie and Cross's Corner, stood the small log cabin of the former slave who had sent for him, and as he approached the narrow path that led, between oyster sh.e.l.ls, from the main road to the single flat brown rock before the doorstep, he noticed with pleasure how tranquil and happy the little rustic home appeared under the windy brightness of the March sky.

"People may say what they please, but there never were happier or more contented creatures than the darkeys," he thought. "I doubt if there's another peasantry in the world that is half so well off or half so picturesque."

A large yellow rooster, pecking crumbs from the threshold, began to scold shrilly, and at the sound, the old servant, a decrepit negress in a blue gingham dress, hobbled out into the path and stood peering at him under her hollowed palm. Her forehead was ridged and furrowed beneath her white turban, and her bleared old eyes looked up at him with a blind and groping effort at recognition.

"I got your message, Aunt Mehitable. Don't you know me?"

"Is dat you, Ma.r.s.e Gabriel? I made sho' you wan' gwineter let nuttin'

stop you f'om comin'."

"Don't I always come when you send for me?"

"You sutney do, suh. Dat's de gospel trufe--you sutney do."

As he looked at her standing there in the strong sunlight, with her palsied hand, which was gnarled and roughened until it resembled the sh.e.l.l of a walnut, curving over her eyes, he felt that a quality at once alien and enigmatical separated her not only from himself, but from every other man or woman who was born white instead of black. He had lived beside her all his life--and yet he could never understand her, could never reach her, could never even discern the hidden stuff of which she was made. He could make laws for her, but no child of a white mother could tell whether those laws ever penetrated that surface imitation of the superior race and reached the innate differences of thought, feeling, and memory which const.i.tuted her being. Was it development or mimicry that had brought her up out of savagery and clothed her in her blue gingham dress and her white turban, as in the outward covering of civilization?

Her look of crumbling age and the witch-like groping of her glance had cast a momentary spell over him. When it was gone, he said cheerfully:

"You mustn't be having troubles at your time of life, Aunt Mehitable,"

and in his voice there was the subtle recognition of all that she had meant to his family in the past, of all that his family had meant to her. Her claim upon him was the more authentic because it existed only in his imagination, and in hers. The tie that knit them together was woven of impalpable strands, but it was unbreakable while he and his generation were above the earth.

"Dar ain' no end er trouble, Ma.r.s.e Gabriel, ez long ez dar's yo' chillen en de chillen er yo' chillen ter come atter you. De ole ain' so techy--dey lets de hornet's nes' hang in peace whar de Lawd put hit--but de young dey's diff'rent."

"I suppose the neighbourhood is stirred up about the murder. What in G.o.d's name was that boy thinking of?"

The old blood crimes that never ceased where the white and the black races came together! The old savage folly and the new freedom! The old ignorance, the old lack of understanding, and the new restlessness, the new enmity!

"He wan' thinkin' er nuttin', Ma.r.s.e Gabriel. We ole uns kin set down en steddy, but de young dey up en does wid dere brains ez addled ez de inside uv er bad aig. 'T wan' dat ar way in de old days w'en we all hed de say so ez ter w'at wuz en w'at wan't de way ter behave."

Like an inst.i.tution left from the ruins of the feudal system, which had crumbled as all ancient and decrepit things must crumble when the wheels of progress roll over them, she stood there wrapped in the beliefs and customs of that other century to which she belonged. Her sentiments had cl.u.s.tered about the past, as his had done, until the border-line between the romance and the actuality had vanished. She could not help him because she, also, possessed the retrospective, not the constructive, vision. He was not conscious of these thoughts, and yet, although he was unconscious of them, they coloured his reflections while he stood there in the sunlight, which had begun to fall aslant the blasted pine by the roadside. The wind had lowered until it came like the breath of spring, bud-scented, caressing, provocative. Even Gabriel, whose optimism lay in his blood and bone rather than in his intellect, yielded for a moment to this call of the spring as one might yield to the delicious melancholy of a vagrant mood. The long straight road, without bend or fork, had warmed in the paling sunlight to the colour of old ivory; in a neighbouring field a young maple tree rose in a flame of buds from the ridged earth where the ploughing was over; and against the azure sky in the south a flock of birds drifted up, like blown smoke, from the marshes.

"Tell me your trouble, then," he said, dropping into the cane-seated chair she had brought out of the cabin and placed between the flat stone at the doorstep and the well-brink, on which the yellow rooster stood spreading his wings. But Aunt Mehitable had returned to the cabin, and when she reappeared she was holding out to him a cracked saucer on which there was a piece of preserved watermelon rind and a pewter spoon.

"Dish yer is de ve'y same sort er preserves yo' mouf use'n ter water fur w'en you wuz a chile," she remarked as she handed the sweet to him.

Whatever her anxiety or affliction could have been, the importance of his visit had evidently banished it from her mind. She hovered over him as his mother may have done when he was in his cradle, while the cheerful self-effacement in which slavery had trained her lent a pathetic charm to her manner.

"How peaceful it looks," he thought, sitting there, with the saucer in his hand, and his eyes on the purple shadows that slanted over the ploughed fields. "You have a good view of the low-grounds, Aunt Mehitable," he said aloud, and added immediately, "What's that noise in the road? Do you hear it?"

The old woman shook her head.

"I'se got sorter hard er heahin', Ma.r.s.e Gabriel, but dar's al'ays a tur'able lot er fuss gwine on w'en de chillen begin ter come up f'om de fields. 'T wuz becase uv oner dem ar boys dat I sont fur you," she pursued. "He went plum outer his haid yestiddy en fout wid a w'ite man down yonder at Cross's Co'nder, en dar's gwine ter be trouble about'n hit des ez sho' ez you live."

Seated on the flat stone, with her hands hanging over her knees, and her turbaned head swaying gently back and forth as she talked, she waited as tranquilly as the rock waited for the inevitable processes of nature.

The patience in her look was the dumb patience of inanimate things; and her half-bared feet, protruding from the broken soles of her shoes, were encrusted with the earth of the fields until one could hardly distinguish them from the ground on which they rested.

"It looks as if there was something like a fight down yonder by the blasted pine," said the rector, rising from his chair. "I reckon I'd better go and see what they're quarrelling about."

The negress rose also, and her dim eyes followed him while he went down the little path between the borders of oyster sh.e.l.ls. As he turned into the open stretch of the road, he glanced back at her, and stopping for a moment, waved his hand with a gesture that was careless and rea.s.suring.

The fight, or whatever it was that made the noise, was still some distance ahead in the shadow of the pine-tree, and as he walked towards it he was thinking casually of other matters--of the wretched condition of the road after the winter rains, of the need of greater thrift among the farmers, both white and black, of the touch of indigestion which still troubled him. There was nothing to warn him that he was approaching the supreme event in his life, nothing to prepare him for a change beside which all the changes of the past would appear as unsubstantial as shadows. His soul might have been the soul in the gra.s.s, so little did its coming or its going affect the forces around him.

"If this shooting pain keeps up, I'll have to get a prescription from Doctor Fraser," he thought, and the next minute he cried out suddenly: "G.o.d help us!" and began to run down the road in the direction of the blasted pine. There was hardly a breath between the instant when he had thought of his indigestion and the instant when he had called out sharply on the name of G.o.d, yet that flash of time had been long enough to change the ordinary man into the hero. The spark of greatness in his nature flamed up and irradiated all that had been merely dull and common clay a moment before. As he ran on, with his coat tails flapping around him, and his thin legs wobbling from the unaccustomed speed at which he moved, he was so unimposing a figure that only the Deity who judges the motives, not the actions, of men would have been impressed by the spectacle. Even the three hearty brutes--and it took him but a glance to see that two of them were drunk, and that the third, being a sober rascal, was the more dangerous--hardly ceased their merry torment of the young negro in their midst when he came up with them.

"I know that boy," he said. "He is the grandson of Aunt Mehitable. What are you doing with him?"

A drunken laugh answered him, while the sober scoundrel--a lank, hairy ne-er-do-well, with a tendency to epilepsy, whose name he remembered to have heard--pushed him roughly to the roadside.

"You git out of this here mess, parson. We're goin' to teach this d.a.m.n n.i.g.g.e.r a lesson, and I reckon when he's learned it in h.e.l.l, he won't turn his grin on a white woman again in a jiffy."