XVIII
When Hamilton looked out of the window of his Pullman the next morning he noticed that the earth was red. He had left the land of dark earth, the cities of gray streets and walks. He had left the cold North and was back home in the South. The hills, rolling in every direction to the slowly rotating horizon, were covered with greenery, and a warmer, more golden sunshine brightened it. It seemed, too, that the sky was bluer. And, peeping out from between the trees and shrubs and running along the roads andditches—red earth.
At noon he saw for the first time in two years a little patch covered with scrubby green plants, just bursting into fluffy white blossoms. In one corner of the field a shack, weather-beaten, gray, unpainted, with a sagging door and broken windows. A Negro mammy in the doorway, a half-dozen pickaninnies playing at her feet, all in rags. Out in the field a white-haired Negro, bent under the load of a crate piled high with cotton, tottering toward the shack. The heads and backs of other Negroes bending over their cotton.
It was only a patch. It was too far north for the heavier yields of cotton. Yet, it was cotton!
It kept growing warmer. Hamilton’s coat became too heavy. He wished that he had taken his cotton uniform with him. He noticed how the vegetation kept growing thicker as they proceeded southward. Now the forests through which they passed were so thick that one could not see into them. Vines and creepers, heavy moss, thick shrubs, high grass, all knit the forest into a single being. The grass grew up to the tracks and even between them.
The towns too weredifferent—smaller, slower, dingier. It was a different world, a more picturesque world, and a more primitive one. He noticed, with a new insight into such things, how much of the towns waswooden—stores, factories, public buildings, and, of course, homes. Eventhe sidewalks. Also there were more wagons drawn by horse or mule. The streets looked crooked and unpaved. The structures unpainted. Men stood around or movedslowly—at the stations, on the streets. And everywhere there were Negroes. Negroes moving trucks at the depots. Negroes lazily driving their teams along the roads. Negroes on the streets. Negroes on the farms and plantations. Negroes even behind the counters of stores. He had never before realized how black the South was, how many less white men than in the North. Previously most of his life away from home had been spent at school, a world where black men seldom intruded. But now they seemed like a tide of color, like a forest pressing down upon the little towns and villages, slowly choking them with their prolific vegetation.
He thought of Williams and of the Paris salons that had been thrown open to him and to other colored soldiers who had fought under the same flag as the white men. He watched the ragged black patiently toiling under the Southern sun. He wondered whether they would be content to remain thus. An idea struck him. He examined the individual figures more closely. Yes! He had noticed something familiar about the shirts that some of the laborers wore. They were the olive drab of the army. And there was a husky in olive drab breeches and army shoes.
It was five o’clock. Hamilton looked through his time table again. He had wired his father to meet him at a suburb one station north of Corinth. It was about the same distance from home as the main station, but he wished to avoid anything approaching a public reception. He had entered the service as a student officer. He was coming back a captain. Some of the home guards might not understand how automatic promotion was. They might greet him with a band or something equally nonsensical. He wished to come home quietly. He wished to rest. Hewished—he did notknow—yes, Margaret. He wished to see her again. He wished to have the wedding as soon as possible and settle down to his new life.
The train was screeching to a halt and through the window he saw them waiting forhim—his father, a little paler than when he had seen him in New York, it seemed; his mother, clutching his arm, and trying not tocry—it was the same way she looked when she had bade him good-bye, only she, too, seemed a little older, and then Margaret, flushed and radiant, in a bright yellow silk sweater.
The next minute he was down the steps and into his mother’s arms. Yes, she was older, but not very much, and stillbeautiful—with her white hair and girlish complexion, her gentle blue eyes, her refined features. Hamilton remembered the time that a schoolmate had mistaken his mother and his only sister, Virginia Ruth, for sisters. Virginia Ruth was married to a New Orleans banker and had children of her own now. But no one would any longer mistake the two for sisters. One cheated time for a while, for a few years; but, in the end, time won.
Hamilton could think of nothing to say, but “Mother, how are you?”
Of the hundred questions that crowded in her brain, all that she could ask was: “Robert, isn’t your uniform too warm?” The gulf between them was suddenly bridged and they laughed.
Superintended by Mr. Hamilton, George, the middle-aged Negro chauffeur, was proudly piling the suitcases into the family automobile. He was grinning from ear to ear and remarked repeatedly that “the gen’ral sure do look well” and something about “bein’ mighty scrumptious.” Father and son shook hands briefly, but Margaret held out her arms and drew down Hamilton’s head. It was the first time that he had kissed her in the presence of anybody else, the first time he had kissed any one, outside the family, before his mother and he felt awkward and self-conscious. As he bent down, he noticed the sparkle of emeralds and diamonds in her engagement ring and felt ashamed that he had eyes for anything but Margaret herself. He noted how calmly she could kisshim—not exactly calmly, but self-possessedly and without embarrassment.
With his first glance, too, he saw how beautiful she really was and how strikingly similar her beauty was, in a way, to that of Dorothy. Only it had a quality of naiveté. She looked, if not actually younger in years, younger in spirit. Hers was the naive sophistication of the risinggeneration—a generation wise in its own conventionalities, the conventionalities of breaking older conventionalities.
It was surprising how her set, among the sons and daughters of the best families in Georgia, could assimilate so readily the spirit of the new freedom, without, at the same time, absorbing its intellectual aspects. Margaret, for instance, knew nothing about political or economic movements save as they came filtered to her through the mind of her parents. The freedom, therefore, was exhibited mainly in the socialsphere—in attending dances and parties unchaperoned, in driving her own motor car, in discussing love and sextheories—generally gleaned from motion pictures or printedstories—in dressing more freely than her mother had done, in staying away with increasing frequency from church, in smoking cigarettes surreptitiously and even in drinking away fromhome—a little.
She had no real discrimination in her choice of either art, literature or cigarettes. She had no favorite schools or intellectual movements. And no theories. She simply liked a picture or a book, or didn’t likeit—her emancipation from the old conventionalities expressing itself simply in a frankness in expressing her opinion. Whereas her mother would have admired a painting because she thought that was the thing to do, with Margaret the thing to do was to say you didn’t like it if you didn’t. But her taste forfiction—the only kind of literature sheread—was omnivorous. In music, too, her tastes were of contradictory breadth, preferring Beethoven one night and jazz the next. She played the piano. Classical music when there were older visitors, old ballads when alone with her mother, jazz music when in her own set. When there was no one else with her she played the three categories in the order of jazz first, then ballads, and lastly classical music.
Margaret was a joy on a horse and a mermaid in the water and altogether a creditable product of the finishing school which her mother had selected for her. The best testimony to this being the fact that she could have married a half dozen of the most eligible young Corinthians, since her graduation, two years ago in June.
The Hamiltons climbed into the touring car, the returned hero seating himself between his mother and his fiancée, while the father took one of the collapsible seats. The home-coming had not been unseen by a crowd of tatterdemalion colored children, who viewed Captain Hamilton with awe until he disappeared down the street.
Hamilton was conscious of many things and of many emotions: warm sunshine bathing the town and fragrant blooming magnolia trees overarching the road; glimpses of familiar houses; the street down which he had attempted to elope with Margaret; the public school-house where he had been set upon and in which he had triumphed in his last fight of childhood; a magnificent old church which he used to admire profoundly as a boy; homes of old friends. He was conscious of the love and pride of the three with whom he rode and the feeling of possession of Margaret, whose eyes were on him, as much as his mother’s.
“Your wound is quite all right?” asked Mr. Hamilton sitting sidewise in his seat.
“It’s fine,” Hamilton assured him. “Couldn’t be better. I think I could even take the sorrel over the fence.”
“Robert, you wouldn’t do that?” said his mother reprovingly, while his father and Margaret laughed. “Taking the sorrel over the fence” had become a family joke, an expression for extreme recklessness, because shortly before leaving for New York, Robert, on a dare, had actually jumped the stone fence on the sorrel, Annabell Lee. As his father had said at the time, Robert had risked the knees of a very valuable horse and the neck of a very heedless rider.
“No, there’s not much chance after the bawling out I got last time.” Mr. Hamilton smiled.
“But Annabell is waiting for you,” he said, “all groomedup sleek and shiny by George himself, here.”
The chauffeur’s white-teethed grin was reflected in the windshield as he nodded his head. “Tha’s right, sir, that’s right. Annabell Lee, there ain’t no horses slicker than her. She like mahogany.”
“Well, I won’t take any fences. But how are you, mother? It’s wonderful to be back.”
“Oh, I’ll take you out riding,” suggested Margaret eagerly. “I know just a ripping place to go, and I’ll race you.”
“Not for a while, Margaret, I’m too lazy for much of anything right now. If I go I’ll take old Major. How is Major?”
“He’s not with us any more, Robert.”
“Did he die?”
Robert looked from his father to his mother. Her eyes faltered.
“No, we sold him,” said Mr. Hamilton.
“Getting old, I suppose.”
“Oh, have I told you? We’ve got another captain in our set,” asked Margaret suddenly. “Who do you think? Howard Pinkney. He got his commission just about the time I got that awful letter telling me you were wounded. I’ll never forget how I felt.”
“Pinkney?”
“Oh, this town is full of ’em,” the elder Hamilton laughed, with the faintest suggestion of irony in his voice. “Captains and majors.”
“Oh, no, he’s a real captain. He showed me his commission. He’s captain of our home guards, and he says it’s the same rank as captain in the infantry or artillery. Is it?”
“Well, that’s a rather embarrassing question. But perhaps we could say that it’s notexactlythe same thing, although it is very nearly.”
“Oh, of course, you did therealfighting. It was wonderful how you risked your life and I’m proud of you, oh, ever so proud. I’ve had a service flag in the window ever since you left, with only onestar—for you. Howard wanted me to have two stars, but, of course, he stayed athome. He’s one of the organizers now of the Trick Track Tribe. Or is that a secret, Mr. Hamilton? He’ll be asking Robert to join anyway.”
“It’s probably a pretty open secret.”
“Trick Track Tribe? What an odd name. Trick Track. It sounds like the cocking of an old-fashioned musket. Trick Track.”
“That’s just what it’s supposed to be. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s to revive the old Southern chivalry and maintain the superiority of the white race and promote Americanism.”
“That sounds pretty ambitious,” laughed Robert. “I really didn’t know the white race was in danger. But if the Trick Tracks can do all that, I’m for them.”
Now the car was rounding a corner and the next minute the Hamilton residence appeared at the end of a row of tall trees. There were the familiar pillars, rising from the floor of the porch to the cornice; the little grilled window just over the door, looking out from the landing on the stairs and through which Hamilton had often peered as a boy; the porch swing; the green shutters, breaking up the mass of white; the lattice under the porch, behind which Hamilton had often prowled, playing it was a bandit’s cave. The grass was as green and the vines clambered as thickly about the sides of the home as his memory had pictured.
“Your room, dear, is just the way you left it,” remarked Mrs. Hamilton as the car drove up the path with a scream of the siren.
They dismounted, George springing down in time to open the door and then bringing up the rear with the suitcases. Robert had expected to see the colored servants at thedoor—Mammy Chloe, who baked memorial corn fritters and candied yams, and her two daughters, Clorabelle and Susy May (sometimes facetiously called Chlorine by Robert), the housemaids, and Sam, a white-haired black of uncertain age who looked after the horses, trimmed the grass and otherwise assisted George. But only Mammy Chloe appeared,in her best apron, a clean, white kerchief around her head, rocking her fat sides in happiness.
“Lor’ bless us if it ain’t Genril Robert hisself.”
“Only captain so far, Mammy Chloe,” Robert corrected her, as he took her hands in his and looked down at her. “Have you got any of those corn fritters ready for me? I’m sure hungry.” This tribute to her culinary skill pleased her prodigiously.
“Corn fritters ain’t nothing to what I done fix for you all. An’ I won’t tell you what they is. You jes’ wait till come dinner. My lan’ sakes, what all them Huns do to you? You wait! You old Mammy Chloe get you fat again, so Miss Margaret won’t know you.”
After George had deposited the suitcases in his room and Mrs. Hamilton had kissed Robert and closed the door gently behind her, Robert sank down in his chair. He was tired and warm. He had almost forgotten about his wound, yet the simple matter of traveling for thirty-six hours was telling on him. He slowly unbuttoned his coat, unfastened his puttees and unlaced his shoes. It would be a good half-hour before dinner.
He removed a cigarette from his pocket, lit it and began looking about the room. It was exactly as he had left it. The same high-ceilinged room, with its friendly ivory woodwork; the same inviting bay windows, half hidden by vines, with the circular window seats; the same rosewood furniture. In the center of one wall was the fireplace and on either side the bookcases lined with the old textbooks and his favorite volumes. Home again.
Robert arose, undressed and slipped into his bathrobe. He walked about the room to verify the presence of certain objects. Yes, even his class pipe was there. He removed his wrist watch and laid it on the dressing table. There would just be time enough for a shower.
His spirits rose under the stinging spray and he began humming’ an old army tune:
“I wanna go home,Gee, but I wanna go home.The bullets they whistle,The cannons they roar;I don’t wanna go back to the trenches no more.I wanna sail ’cross the seaWhere the Allemand can’t get at me.Oh, my, I’m too young to die.Gee, but I wanna go home!”
“I wanna go home,Gee, but I wanna go home.The bullets they whistle,The cannons they roar;I don’t wanna go back to the trenches no more.I wanna sail ’cross the seaWhere the Allemand can’t get at me.Oh, my, I’m too young to die.Gee, but I wanna go home!”
“I wanna go home,
Gee, but I wanna go home.
The bullets they whistle,
The cannons they roar;
I don’t wanna go back to the trenches no more.
I wanna sail ’cross the sea
Where the Allemand can’t get at me.
Oh, my, I’m too young to die.
Gee, but I wanna go home!”
As he rubbed himself with a bath towel he thought: “Mammy Chloe is right at that. I am pretty thin.” He flexed his muscles and posed before the mirror. Not so much thinner than when he had left home. He had gained almost fifteen pounds in the army and lost it all and a little more in the hospital. The scar was barely visible. He remembered the wound that his grandfather had received in the Civil War and wondered whether inquisitive children would ever ask him to show his scar. He inspected his face in the mirror. Not such a bad job for shaving on the train. He threw on his bathrobe and returned to his room. In the closet, carefully protected by a wardrobe bag hung his dinner clothes, perfectly pressed. After he had dressed he again stood before the mirror. Civilian clothes felt loose. They felt as though he had forgotten to put something on. They were careless, unrestrained, individualistic garments.
“Gee, but I wanna go home,” he sang.
When Captain Hamilton, in conventional dinner clothes, reached the foot of the stairs it was to shock his mother and Margaret.
“Wherever did you get those?” asked Margaret.
“Why, dear,” pleaded Mrs. Hamilton, “I thought you would surely wear your uniform. A few friends are coming over and I’m sure they would like to see you in uniform.”
Robert grinned.
“Oh, I don’t know. I just thought it would be rather nice to slip into these for a change. You know I’ve worn olive-drab for two years now.”
“But they will want to see you in uniform,” urged his mother.
“And Howard is going to be here and I do want him to see you in uniform. He’s going to wear his,” added Margaret.
“Which is all the more reason why I shouldn’t. Anyway my uniform’s too hot, and my gabardine is in the trunk.”
But Mrs. Hamilton triumphantly pointed to the fact that George had just returned from another trip to the depot with Robert’s locker trunks and would carry them up in another minute, and Captain Hamilton was forced to turn back and resume the habiliments of war. But he did it happily. The last time, he thought.