III
When Dr. Levin returned later that day to change the dressing, he found Hamilton still asleep. He was also asleep the next day; but the third time, Dr. Levin found him awake, his dark eyes fluttering restlessly about the ward, like caged birds.
Hamilton, Dr. Levin decided, might be twenty-five or twenty-six, an athlete and a person of socialposition—analyzing people who came under his observation was one of the surgeon’s hobbies. Weeks of unconsciousness had left Hamilton pale and weak, but there was an appearance of strength in his restless eyes and firm, ambitious lips. His nose was slightly arched and the bridge at the highest point a trifle thick as though it had once been broken; his jaws broad, but tapering to a pointed cynical chin; his brow high and narrow; his eyebrows thick without beingshaggy—one of them was scarred. A compromise between the intellectual and the physical, Levin thought. He might have made the Harvard football team or Phi Beta Kappa, depending on his inclinations.
As a matter of fact, Hamilton had not made Phi Beta Kappa, although he had come comfortably near it, and had made the footballteam—trying out for it only on the insistence of a physical training instructor after he had watched Hamilton for a few minutes on the wrestling mat.
Hamilton believed thoroughly in the old Greek ideal of a sound mind in a sound body, but he held no exaggerated idea of the importance of his ability to tuck a leather ball under his arm and hammer his way through a line of opposing men. He burned no incense at the altar of his egoism as he had seen so many other football heroes do and he expected no tribute. He enjoyed the game for its ownsake—the nervous expectation, the united purpose to win, the quick strategy, the unexpected opposition, the physical clash, the tug and strain of muscles, the smell of keenautumn air and of blood and leather. But football was only agame—only part of his carefully planned scheme of education. It helped provide the sound body.
His studies were the studies that a gentleman of leisure of the old school might select for his son, with a few allowances for modern standards. He had pursued the study of Greek, for instance, only through Homer and of Latin through Horace. He had taken the minimum science requirement, a single year of physics, and had then gone in for contemporary literature and history. He had chosen French for his foreign language. These studies he had sprinkled with a few courses here and there in fine arts, psychology and philosophy. Some were admittedly cinch courses. He applied himself to these with reasonable zeal, without, at the same time, endangering his social position by being mistaken for a grind. He was giving himself a foundation not so much for the establishment of a career, but for the enjoyment of life.
As the son and heir of Robert E. Hamilton, owner of extensive cotton plantations, cotton mills and hardwood forests in Georgia, Robert, jr., had no particular need to establish a career, and, although literature attracted him, he preferred to enjoy rather than to try to produce it.
“There are too many writers already,” Hamilton would say. “What we need are more persons who can distinguish between good and bad writing. We need a larger dilettante class, for the sake of the writers themselves, and as I have no real inspiration I might as well belong to the dilettantes.”
This might have been either a streak of laziness or of candor. Or again it might have been only the result of his peculiar conception of aristocracy.
Hamilton was aristocratic as only a thorough Democrat canbe—that is a Southern Democrat. And his ideas came by heredity. He believed, first, in the absolute supremacy of the white race, as distinguished from the colored races; second, of the Anglo-Saxon as distinguished from the rest of the Caucasian race; third, of the residents south of the Mason and Dixon line, as distinguished from the rest of theAnglo-Saxons; and fourth, of the Hamiltons. Although he no longer attended church regularly, he was a firm believer inGod—a deity not unlike the oil paintings of the ancestral Hamilton, who had received the grant fromOglethorpe—only infinitely more powerful and grand. Hamilton’s God was a god of the cotton plantations and the mills, although Hamilton himself would have been the first person to deny it. His voice was heard in the thunder and His rain made the cotton plants to grow. His hand could be seen ruling the waters and turning the wheels of the cotton mills. His anger flashed in the lightning and was seen in the uprisings of white men to stamp out transgressions of His law.
Yet it was a just God and a beneficent one; for though it had been God who had created the different races and classes and who had destined some to rule and others to be ruled, He gave to all alike the beauty of sunsets and sunrises, of misty mountain peaks, of majestic expanses of ocean, of flowers and forests. And He allowed the rain to fall alike on the highest white man in His caste, and upon the lowliest black.
At college Hamilton’s conceptions had broadened sufficiently for him to admit that all of God’s people were not concentrated south of the Mason-Dixonline—though they might be more thickly settled there.
His first contact with theories of evolution advanced fifty years ago, but new to him, for a time threatened to shake his belief in the god of the clan, but eventually he absorbed the new teachings and catalogued them as part of the inscrutable plan, the mysterious ways in which God moved His wonders to perform.
All this sounds very ponderous for a young man at the threshold of life. As a matter of fact, these concepts played but a small part in his actual life. He was fond of outdoor sports, tennis and golf, had gone on several fishing trips in northern Maine with a Harvard chum, and was a fair horseman. He had belonged to an exclusive club at Harvard and held a membership in the best club in Corinth. He attended all the dances in his set, sometimes led a cotillion, flirtedlightly with the belles, took them motoring, was the life of house-parties and had a reputation as one of the keenest hands at poker in Georgia.
He drank like a gentleman and had an utter contempt for anyone who couldn’t. Women liked him naturally, because he was tall and athletic, conversed interestingly and could makelove—of the mockvariety—delightfully. But he had never carried his mild philanderings to the dangerousstage—far less violated the code that holds a woman’s honor inviolate—in his own set.
Robert was preparing to succeed his father in the control of the Hamilton interests gradually. But neither father nor son had any illusions about the inherent value or nobility of learning the business from the bottom. Father and son planned that when the time came for the younger man to step into control that a competent staff should continue to attend to all the details of the Hamilton enterprises, leaving to the son only the outlining of broad policies. This arrangement would leave Hamilton free to live his own life, according to his own theories and untrammeled by business cares.
Hamilton was living in a New York apartment, learning the details of the distribution of cotton from the New York office, and incidentally learning how to pick a Follies girl from the first row, when the United States entered the World War. He immediately applied for a commission in the army and was accepted as an officer candidate at Plattsburg. Here his ideas of inherent aristocracy received a jolt. In the bunks adjoining his were a Jew who had worked his way through the College of the City of New York and had just entered the practice of law, and an Italian-American who had formerly been a mounted policeman in Pennsylvania. He found neither particularly greasy, as he might have expected. Near him were men of German, French, Norwegian and Southern European descent. Best of all, however, he liked William McCall, New York correspondent for a Chicago newspaper, a clever, whimsical sort of fellow of Robert’s ownage—a dreamer and a holder of startling,but interesting, theories of art, poetry and life. He was a brother dilettante, with an added knack ofdoingthings—besides.
McCall and Hamilton received second lieutenancies and were assigned to the same company in the New York division of the national army (the draft army). Here Hamilton’s ideas received another jolt, for men and officers represented every nation and creed. And here for the first time the idea of such phrases as “the melting pot” and “the army of democracy” began to sink into his consciousness.
His engagement to Margaret Forsyth had come quite suddenly and logically. Since childhood they had frequented the same circles. They had attended the same dances and receptions. They had played, as children, in each other’s homes, and made faces at each other across the same table. When Robert was eight and riding through the streets of Corinth on a white pony that caused all the children in sight to shout envious “ohs” and “ahs,” he formed the plan of eloping with Margaret. She agreed with alacrity. When they had reached the outskirts of the city, however, and Margaret discovered that it wasn’t a make-believe elopement, she began screaming so loudly that Robert was obliged to turn back. From that time on he pretended to have a supreme disdain for the opposite sex. In his fifteenth year, however, while home on a vacation from “prep” school, he had once more succumbed to femininewiles—and intermittently thereafter.
The imminent departure of the troops for France, and to what perils no one could say, stimulated the dormant sentimentalism in Hamilton and, like half the young lieutenants in the division, he woke up one day to find himself engaged to Margaret, after she had come to camp with her mother to visit him.
Now, as his eyes moved restlessly about the room, as if looking for a means of escape, little incidents of his past life came popping out from unexpected hiding places in his brain. His mind had a trick of confusing twoevents—present andpast—and he felt vaguely he had been in thisward before. Then he remembered the operation on his nose, after it had been broken in the Princeton game. It made him suddenly homesick.
“You’re looking fit to fight,” said Dr. Levin cheerfully, leaning over the bed and preparing to slip back the jacket of Hamilton’s pajamas so that he could get at the wound. “Just move your arm back alittle—that’s the way. I suppose you know it’s all over now?”
Hamilton nodded.
“You don’t know what a close call you had, I’ll bet.” The surgeon deftly removed little strips of adhesive plaster.
“No,” Hamilton’s eyes were turned on the doctor. “Only this infernal wound hurts like the devil. Nurse saidthat—that nigger over there saved me.”
Dr. Levin turned around. The negro was asleep.
“Yes, he and a white officer picked you up near Chartreux Woods.”
“Chartreux Woods? How’d I get there? That wasn’t our objective, and anyway there weren’t any nigger troops around. Last thing I remember I was heading across no man’s land. Then something hit me.”
Hamilton scowled and noticed the quick skill with which Dr. Levin was tearing bits of porous plaster and sticking them on the edge of the bed, where they would be handy.
“I don’t know a thing about that,” said the surgeon, intent upon his work. “Now just a minute while I wash this. It won’t hurt. Did it? There now.” The dressing was complete.
“If your chest hurts too much have Meadows call me, but I think it will be all right.”
“Who’s Meadows?”
“That’s the little dark-haired nurse. They call each other by their last names and sometimes we do too.”
“I’ve noticed her,” Hamilton’s eyes suddenly wandered off into space. “Looks a lot like a girl I know back home.”
Dr. Levin smiled and patted Hamilton’s shoulder.
“You’ll be with that girl back home sooner than youthink. Here, take this cigarette. A little smoking won’t hurt you.”
“I’m dying for a smoke,” said Hamilton, thrusting out a trembling hand. “It’s my first smokein—What is the date?”
Dr. Levin told him.
“In six weeks! Six weeks! God!”
The surgeon was off to visit his other patients and, after a few puffs, Hamilton extinguished his cigarette and was ready to sink back into sleep.