XXI
The next morning Robert awoke only after he had been called three times. The sun was shining brightly into his window and he realized that it was past the family breakfast hour. He lay in bed thinking of what he would do, found that he was still in bed and stretched leisurely. As long as he was late for breakfast he might as well be still later. He suddenly remembered his resolve to see Margaret and induce her to set their wedding as soon as possible.
Of course, he could not with propriety visit her this morning, after having seen her only a few hours before. He would wait until afternoon. In the meantime he must straighten those papers.
As his eyes fell upon the old envelope again he had an impulse to tear it, another to send it to McCall, and a third, which he followed, to keep it with his other records. He would keep it with certain other letters, as a woman might keep old rosepetals—not to bloom again, but to remind one of the past.
He noticed a card, which he had at first mistaken for the postal ordering him to report at Plattsburg. Now he saw it was a white card with the words “Non Silba Sed Anthra” in large letters on the top line. “Non Silba Sed Anthra?” Where had that come from? Let’s see. That was Latin. Anyway, he knew what two of the words meant. He went to the bookcase and pulled out his Latin dictionary. There it was.
Now he remembered. That fat man had given it to him. Oh, yes, Jarvis. He picked up the card and read it:
“Sir, six thousand men who are preparing for eventualities have their eyes upon you. You are being weighed in the balance!
“The Call is coming! Are you able and qualified to respond?
“Discuss this matter with no one.
“Oohay-Oohay-Oopay.”
It seemed rather ridiculous, some sort of a practical joke, until he remembered the society with an equally ridiculousname—Trick TrackTribe—of which Jarvis and the Pinkneys had spoken. The society that was to protect the white race, womanhood, the United States Constitution and several other things. That reminded Robert that he had promised Howard Pinkney to see him.
Before his plate Robert found two letters. The one with the Chicago postmark he opened first and read over his oatmeal. Mrs. Hamilton came in and sat opposite, although she had long since eaten her breakfast.
“Oh, mother,” he exclaimed, “a letter from Bill McCall!”
“One of your college friends?”
“No. He’s the man I’ve been telling you about. Don’t you know? That Chicago newspaper man!”
“Oh, yes, it’s too bad that he doesn’t live in Corinth.”
“I’ve never really told you or dad all that he’s done for me.”
He laid the letter to one side and looked grave.
“He’s going to have anoperation—a seriousoperation—on his eye. It’s going to take place tomorrow morning and he writes about it as though it were a joke!”
“Well, dear, maybe it’s not so serious as you think. Surgeons can do such marvelous things nowadays. Don’t you think you’d better finish your breakfast? Did he get it in the war?”
Robert nodded.
“Yes. I never told you the details. I was afraid itmight—upset you, but Bill was wounded while trying to save me.”
Briefly he sketched the account of his rescue, minimizing as much as possible the danger to himself. His mother covered her face with her hands.
“If I had known it at the time I couldn’t have stood it, Robert.”
She took a seat beside him, placed her arm about hisshoulders and rested her head against him. Mammy Chloe’s dark face appeared for a moment in the swinging door leading to the kitchen, a steaming plate of corn fritters in her hand, but she did not enter. Robert took his mother’s hand and was conscious of innumerable little details of color and form.
“Just think,” he said, “not to be able to see anything!” Not to be able to see, he thought, the sun gleaming through a window and falling in bands of gold across the blue rug, with tiny dust motes dancing in them. Not to see snowy linen or shining silverware or glittering glass. Not to see the warm glow of polished rosewood and the cheerful glow of ivory woodwork. Not to see one’s mother or one’s own face in the mirror. He shut his eyes for a moment.
“And to think that I can’t do anything,” he said at length. “That I can’t even talk to him. And he writes about ‘going over the top once more.’”
His mother tried to comfort him.
“I’m sure he’ll come through it all right,” she said. “It’s too late to send him a letter, but you could send him a telegram.”
“Yes.” Hamilton rose. “I must do that.” He took up the second envelope mechanically and opened it. It was a card like the one Jarvis had given him, with the same heading: “Non Silba Sed Anthra” across the top. The Latin annoyed him, the childish air of mystery, evidently designed to impress persons who did not own Latin dictionaries. There was the same silly signature, Oohay-Oohay-Oopay—pig Latin, of course, for H. H. P., Howard Pinkney. Who else would be asinine enough to think of it? Another message, designed to be mysterious, followed the heading:
“Sir:
“You have been weighed in the balance and found not wanting!
“StrongMen—Brave Men (evidently Pinkney himself)—R-E-A-L Men (probably little Jarvis). We need such men. We know you are one.
“The Bogeys of the Fourth Dimension will shortly issue their call. Be discreet, preserve silence and bide the coming.
“Discuss this matter with no one.
“Oohay-Oohay-Oopay.”
Robert was thinking of McCall. The follow-up invitation of the Trick Track Tribe jarred on him. He thrust the card in his pocket and walked out to send his telegram.
As he walked toward his street car he offered little prayers to a God whom he now realized he had invoked all too seldom of late. He wondered why he should have been saved and McCall chosen to undergo this ordeal. And how would Dorothy take it? Would she be at his bedside?
In Paris the operation had been accepted fatalistically and in a spirit of bravado by both of them. That was because it lay still so far in the future and, too, perhaps, because they then still retained the war-time psychology, the callous outlook upon life and death that frequent contact with these had formed.
The car jolted and was dirty. The blacks, he noticed, were squeezed together in a section dirtier than the one in which he sat. It was growing warm. In another few weeks summer would be there.
Pinkney was just leaving the telegraph office.
“Oh, yes, I was going to see you today,” said Robert with a guilty feeling.
“So you got our summons from the Fourth Dimension?” inquired Pinkney with an earnest smile. “We need brave men, real men, Hamilton, to carry on our work.” There was an allusion to the flaming rood that Robert did not understand and he was able to get away only long enough to send a short message to McCall. Pinkney took his arm and insisted on escorting him to his office. On the way they paused to exchange a few words with acquaintances, some of whom referred mysteriously to the coming concilium.
Pinkney’s office was a truly magnificent one, just off themain office of the Corinth Lumber Company, with a commanding sweep of the city’s principal thoroughfare. One’s feet sank into a soft, thick rug of mauve and one’s eye immediately took in the glass-covered mahogany desk and the decorations on thewall—a silk American flag under glass, his captain’s commission in the home guards, a college diploma, a membership in some civic organization and a poem “To My Mother”—all framed. Not until they had come quite into the room did they notice that they were not alone. A rather tall, wavy-haired man with shrewd blue eyes and a straight-line mouth was standing at the window, chewing a cigar. He wore a light checked suit and tan oxfords, and had the appearance of looking older than he really was. As he saw Pinkney he waved his right hand in an indefinite salute without, at the same time, straightening up.
“Captain Hamilton,” said Pinkney, “this is Mr. Griffith.”
They shook hands, Robert mumbled an acknowledgment and Mr. Griffith said he was very glad to meet him.
“Mr.Griffith—later you’ll know him by a rather more pretentious title,Robert—is what I might term the brains of the Tribe,” remarked Pinkney. “Won’t you gentlemen take a seat? Now we can talk more comfortably. Cigars? Oh, try agoodbrand.”
Griffith smiled so that all his teeth, including a gold tooth in front and several gold-filled ones, shone.
“That’s just some o’ his bull. Don’t you pay any attention to him,” he laughed.
“No, that’s the whole truth. You know, Captain, while you were fighting for civilization on Flanders Fields, Griffith was one of the men who was fighting the good fight over here through the most potent weapon that man has ever devised.” Griffith grinned as though Pinkney were quoting a phrase with which he was familiar, or, perhaps, had even coined himself. “That weapon is nothing else than publicity!”
Hamilton nodded. Since his return he had learned that cotton, that wood, that conservation of coal and food, thatthe county councils of defense, that the women, that the Y. M. C. A., that a hundred different things had won the war, and he was not surprised to hear now that publicity was the most potent weapon of mankind.
“Griffith here is an old newspaper man.”
“Oh, I know a newspaper man,” said Hamilton, to make talk. “One of my best friends in the army was correspondent for the Chicago Times.”
“What’s his name?”
“McCall.”
“Sure. I’ve read his stuff. So he was over with your outfit. Gee, he could have cleaned up if he’d been home.”
Pinkney resumed charge of the conversation and employed it in briefly sketching the more recent portion of Griffith’s biography. He had been connected with some newspaper when the war broke out, what connection, was evidently unimportant, Pinkney casting all newspaper men in one huge category as he might walnut logs or hardwood. At the outbreak of the World War he had foreseen the tremendous importance of publicity and had offered his services to various organizations in raising funds, recruiting members, and so forth. He had been secretary of the first drive ever held in Corinth to raise money for the Belgian war sufferers. Later when the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A., the Y. W. C. A., the Salvation Army, the Near East, the Chinese, the French and several local and state organizations had started their drives Griffith’s services had been in demand.
“Corinth went over the top on every drive through this man,” said Pinkney proudly.
The expression “over the top” grated on Hamilton. It was the same phrase McCall had used in describing his coming operation.
“Weren’t you the first man to use ‘over the top’ to describe exceeding a quota?” asked Pinkney.
“Some say I was,” smiled Griffith. “But I’ve got to be going, folks. I’m mapping out a campaign to cover theentire United States.” He leaned over the desk, and drew diagrams on it with his finger as he spoke. There were hard, practical lines about his mouth, and his eyes narrowed almost to slits. “See, we’ll cover every section. We’ll have a perfect military organization with a commander-in-chief at the head.”
He went on, sketching rapidly with his forefinger on the mahogany his idea of a feudalistic system that would make the Tribe all powerful in the United States. There were strategic positions to be carried at allcosts—certain localities in each state which offered an easy entrance. There were districts, corresponding to congressional districts, that must be covered by an army of Bogeys. Here was a citadel hard to break through. Here a breach in the walls. He waxed more and more enthusiastic over his plan. His words came more and more forcibly. His forefinger flashed faster and faster. His eyes gleamed. He leaned over the desk and pounded on it with his fist.
A transformed figure, Hamilton thought, from the man who had slouched against the wall when he had firstentered—an almost fanatical leader, carried away with an idea. The plan was made up of bits of military science, of salesmanship, perhaps picked up through some correspondence course, of the technique of carrying on drives. Out of his miscellaneous reading, evidently, and out of an idea upon which he had been brooding perhaps for years, this man had evolved his huge “campaign.” Hamilton guessed that he was a few years above the draft age and reflected ironically what might have happened if Griffith, with his almost insane imagination, had been placed in charge of a body of troops in France.
“And we’re going to have you with us, Captain Hamilton,” exclaimed Griffith at last, shaking hands and making for the door. “Got a blank? All right, let him fill it out. The concilium meets Tuesday night. Only a few more days and we can get him in on this. Well, I’m glad I met you, Captain.”
Griffith put on his soft felt hat a little to one side andwalked out. Hamilton made a movement as if to follow, too.
“Wait a minute, Robert, fill this out!”
Pinkney removed a card from his drawer and handed it to Robert.
“What we need is men who have been overseas, preferably officers, in order to get the soldiers interested in it.”
Robert looked at the row of questions on the card. Was his motive in answering serious? His age, occupation, birthplace, length of local residence and so forth.
“This is worse than an income tax questionnaire,” laughed Robert. “They want to know the color of my hair and eyes, where my parents were born, and my religion. Well, that’s easy enough. But what’s the idea of asking my politics?”
Pinkney smiled. “Oh, some of the questions, I suppose, aren’t really necessary. But we wish to be absolutely exclusive. Suppose a man should answer that he was a Socialist or an Anarchist?”
“Why in the devil would an Anarchist want to join the Trick Track Tribe? He’s opposed to all government. Why should he pay dues to belong to a sort of feudal government, according to the way Griffith outlined it?”
“Well, hemight—I suppose he really wouldn’t, but that really isn’t it. Oh, you’ll find out after you join.”
Robert had been asked to join other secret organizations. In every case there had been a certain air of mystery about it and a great to do about selecting only persons of a high level for membership, and, although he had joined only the exclusive Corinth Club, he had always suspected that the mysteriousness and air of exclusiveness of the others had been maintained principally with a view to making membership seem more difficult and hence more desirable. A few questions struck his attention, however, as he jotted down his answers:
“Were your parents born in the United States of America?
“Are you a Gentile or a Jew?
“Do you believe in the principles of Pure Americanism?
“Do you believe in white supremacy?
“What is your religious faith?
“Of what church are you a member, if any?
“Of what religious faith are your parents?
“Do you owe any kind of allegiance to any foreign nation, government, institution, sect, people, ruler or person?”
Robert finished answering the questions and signed a statement “asserting and affirming” that the questions had been truthfully answered.
“Well,” he rose, “I don’t know whether I’ve answered all your questions satisfactorily or not—”
“We’ll let you know,” Pinkney waved the card dry and extended his hand. “But don’t worry about that. The initiation will be next Tuesday. We’ll tell you exactly where to be. Don’t forget!”
Robert walked out of the office with Pinkney’s injunction ringing in his ear. After all, the insistence of every one to have him join the Tribe was rather flattering. But the rest of the day his mind was not so much on the coming ceremony as on the outcome of McCall’s operation.