VII
McCall, whose bed was in an adjoining ward, called frequently. There was a possibility that his eyesight might still be restored, but the operation was extremely hazardous. It involved fastening together the two ends of the optic nerve, close to the brain. As time went on the nerve tissue would shrivel and recede, so that if McCall waited too long the ends of the nerve would no longer meet. If an operation was to be performed, it would have to be done as quickly as possible. McCall could see perfectly out of his right eye. A successful operation would restore sight to the left eye as well. On the other hand, failure might prove fatal.
Dr. Levin had laid the problem squarely before McCall and the latter was pondering it seriously.
“I’ve a good mind, Bob, to give him a shot at it,” said McCall one day, as they sat side by side on Hamilton’s cot.
“But supposing he fails?”
“Well, there’ll be one less newspaper man in the world. I suppose The Times will have to find a new star reporter. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Dr. Levin is like fate. In his hands is the knife that will kill or restore my sight. I think it’s worth the gamble. You have your eyes, so you don’t realize what sight means. I know. When I first came to they had a bandage over my eyes and I thought I was totally blind. And believe me, I cried like a kid. When they told me that one eye would probably be all right and perhaps the other, I didn’t believe it.
“I thought of all the beautiful things I hadseen—sunrises and sunsets, mountain peaks, the ocean, Lake Michigan in the morning, you know how it is, with the sun dripping red and gold. There were things I hadforgotten—paintings and statues, and faces. They all came back to me. I saw my mother, my dad, members of the family, old friends. And colors. Did you ever see Parison Bastile day? An impressionistic painting after Monet, with daubs of color all overit—brilliant reds and blues and yellows and greens. Or a wood in Illinois in autumn. And shadows. Foggy, drizzling nights with everything in shadow, but the reflection from the pavement, and friendly stabs of color from windows and street lamps. And moonlit nights on river banks.And—but what’s the use.”
They were silent for a moment.
“But I thought you could see just as well with one eye,” ventured Hamilton.
“Almost. Well, I’ve gotten used to it and I could get along as well with one eyeif—if I knew I could always have that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, as the tissue forming the nerve running to my left eye shrivels up, itmay—it might affect the other eye. Those things happen. It might take two years, it might take ten years, but sometime in the future there is always that possibility, that chance of going blind altogether.
“I’m a gambler. I’d risk everything to keep my sight. You don’t know. It’s worth everything!”
As the two friends discussed the advisability of the operation, Dr. Levin loomed in their minds like a personification of fate. The surgeon remembered McCall as a feature writer for The Times and took a particular interest in him. He would come to the two friends, as they sat together, and join their conversation. They talked pleasantly of art, literature, the effects of the war, the terms of the treaty and women. At other times all three played cards.
Dr. Levin was a man of medium height, and with a straight nose and blue eyes that belied his race. People were continually telling him that he did not look like aJew—a fact which invariably nettled him. It was as if people were saying that, whatever he might be on the inside, outwardly he could pass for a man. In college he had even been invited to join a Greek letter fraternity by some well-meaning Christian colleague, not up on the art of trailing one’s ancestry by one’s name.
When Dr. Levin spoke it was with nervous force. He was forever anticipating other persons’ questions and usually correctly. His mind ran nimbly from subject to subject, and he was equally at home in a discussion on anthropology and art. Persons who knew him casually called him an “intellectual.” And there were subjects in addition, that is, to his chosen field, surgery, in which he did display scholarship. Psychology was one of these.
When Hamilton had thanked him for saving his life, Dr. Levin had dismissed the matter by saying that it was only a case, like any other of a thousand cases.
“From your viewpoint it may be a wonderful service that I am doing, but from my viewpoint it is a remarkable opportunity for study,” Dr. Levin had explained. “Well, I’ll admit that patriotism had something to do with my coming here.” His eyes twinkled. “But think of the wonderful clinic I have before me. Hundreds of cases that the average surgeon runs across once in a lifetime. Hundreds of variations of injury that one would not find in a thousand years in the largest hospital in the world. Each fresh case aproblem—an interesting problem to be solved. A challenge to my skill and ingenuity. We surgeons evolve new systems of treatment, new techniques, new theories, as we go along.
“That is the best part of my work,” the surgeon went on enthusiastically, “it gives one a chance to serve his community and to express his own individuality at the same time.”
“Don’t you feel any difference in your attitude when you treat a caselike—like that one?” asked Hamilton.
“Certainly not,” replied Levin. “There’s your snobbishness creeping out. You’re probably a Southerner, aren’t you? I thought so. The antipathy to the negro is interesting as a phenomenon. It’s a problem in mob psychology. But a surgeon cuts down under the skin ofman—literally. You’ve never seen a class in anatomy. Well, to the surgeon, to the scientist, there isn’t such overwhelming proof of the white man’s superiority. No, I don’t mean justphysically. You remember how the Teutonic barbarians swept over Rome. And the white men whipping the Indians. It all seemed part of some divine scheme to keep the inferior races subdued. The Nordic, including the Teuton, you know, always has boasted of his physical superiority. But now, when his physical superiority is not so well established over the black, he argues that it is not important.
“Butmentally—The weight of the average negro’s brain I’ll grant is slightly less than the weight of the average white man’s. Yet the brains are almost identical. The stuff in Williams’ brain is in all probability the same as in your brain, Hamilton. It may be a little finer quality, or a little poorer. There may be more of it or less of it, even though you are a Hamilton of Virginia, or wherever it is, and Williams, the grandson of a negro slave. As a matter of fact, Williams is probably as well educated as any of us. We’re all collegegraduates—McCall, you and I. Well, Williams is a Harvard graduate. It doesn’t mean much, if you or I are college men. Probably couldn’t help it. Our parents mapped out our educational program for us, but do you realize what it means to win a college education, with the whole white world sneering at you and offering obstacles to your path? And, of course, there’s poverty. But that’s only a minor difficulty.”
“Oh, there are some smart niggers, I’ll admit,” said Hamilton frowning, “but they’re the exceptions. Booker T. Washington, this poet, Dunbar, I guess his name is. And I’ve read some of DuBois in college, sociology class. But themass—Ugh!”
Hamilton made a wry face.
“Well, you’ve got to judge the negro race by the exceptions,” said the surgeon. “Why? Because it’s only the exceptional negro who’s had the same chance as the average white man. You wouldn’t compare a man whose grandfather had been a slave and his father practically a peon on a plantation, a man without any schooling, with a man whose ancestors had been freemen and who had enjoyededucation for at least a few generations. If the average negro had the same chance as the average white, the comparison would be fair.
“But we’re drifting off into something that lies beyond reason and argument and I just dropped in for a friendly chat. I think you’ll be out in a week.”
While Levin was the scientist of the three, McCall was the poet and the champion of human rights. While Levin weighed and analysed, McCall rhapsodised.
McCall was enthusiastic about each claim for national independence as it arose at the peace conference and was recorded in the newspapers. He waxed eloquent not only over the wrongs of Ireland, but of the Jews, and was more of a Zionist than Levin, who sometimes doubted the practicability of rehabilitatingPalestine—building a country out of a desert, investing millions of dollars, raising the hopes of millions of human beings for the sake of an idea.
McCall was a poet in practise, as well as by inclination, although he had allowed only a few of his most intimate friends to set eyes upon his poems. He had several manuscripts of plays and short stories tucked away somewhere in a trunk at home, which he meant to publish to the world some day.
Physically, McCall was not unlike Levin. McCall was perhaps an inch taller and held himself straighter. But there was the same boyishness of figure, and McCall had dark hair and blue eyes as well.
Often when the conversation drifted to anthropology, Levin would slyly compare the color of his eyes with those of Hamilton and McCall. Hamilton had brown eyes. His hair too was dark, although not so black as either Levin’s or McCall’s, and he was cast in a larger mold,physically—within an inch of six feet in height and broad of shoulder.
“You see what happens to your pure types,” laughed Levin. “Here’s the descendant of the blue-eyed, fair-haired Saxon with brown eyes and the descendant of the dark-skinned Semite with blue eyes. You see all this pride in race is after all based on a very slim physical foundation.All modern peoples are mixtures of many different tribes and races. Even the Jew and the Chinese, who usually boast of their racial purity. As for theEnglishman—England has been the melting pot, for centuries, of northern Europe. Here you have the original Celts, the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Danes, the Normans, probably some Jews and any number of modern European strains. And the Americans who boast of their pure English ancestry might as well boast of being descended from Adam.”
McCall applauded these sentiments, but Hamilton staunchly upheld the supremacy of the Nordic.
The day before Hamilton left the hospital, he had a chance to thank Williams for rescuing him. Williams was just regaining consciousness from a series of operations that had riveted together bits of shattered bone in both arms, a shin and one thigh. Only the thickness of his skull and his powerful constitution had pulled him through, according to Dr. Levin. He was lying flat on his back, looking up at the ceiling when Hamilton leaned over him. His arms and legs were still in casts and he was too weak to observe closely Hamilton’s expression. The white man extended his hand absent-mindedly, then suddenly realized that the negro could not use his own. The latter smiled.
“That’s all right,” said he. “It is slightly discommoding.”
Hamilton flushed and stumbled about to find the right words. Condescension, patronage, a sense of his own awkwardness, genuine thankfulness appeared in his voice. But the man who had saved his life grinned good-naturedly and nodded. He was used to this air of patronage on the part of white men. He understood.