The Colonel's Dream

Twenty-one

The colonel's schemes for the improvement of Clarendon went forward, with occasional setbacks. Several kilns of brick turned out badly, so that the brickyard fell behind with its orders, thus delaying the work a few weeks. The foundations of the old cotton mill had been substantially laid, and could be used, so far as their position permitted for the new walls. When the bricks were ready, a gang of masons was put to work. White men and coloured were employed, under a white foreman. So great was the demand for labour and so stimulating the colonel's liberal wage, that even the drowsy Negroes around the market house were all at work, and the pigs who had slept near them were obliged to bestir themselves to keep from being run over by the wagons that were hauling brick and lime and lumber through the streets. Even the cows in the vacant lot between the post-office and the bank occasionally lifted up their gentle eyes as though wondering what strange fever possessed the two-legged creatures around them, urging them to such unnatural activity.

The work went on smoothly for a week or two, when the colonel had some words with Jim Green, the white foreman of the masons. The cause of the dispute was not important, but the colonel, as the master, insisted that certain work should be done in a certain way. Green wished to argue the point. The colonel brought the discussion to a close with a peremptory command. The foreman took offense, declared that he was no nigger to be ordered around, and quit. The colonel promoted to the vacancy George Brown, a coloured man, who was the next best workman in the gang.

On the day when Brown took charge of the job the white bricklayers, of whom there were two at work, laid down their tools.

"What's the matter?" asked the colonel, when they reported for their pay. "Aren't you satisfied with the wages?"

"Yes, we've got no fault to find with the wages."

"Well?"

"We won't work under George Brown. We don't mind working with niggers, but we won't work under a nigger."

"I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I must hire my own men. Here is your money."

They would have preferred to argue their grievance, and since the colonel had shut off discussion they went down to Clay Jackson's saloon and argued the case with all comers, with the usual distortion attending one-sided argument. Jim Green had been superseded by a nigger—this was the burden of their grievance.

Thus came the thin entering wedge that was to separate the colonel from a measure of his popularity. There had been no objection to the colonel's employing Negroes, no objection to his helping their school—if he chose to waste his money that way; but there were many who took offense when a Negro was preferred to a white man.

Through Caxton the colonel learned of this criticism. The colonel showed no surprise, and no annoyance, but in his usual good-humoured way replied:

"We'll go right along and pay no attention to him. There were only two white men in the gang, and they have never worked under the Negro; they quit as soon as I promoted him. I have hired many men in my time and have made it an unvarying rule to manage my own business in my own way. If anybody says anything to you about it, you tell them just that. These people have got to learn that we live in an industrial age, and success demands of an employer that he utilise the most available labour. After Green was discharged, George Brown was the best mason left. He gets more work out of the men than Green did—even in the old slave times Negroes made the best of overseers; they knew their own people better than white men could and got more out of them. When the mill is completed it will give employment to five hundred white women and fifty white men. But every dog must have his day, so give the Negro his."

The colonel attached no great importance to the incident; the places of the workmen were filled, and the work went forward. He knew the Southern sensitiveness, and viewed it with a good-natured tolerance, which, however, stopped at injustice to himself or others. The very root of his reform was involved in the proposition to discharge a competent foreman because of an unreasonable prejudice. Matters of feeling were all well enough in some respects—no one valued more highly than the colonel the right to choose his own associates—but the right to work and to do one's best work, was fundamental, as was the right to have one's work done by those who could do it best. Even a healthy social instinct might be perverted into an unhealthy and unjust prejudice; most things evil were the perversion of good.

The feeling with which the colonel thus came for the first time directly in contact, a smouldering fire capable always of being fanned into flame, had been greatly excited by the political campaign which began about the third month after his arrival in Clarendon. An ambitious politician in a neighbouring State had led a successful campaign on the issue of Negro disfranchisement. Plainly unconstitutional, it was declared to be as plainly necessary for the preservation of the white race and white civilisation. The example had proved contagious, and Fetters and his crowd, who dominated their State, had raised the issue there. At first the pronouncement met with slight response. The sister State had possessed a Negro majority, which, in view of reconstruction history was theoretically capable of injuring the State. Such was not the case here. The State had survived reconstruction with small injury. White supremacy existed, in the main, by virtue of white efficiency as compared with efficiency of a lower grade; there had been places, and instances, where other methods had been occasionally employed to suppress the Negro vote, but, taken as a whole, the supremacy of the white man was secure. No Negro had held a State office for twenty years. In Clarendon they had even ceased to be summoned as jurors, and when a Negro met a white man, he gave him the wall, even if it were necessary to take the gutter to do so. But this was not enough; this supremacy must be made permanent. Negroes must be taught that they need never look for any different state of things. New definitions were given to old words, new pictures set in old frames, new wine poured into old bottles.

"So long," said the candidate for governor, when he spoke at Clarendon during the canvas, at a meeting presided over by the editor of the Anglo-Saxon, "so long as one Negro votes in the State, so long are we face to face with the nightmare of Negro domination. For example, suppose a difference of opinion among white men so radical as to divide their vote equally, the ballot of one Negro would determine the issue. Can such a possibility be contemplated without a shudder? Our duty to ourselves, to our children, and their unborn descendants, and to our great and favoured race, impels us to protest, by word, by vote, by arms if need be, against the enforced equality of an inferior race. Equality anywhere, means ultimately, equality everywhere. Equality at the polls means social equality; social equality means intermarriage and corruption of blood, and degeneration and decay. What gentleman here would want his daughter to marry a blubber-lipped, cocoanut-headed, kidney-footed, etc., etc., nigger?"

There could be but one answer to the question, and it came in thunders of applause. Colonel French heard the speech, smiled at the old arguments, but felt a sudden gravity at the deep-seated feeling which they evoked. He remembered hearing, when a boy, the same arguments. They had served their purpose once before, with other issues, to plunge the South into war and consequent disaster. Had the lesson been in vain? He did not see the justice nor the expediency of the proposed anti-Negro agitation. But he was not in politics, and confined his protests to argument with his friends, who listened but were not convinced.

Behind closed doors, more than one of the prominent citizens admitted that the campaign was all wrong; that the issues were unjust and reactionary, and that the best interests of the State lay in uplifting every element of the people rather than selecting some one class for discouragement and degradation, and that the white race could hold its own, with the Negroes or against them, in any conceivable state of political equality. They listened to the colonel's quiet argument that no State could be freer or greater or more enlightened than the average of its citizenship, and that any restriction of rights that rested upon anything but impartial justice, was bound to re-act, as slavery had done, upon the prosperity and progress of the State. They listened, which the colonel regarded as a great point gained, and they agreed in part, and he could almost understand why they let their feelings govern their reason and their judgment, and said no word to prevent an unfair and unconstitutional scheme from going forward to a successful issue. He knew that for a white man to declare, in such a community, for equal rights or equal justice for the Negro, or to take the Negro's side in any case where the race issue was raised, was to court social ostracism and political death, or, if the feeling provoked were strong enough, an even more complete form of extinction.

So the colonel was patient, and meant to be prudent. His own arguments avoided the stirring up of prejudice, and were directed to the higher motives and deeper principles which underlie society, in the light of which humanity is more than race, and the welfare of the State above that of any man or set of men within it; it being an axiom as true in statesmanship as in mathematics, that the whole is greater than any one of its parts. Content to await the uplifting power of industry and enlightenment, and supremely confident of the result, the colonel went serenely forward in his work of sowing that others might reap.

Twenty-two

The atmosphere of the Treadwell home was charged, for the next few days, with electric currents. Graciella knew that her aunt was engaged to Colonel French. But she had not waited, the night before, to hear her aunt express the wish that the engagement should be kept secret. She was therefore bursting with information of which she could manifest no consciousness without confessing that she had been eavesdropping—a thing which she knew Miss Laura regarded as detestably immoral. She wondered at her aunt's silence. Except a certain subdued air of happiness there was nothing to distinguish Miss Laura's calm demeanor from that of any other day. Graciella had determined upon her own attitude toward her aunt. She would kiss her, and wish her happiness, and give no sign that any thought of Colonel French had ever entered her own mind. But this little drama, rehearsed in the privacy of her own room, went unacted, since the curtain did not rise upon the stage.

The colonel came and went as usual. Some dissimulation was required on Graciella's part to preserve her usual light-hearted manner toward him. She may have been to blame in taking the colonel's attentions as intended for herself; she would not soon forgive his slighting reference to her. In his eyes she had been only a child, who ought to go to school. He had been good enough to say that she had the making of a fine woman. Thanks! She had had a lover for at least two years, and a proposal of marriage before Colonel French's shadow had fallen athwart her life. She wished her Aunt Laura happiness; no one could deserve it more, but was it possible to be happy with a man so lacking in taste and judgment?

Her aunt's secret began to weigh upon her mind, and she effaced herself as much as possible when the colonel came. Her grandmother had begun to notice this and comment upon it, when the happening of a certain social event created a diversion. This was the annual entertainment known as the Assembly Ball. It was usually held later in the year, but owing to the presence of several young lady visitors in the town, it had been decided to give it early in the fall.

The affair was in the hands of a committee, by whom invitations were sent to most people in the county who had any claims to gentility. The gentlemen accepting were expected to subscribe to the funds for hall rent, music and refreshments. These were always the best the town afforded. The ball was held in the Opera House, a rather euphemistic title for the large hall above Barstow's cotton warehouse, where third-class theatrical companies played one-night stands several times during the winter, and where an occasional lecturer or conjurer held forth. An amateur performance of "Pinafore" had once been given there. Henry W. Grady had lectured there upon White Supremacy; the Reverend Sam Small had preached there on Hell. It was also distinguished as having been refused, even at the request of the State Commissioner of Education, as a place for Booker T. Washington to deliver an address, which had been given at the town hall instead. The Assembly Balls had always been held in the Opera House. In former years the music had been furnished by local Negro musicians, but there were no longer any of these, and a band of string music was brought in from another town. So far as mere wealth was concerned, the subscribers touched such extremes as Ben Dudley on the one hand and Colonel French on the other, and included Barclay Fetters, whom Graciella had met on the evening before her disappointment.

The Treadwell ladies were of course invited, and the question of ways and means became paramount. New gowns and other accessories were imperative. Miss Laura's one party dress had done service until it was past redemption, and this was Graciella's first Assembly Ball. Miss Laura took stock of the family's resources, and found that she could afford only one gown. This, of course, must be Graciella's. Her own marriage would entail certain expenses which demanded some present self-denial. She had played wall-flower for several years, but now that she was sure of a partner, it was a real sacrifice not to attend the ball. But Graciella was young, and in such matters youth has a prior right; for she had yet to find her mate.

Graciella magnanimously offered to remain at home, but was easily prevailed upon to go. She was not entirely happy, for the humiliating failure of her hopes had left her for the moment without a recognised admirer, and the fear of old maidenhood had again laid hold of her heart. Her Aunt Laura's case was no consoling example. Not one man in a hundred would choose a wife for Colonel French's reasons. Most men married for beauty, and Graciella had been told that beauty that matured early, like her own, was likely to fade early.

One humiliation she was spared. She had been as silent about her hopes as Miss Laura was about her engagement. Whether this was due to mere prudence or to vanity—the hope of astonishing her little world by the unexpected announcement—did not change the comforting fact that she had nothing to explain and nothing for which to be pitied. If her friends, after the manner of young ladies, had hinted at the subject and sought to find a meaning in Colonel French's friendship, she had smiled enigmatically. For this self-restraint, whatever had been its motive, she now reaped her reward. The announcement of her aunt's engagement would account for the colonel's attentions to Graciella as a mere courtesy to a young relative of his affianced.

With regard to Ben, Graciella was quite uneasy. She had met him only once since their quarrel, and had meant to bow to him politely, but with dignity, to show that she bore no malice; but he had ostentatiously avoided her glance. If he chose to be ill-natured, she had thought, and preferred her enmity to her friendship, her conscience was at least clear. She had been willing to forget his rudeness and be a friend to him. She could have been his true friend, if nothing more; and he would need friends, unless he changed a great deal.

When her mental atmosphere was cleared by the fading of her dream, Ben assumed larger proportions. Perhaps he had had cause for complaint; at least it was only just to admit that he thought so. Nor had he suffered in her estimation by his display of spirit in not waiting to be jilted but in forcing her hand before she was quite ready to play it. She could scarcely expect him to attend her to the ball; but he was among the subscribers, and could hardly avoid meeting her, or dancing with her, without pointed rudeness. If he did not ask her to dance, then either the Virginia reel, or the lancers, or quadrilles, would surely bring them together; and though Graciella sighed, she did not despair. She could, of course, allay his jealousy at once by telling him of her Aunt Laura's engagement, but this was not yet practicable. She must find some other way of placating him.