Chapter VI: Part III (2)

She patted his arm in the gathering gloom. “I am so very glad you told me that,” she confided. “Now we’re going to be real friends.”

“Not until you have told me something about yourself,” he qualified.

“It’s an awfully short story,” she said, “and a grey little one. You see, Father is one of those artists who missed greatness. He even missed distinction. He thought that because he loved painting he could be a painter. Now he knows how little that has to do with it, and he is too old to start over at anything else. Mother--Uncle George’s sister, you know--oh, she’s such a brick. She works too, at lots of things, and helps, and when I get home I will have to turn in too and find something to do--not painting. Father says one artistic failure in the family is enough. But in spite of everything we do, we don’t get anywhere. Father can’t leave New York because he can get odd jobs there--something from the scenic studios, interior decorations, dribbling little things that keep us chained there yet won’t give us enough to really live on. And New York is such a bitter place to be poor in.”

Saint slipped his arm through hers, found her hand and pressed it. She let her fingers remain in his, and, after a moment of silence, looked up at him with her long scrutiny. “The two of us,” she whispered. “Cinderellas at the ball. That was why I was so glad that you told me about your work too.”

* * * * *

After his week in the rarefied air of the social world, Saint’s descent to the earth of the mining camp had been a gradual one, during which he was still enveloped in trailing clouds of glory. The events of the brief sojourn had remained so vividly in his mind that they seemed for those first few days more actual than the humdrum routine through which he moved by habit rather than thought. He measured cloth and weighed out provisions, but there was a shimmer over his tasks, as though an iridescent gauze floated between his hands and the things that they touched. It was not until the fifth day that he could actually be said to have arrived. He was dining as usual at the mess maintained by the white employés in a cottage near the washing shed. He was always silent at his meals, and the other men usually took him as a matter of course and discussed their poker and hunting across him as though he were a part of the room’s furnishings. But to-day one of their number returned from town, where he, like Saint, had gone for the ball and a taste of the social season. He ragged the boy rather unmercifully, and the others joined in, with the result that when he stepped again through the commissary door the shimmering illusion was gone--salt pork, cabbages, and herrings were again salt pork, cabbages, and herrings. The swallowtail was definitely back in camphor, and his actual wage was twelve dollars and fifty cents a week.

He seldom had customers in the afternoon, as the negroes were still in the mining fields, and as the hours dragged by he came into a realisation of what the week had meant to him. Now, with the glamour gone, he could see quite plainly that its luminous centre had been Valerie Land. Sitting in his little sanctum behind the store, with his face buried in his hands, he looked for the first time into youth’s keenest tragedy: a vast aspiration and the overwhelming conviction of his own inability to attain it. He tried to consider it impersonally and debated it as a purely academic question. Was it better to have caught a glimpse of the unattainable or to have stayed in ignorance of it all, sweating it out in the obscurity of the camp, finding escape only in his reading, music, pictures--the sort of things that couldn’t hit back? Now even the little that he was sending home was desperately needed there. If Polly was given this year, and perhaps next, she would probably marry, and marry well. In the meantime she and his mother must have the best possible background.

Looking back on his parting from Valerie, he realised that some protective divination had been at work within him, for he had made the farewell deliberately casual, as though they were mere acquaintances parting after a week of festivities. She had said that surely she would see him on the following Sunday when he would come to town as usual. He had replied evasively, telling her that there would be a lot of work to be made up, and he did not know when he would be free again. He remembered that she had looked surprised and hurt. Now he thought bitterly that even that was best. There was no use to go ahead toward an agonising smash. A clean break--and a memory--surely that was the wisest. Now he must pull himself together--buck up--face it squarely.

Through the heavy stillness came the sound of an automobile engine throbbing in the sand of the main road some little distance away. It fretted the structure that the boy was commencing to build--challenged its permanence. He dropped his face in his hands. “A bunch of tourists on their way to see the Ashley River gardens,” he thought. They were commencing to discover them now. Coming from way up North in their great new machines that looked so out of place in the ancient solitudes of marsh and forest. He wished they’d stay away. Their appearance stressed differences so heavily, started absurd longings.

He heard a step in the store, got wearily to his feet, shook himself together, and went out. The large room was gloomy, and by comparison the doorway seemed almost dazzling in the afternoon sun. It framed a foreground of white sand road, and a towering back drop of straight pine boles. In the centre of the picture, showing only in silhouette, stood Valerie.

She hesitated a moment, then advanced toward him. While he thought, “This isn’t right. This will upset everything again,” his quick perception of beauty caught the sinuous flow of the little body, carried now with a childish bravado. He said, “Oh, good God,” and stood motionless. On his face was the old look that had counted so heavily against him when he was a child--the wide-eyed, almost vacuous gaze. Finally he broke into movement, holding out his hand--“Valerie.”

“Yes,” she said, laughing a little shakily, “right you are, but don’t be so frightened. I haven’t come to call. That wouldn’t be proper. I have come on a mission. I have come to save you. Is there some place where we can talk?”

She had spoken in a light manner but with a serious undertone in her voice. Saint was mystified. He locked the store and opened the door into his own room. She entered, and he followed her in silence. He was bewildered by her sudden and unexpected appearance, and by the faint, exciting vibrations that her presence released in the familiar room. She did not look about her, saying at once: “Uncle George was taking the children to see the gardens, so I got him to drop me off here.” Then with her characteristic directness, she came immediately to the point.

“You remember what I told you about Father and the bad time he has had?”

Saint nodded assent.

“Well, I have been thinking about him a lot since, and I couldn’t help thinking about your saying that you were going in for painting. It made me see you in a new light, and it made me see your great danger. I thought maybe no one else would see it and tell you. You see, it struck me suddenly that Father must have been awfully like you when he was young--his passion for beauty--for knowledge--reading--painting--confusing the love for a thing with the ability to create it.” She was talking now in short, rushing sentences, watching his face for any revelation that it might give her of his response, but not giving him a chance to interrupt her. “And Dad isn’t the only one that made the mistake. I have seen lots of others go the same way. You see, they are two such different things. I knew a real artist once--he almost hated his art--it was such a relentless taskmaster--he was a terribly lonely soul--but his things are in the Metropolitan now. At first, at the gallery that afternoon, you said you loved pictures. Then, after I had talked to you about them, you said suddenly that you were going in for it. That made me feel terribly responsible. I could not rest until I could come to say _don’t_. Hold on to the thing you have. Try to make it pay the way. Then you can have beauty too. That’s all. Am I forgiven?”

She had been standing tensely before him while she spoke. Now her body went slack. She sighed and let herself go into the depths of Saint’s big chair.

The boy stood looking down at her with preternatural solemnity. “You are right to have come,” he said, “but I don’t know yet. I can’t think quickly, you know. There has always been a dream. It seemed so far, so hard to get hold of. I kept doing all sorts of things like those fossils there, hoping I would stumble on it and see it clearly. Then came the ball. It changed values, made me see other things as important, and on top of that, the day with you and the pictures. Now here I am back on earth again. I see this job for what it is. I am beginning to loathe it all--the ugliness--the cheap hypocrisy. And yet I know now that I can’t let it go. I am even beginning to see some justification for the hypocrisy. Polly’s got to have her chance. I’ve got to play up for Mother. So there we are!”

“But there’s more than just that,” she told him earnestly. “You see, I have been thinking terribly hard about it. It took a lot of courage to come, and I would not have dared if I had not had an idea.”

She was so small and so desperately in earnest that Saint could not help smiling down at her.

“Oh, don’t take this lightly,” she begged. “It hasn’t been easy for me, and I can’t just waste it all. You must see it like this: Now you are in a job that you can do. I bet you can do it better than other men could, even not thinking about it. But you have lots of imagination that you have just been playing in this room with, keeping that door into the store closed all the time. Why can’t you spend some of it on the job? Whatever it is, you can make it grow. Then when you have succeeded you will have time and money for Beauty too, and she won’t disillusion you then as she has Dad.”

Saint sat down opposite his guest and looked into the fire that crackled on the hearth between them. After a while he said: “Dreams are funny things. They had me mastered when I was a kid--shoulders right to the mat--but out here I have learned to keep them in their place a little. I only let them come into this room, and never across that threshold into the store. It was hard keeping them shut up at first, I can tell you. But now they behave. Then I started reading, playing a little, thinking things out, studying. It seemed that if I could only keep alive by what I got beyond that door, I could keep on finding my happiness alone in here. Then there was always the vague hope that sometime, somehow, a miracle would happen and I’d find myself writing, or painting, and would never have to open the door into the store again.”

“But don’t you see, you can’t keep on that way. That’s drifting. You must carry your imagination over that threshold--into life--and make it work for you. You are young, and no one can count on always meeting life alone.” She blushed hotly, stole a sidelong glance at him that brought reassurance, then hurried on: “I mean life is something to be gone after--fought for--not just dreamed over.”

She broke off suddenly, then mocked herself, “Here I am getting as intense as anything, positively preaching to you--and my pose in ruins. My nice casual little self gone moralist. Well, don’t lie awake over what I have said. We’ve all got to think things out for ourselves, anyway.”

She stood up, saying that the car would be back any minute and she had promised to be at the roadside to be picked up without delaying the homeward journey. She had an overdone air of indifference about her and held out her hand with impersonal coolness. Saint took it and held it for a moment. Then he said with the solemnity of youth, “Thank you, Valerie. I have to think this all out. But I’ll never forget your coming.”

“Oh, that’s all right, quite all right,” she replied in a deliberately passionless voice. “It is the sort of thing that my sort of meddling person can’t help doing for a friend. You’ve taken it nicely. And now I feel better for having done it.”

In the moment of departure she hesitated, turned slowly, and for the first time examined the room, noting the etchings, the books, the guitar; and on the table the rather absurd self-instruction book. She completed her survey in silence; then she came and took both of his hands impulsively. In the up-flung light of the fire her face was luminous.

“Oh,” she said, “I am sorry for you and I’m proud of you. This little room--can’t you feel it? It is not a playhouse, after all. It is your battle ground, and you’re going to win.” She dropped his hands suddenly and turned her back upon him, leaving him inarticulate and embarrassed. Then she looked over her shoulder and laughed audaciously.

“There’s something else I came to say too, and I had almost forgotten. It’s this: you need not be afraid to come and see me in town. I’ll promise not to marry you unless you ask me.”

The boy goggled at her, his face a mask of comedy. Finally he achieved a grin.

“Poor boy,” she laughed. “The Wentworths have never had to contend with my sort before, but you’re young. You’ll learn.”

He walked with her to the road, and they saw the Atkinson car approaching, a great, shining limousine, nosing its way along the winding sand road. Atkinson was at the wheel, and the children had a friend with them in the deep rear seat. Saint helped Valerie up beside him while he responded to the cheery greetings, then stood and watched the car diminish toward a far vanishing point. Instinctively he turned back into the old avenue of escape--the splendid abstract dreams that had pulled him through the bitter moments of his adolescence. He opened his mind to them, and suddenly they were upon him, bright and amazing, more actual than life. The great machine vanishing under the trees turned the trick--its incongruity in that primitive setting. Under the rubber tires, a scant six feet deep--carcases of dinosaurs, their great teeth and bone fragments waiting for the shovels of the negroes to show them the light again. They rose before him. In the dusk under the live oaks he saw vast moving shapes oddly balanced on hind legs while they reached to feed on treetops. They were so real, so marvellously convincing, he regarded them with a sort of detached pride akin to the thrill of creation. The last glimmer of a sanguine sunset, broken into long bars by the tree trunks, penetrated the dusk and burned faintly on the swaying forms. Then the swamp mists bellied in whitely and blurred the huge outlines.

Saint became conscious of the roughness of the bark against which he was leaning. “Yesterday and to-day,” he thought, “and what does it all amount to, anyway?” He pulled himself up sharply. What would Valerie say! She thought he had something in him, and she hadn’t put him down as a quitter. He straightened up resolutely, and jammed his hands deep into his trousers pockets. Then he strode quickly across the road and entered the store.

* * * * *

One month had passed since Wentworth had been to the city for the St. Cecilia ball, four years since he had gone on the payroll of the mining company. Mr. Raymond had sent word that he would call at noon. There was an important matter to be threshed out. The two men had scarcely met since the morning when they had driven out together and Saint had been installed. Mr. Raymond belonged to a world of statistics, directors’ meetings, and conferences, with his orbit definitely fixed in the big Broad Street offices and the surrounding financial district. Wentworth had been directly answerable to the commissary manager, an extremely low order of human being named Goodlow, to whom a trade was as the breath of life, and who naturally regarded his aristocratic subordinate with the traditional suspicion and dislike of the poor-white. Twenty years of penny-pinching had raised him from the keeper of one of the smallest branches to the position of purchasing and managerial head of the chain. Saint knew that the man disliked him intensely, but he also knew that, having come into the job over the manager’s head, at the hands of the great Mr. Raymond, he enjoyed a certain mysterious prestige in the Goodlow mind, and that was why he was, at least, left largely to himself.

It was odd that Saint felt no nervous apprehension at the prospect of the visit of his chief. He wondered about this for a while. What had brought about the difference? Then he got the answer: the ball, not the event itself, but the things for which it stood, the odd feeling of importance that it left with him in spite of his disillusioning return to the realities of the camp. He remembered his panic that day when he had been given his job, and he smiled at his own expense.

When Mr. Raymond arrived he greeted his employé warmly, but there was a subtle something in the air that seemed to temper the extreme cordiality of his attitude toward him when they had driven out to the store that other morning four years ago. He stood silent while the outer door was locked, then, at a gesture of invitation, preceded Wentworth into his little sanctum. Strangely enough, the room seemed to impair the sense of superiority which an employer has every right to experience in an interview that deals with policies of the company. The room was less a part of the store building than it was of the man before him. It confused the issue, making him feel like a guest in his own house. Mr. Raymond stood looking about him in silence for a moment. There were many books, and his roving glance failed to discover a familiar title upon any of the neatly arranged bindings. There were several etchings, and odd bits of statuary. In a corner stood a glass case containing a small collection of fossils from the mines. His glance came back to Wentworth and rested on him questioningly. He had had him neatly catalogued. The boy had been hopelessly devoid of ability, personality, everything that could make for success. He had taken him on and buried him here because Kate Wentworth was one of the finest women God ever made, and he wanted to do what he could for her son. Now, reinforced by this inexplicable background, the boy was emerging as a mystery, and he was suspicious of mysteries, especially in business. His employé had changed physically too--filled out--and there was an ease and resilience about his carriage that denoted reserves of vigour.

Saint begged his guest to be seated and returned to the store for the box of cigars. When he re-entered the room Mr. Raymond was standing before the mantelpiece from which he was in the act of lifting a small curious object, holding it gingerly in his heavy, blunt fingers.

“What’s this peculiar affair, Wentworth?” he inquired.

Saint took it and held it with a strange sort of deference. It was about six inches in height, made of some heavy, dark wood. Oddly out of proportion, it yet resembled a woman in a kneeling posture. The limbs were massive and primitively modelled, the eyes half-closed, the nose broad and flat.

The answer came with diffidence. “Oh, that! Why, that’s a piece of primitive African sculpture. It was almost a duplicate of a piece in a collection at the museum, and when it was offered the other day by the British Museum for sale or exchange, the director arranged for me to take it off their hands.”

He hesitated a moment, while he studied the bit of wood, then he added impulsively: “Not often a fellow down here gets a chance like that, I can tell you.”

“Ahem! no--I suppose not,” Raymond replied. Then, seizing the opportunity offered by the topic, he sat down, relighted his cigar, and said with some sententiousness: “Negro, eh! Well, that brings us to the matter in hand. I thought, Wentworth, that we had rather given you an idea of the policy toward Baggart and his men out here. It’s not the sort of thing that we issue orders about, you understand, but there is a general feeling among the men that it is for the good of all concerned not to interfere with his administration of the law in this district. Perhaps you haven’t quite realised this?” And he looked at Saint with raised eyebrows.

“But I do understand, Mr. Raymond, and God knows I’ve minded my own business. Why, I even let that yellow skunk Bluton hang around the store, and keep my mouth shut while I wait on him.”

“Oh, it’s nothing about the store,” said Mr. Raymond hastily. “It’s this matter of Davy something-or-other. I gather that Baggart subpœnaed him for crap shooting Saturday night, and that you appeared for him and swore to his alibi.”

“Oh, that!” exclaimed Saint, his face clearing. “Certainly. I see you don’t understand. I had Davy here helping me take stock until midnight, then I saw him go home. When he told me about his summons I thought that there was some mistake, so I offered to go to the hearing and clear it up for him. That was all.”

Raymond leaned forward with his elbows on the arms of the chair and regarded Saint intently. The boy was struck again, as he had been that first day, by the kindliness of his eyes, but when he spoke the bold, flexible voice had a decisive edge to it.

“I see that I have to be very plain-spoken with you, Wentworth. It is a hard matter to put into words, but I am going to try to get it over to you. We--that is, the Company, the labour, the magistrate, you--have all shaken down into a system that works. It may look unjust, it certainly is faulty, but I am not sure that it is such a bad arrangement after all. To begin with, the state put a magistrate here and requires him to maintain an office, a constable, and live like a white man on seventy-five dollars a month, and--here’s the joker--such perquisites as the office may yield. The incumbent holds his office at the pleasure of the voters--not the mining interests with their few white votes, but the rank and file of the poor-white, small farmers, workingmen, who fear the negro in the mass worse than they do the devil. They give their man the job for what it is worth, requiring of him two things: to keep the negro, as they say, in his place, and, with almost no actual police at his command, to maintain order in the district. From their point of view Baggart is a success. He has absolute power to cause the arrest and fix the penalty of any man upon the knowledge and belief of his constable or the invaluable Bluton. Now you see what will happen to the mining company if it interferes. If we stand with a negro openly against the magistrate we are going back on our colour; according to his point of view, we are demoralising the negroes and putting unsafe notions in their heads. In reprisal, then, the magistrate has only to flood the village with warrants under perfectly valid statutes, crap shooting, delinquent road taxes, dog taxes, and God only knows what not, and in this way pauperise our negroes, and deprive us of labour. No, we are expected to extend co-operation, as it is called, and as long as we do we have a right to expect him not to be too excessive in his demands. At any rate, be the ethics what they may, we are powerless because Baggart is doing exactly what his constituency put him here to do.”

“But,” interrupted Saint, “all the money that the fines bring in, what becomes of that?”

Mr. Raymond inhaled a deep breath of tobacco smoke and blew it toward the ceiling. “That,” he said with a cryptic smile, “is Proctor Baggart’s little secret.” After a moment he added: “I may say in the strictest secrecy that we are trying through an underground route to have all magistrates required to give receipts for fines. That may be some small restraint, but I doubt if we can get away with it.”

“But, Mr. Raymond,” Saint asked, “what would you have me do about Davy? Why, he was working under my eyes at the time. I had to take care of him.”

“Certainly, take care of him, but in the proper way. What you’ve done is apt to lay him open for an ungodly disciplining now. It will be Baggart’s indirect way of enlightening you. He has to come down hard on insubordination. He has to be invincible. That’s what gives him his hold over them. Remember that last case? Time Bluton was ripped by that old fellow Ned? Baggart simply had to get that man. It cost him lots of money, private detective, and all that, but he put him up for ten years. Result: no more razor exercise since that night. But to get back to this specific case--here’s how it stands: Everybody knows Davy’s weakness for craps. He was due for a contribution, that’s all. You had only to sit tight, and the next morning he’d have come to you for his fine. If his credit was strong on your books, you could have advanced him the ten dollars then and there; if not, you could have sent two down on account. Baggart makes terms, you know--two down, two a week. That way you would have been playing the game and everybody would have been happy.”

Saint said, “I mind most getting Davy in wrong by it. What had I better do about it now?”

The employer gave the matter thought. At length he said, “I’ll tell you what. Just go over to Baggart. He’s not a bad sort to talk to. You’ll have to handle it a little delicately. Compliment him on the way he keeps order. Tell him that you are just beginning to understand how he gets such fine results. That he can count on your co-operation in future. Fine word that--co-operation. Then say offhand that you have a special interest in Davy and that if he gets in trouble again to let you know.”

“That’s a nasty dose to stomach,” Saint remarked, “but I can’t have Davy persecuted. I suppose I’ll end by going.”

“That’s right,” Mr. Raymond approved. “Better take a bull by the horns and haul him out of the road. Only way to get ahead.” He sat smoking for a moment or two, then touched on the subject in the abstract. “Strange tangle, this negro business. Had a talk with a neighbour of yours about it yesterday. Atkinson--fine chap--open mind. He’s been thinking a lot about it and had it sized up pretty well. He said that the Yankee was all for the negro race, and hated him as an individual, but that in the South, we love the individual negro, while we hate, or at least fear, him as a race. I told him that if he had been South during reconstruction and had seen them making laws for us in Columbia, he’d know mighty well why, as a race, we have to hold him under control.”

“But in the meantime,” Saint argued, “they’re not getting anywhere, are they?”

Mr. Raymond’s voice was a little weary. “Oh, I don’t know, I’m sure. Anyhow, there’s always got to be labour, and they are the best for us. And you never saw one willing to work out here who had a dollar in his pocket. It isn’t as though they were unhappy. Come, you have been working here four years. You keep your eyes open. Are they a miserable lot?”

“No, I can’t say honestly that they are. They have enough to eat, and, to tell you the truth, when they actually cut loose for a good time they seem to get a lot more out of it than I do.”

“Sure they do. The white man’s burden,” said Mr. Raymond, in dismissal of the subject. “Enough to eat, friends, more time than we have, the men have women, and the women have men. ‘Sufficient unto the day,’ as the Bible or somebody says. Now tell me how you’re getting along yourself.”

Saint said, “I’m glad you asked me that. There are some things that I want to talk over with you, and I want you to have a look at the books. I have been thinking a lot about the work here, and I believe it has possibilities. I have started some things already. Do you mind if I go ahead with suggestions?”

Raymond regarded him with a surprise that was not entirely free from amusement. He had never considered the commissary in the light of its business possibilities. “Go right ahead,” he encouraged.

The boy began a little self-consciously, but soon lost all sense of himself in the telling of his plans. “There’s quite a nice cash business now among the outside negroes who farm. We could make a small line of agricultural implements pay, I think. And I’d like to have Davy as a regular hand. He’s quick at figures”--a wry smile tugged at the corner of his mouth--“quicker than I am, as a matter of fact, and he’s the most popular boy for miles around. I could get him for five dollars a week, and, unless I’m mighty wrong, he’ll pay for himself from the start.”

Saint, watching intently, could almost visualise the new ideas sink slowly in, meet the dense wall of unquestioned preconceptions, and slowly rebound.

“Hmmm, not so sure about that last item. Never use negroes in the stores. Never thought of it. Can get a white boy just as cheap, and it has always been white man’s work. Start now and it might put notions in their heads.”

“Perhaps that’s why the cash business has been going to the little negro shops over on the main road,” put in Saint quietly.

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Then the big man laughed. “All right,” he said at length. “Go ahead and try it out. Any more surprises for me?”

Half an hour later Mr. Raymond stood on the piazza of the store, blinking in the glare that the white sand road flung upward. “Well, good-bye, Wentworth,” he said. “Remember to do your best by us in straightening out that damned awkward business with Baggart, and watch your step in future. And about the store: go ahead with your plans, and I’ll stand back of you with Goodlow and the town office. If anything new occurs to you, you had better run over to town and take it up with me personally.”

* * * * *

All that afternoon Saint was too filled with elation over the success of his plans to give thought to any other matter. But the next morning, plodding through the white sand on his way to Baggart’s office, the unpleasant nature of the mission upon which he was engaged commenced to eclipse the brightness of his mood. He had locked the store and started off through the lemon-coloured winter sunshine whistling the air of the last waltz that he had danced with Valerie, and while his surface thought played lightly with that memory, plans for the store had been taking form in a substratum of his mind. But as he tramped along a shadow commenced to grow out of the Baggart business and cast a gloom over his mood. Finally he stopped whistling, then, almost defiantly, he faced the unpleasant issue.

No longer confronted by the powerful and persuasive personality of his employer, Saint now saw the incident for exactly what it was. He was on his way to apologise for having done a thing that, deep within his instinctive feeling for right and wrong, he knew to have been right. All of the arguments that he had listened to the day before could not change that. He remembered now how his simple and unpremeditated action had affected the magistrate’s court when he had gone in and sworn to Davy’s alibi. The negroes had regarded him with amazement. That had impressed him at the time and made him wonder. But Baggart had immediately suspended the case upon which he was engaged, received him with an exaggerated courtesy, at once removed the charge from the books, and thanked him cordially for coming. “The dirty hound,” Saint thought. “He must have gone straight to the Company’s office and whined about it.” With that impulse to vent anger upon an inanimate object, he struck viciously at a wayside bush with the stick that he was carrying. Then his thoughts veered from the specific case to the ethics involved in the affair. What an intricate mess it all was. You could not go about righting a wrong in a perfectly direct and natural way because of appearances, because of the effect that it would produce upon a number of minds that had no concern with the actual incident. Everything had to be done upon such an absurdly personal basis. Davy was his employé, and so, for personal reasons, he would do what he could for Davy. Baggart, who was a state official, nevertheless managed to make everything that he did an obvious personal concession, and expected private and personal concessions in return. As long as a man looked after his own negroes in accordance with the customs prevailing in his particular locality, no one thought anything of it. But if he made an open move that carried the slightest suggestion of impersonal interest in the race, that was another matter, and he was due to be cozened gently back into line.

Well, now that he came to think of it, that was exactly where his grandfather had stood in 1861. He had enjoyed the reputation of taking better care of his slaves than any other man in the parish. He had positively pampered them. Yet he had died at Gettysburg in defence of certain principles, among which certainly must be numbered the institution of slavery. But no, that was not quite a fair comparison. In town, at any rate, there were now good schools. There was even a state college for negroes. There were coloured business and professional men who were earning tidy incomes and living comfortably. Saint’s mind locked with this apparent inconsistency. Suddenly he saw an explanation--not a solution--there probably wasn’t any--but at least the motivating principle. Expediency. In town, both numbers and power rested securely with the white, and so he could afford to appear in court for a negro, could educate him, give him a chance in business, indulge his own benign paternalism. Out in the agricultural region, staying on upon the same soil that had enslaved their grandfathers, they were held to the old code of behaviour by a tradition of servitude, reinforced in many cases by an actual affection to their landlords. There they were safe. Only here in the industrial belt, thronged as it was by the rag-tag and bob-tail of the race, ten, twenty, a hundred of them to a single white, the grip could not be allowed to slacken. White supremacy must remain absolute.

A dazzling idea struck the boy, an idea as fantastic, as improbable as the old grandiose and heroic dreams. Suppose he should openly abandon expediency for principle. Suppose he should turn back now, instead of going on and repudiating his attitude of three days ago. What would happen? He stopped dead in his tracks, trying to estimate the consequences. First, according to Mr. Raymond’s reasoning, Davy would soon be apt to receive another summons. He would be fined, perhaps even given a term on the chain gang. It would be easy enough for Baggart to get him in a crap game if he just watched and waited. Then most certainly his own position would be jeopardised. He would no longer be one of a group bound together by a wordless, but absolute, understanding. He’d be out in a no-man’s land of his own making. He would lose the chance that he was just beginning to realise in the store. Hunting for work again. Failure again. His mother--Polly--Valerie.

Out of a job, what good would he be to himself or anybody else? Supposing that he was really interested in the problems of the negroes and wanted to help, was it not best to stay here, observe the conventions, and give them a leg up one at a time? Yes, that seemed the practical thing to do. But if that was so, why was it so difficult to go on to Baggart’s? It ought to be plain sailing if he had satisfied himself that he was right. He searched for a reason that would bring conviction to himself. Of course, it was his own pride. No gentleman would relish having to apologise to a man of Baggart’s type. Well, then, he must make a personal sacrifice in the matter. For Valerie--his mother--Polly--for the assistance that he might be able to render to the negroes themselves, he must pocket his pride. He squared his shoulders, feeling not a little heroic. Before him the broad belt of white sand swung out to divide at a little distance into two roads, one cutting straight back between the pines into the vast loneliness of the black back country, the other swinging a sharp right angle toward the river and Baggart’s office. Saint stood, his eyes before him, and tried to force the familiar, objective details of sand, forest, and sky in upon his mind. He must get out of himself and go ahead with the thing he had to do. But the picture-making faculty that had so often been his escape now turned upon him and endowed the way that he must choose, with its wide-flung alternatives, with a huge and momentous symbolism. His heroic pose collapsed. With a gesture of utter weariness he set his face in the direction of Baggart’s office.

* * * * *

In Charleston the brief and intense social season had burned itself out, and the chimes of St. Michael’s, that had carolled it brightly through its short career, were now, in their Lenten tolling, sounding its requiem. For Lent still made a sharp line of demarkation in the behaviour of the old city, with its deeply imbedded Church of England tradition. The imposing building, with its lofty façade and Grecian portico, where the St. Cecilia had held sway, had now about it an air of desertion and neglect. There seemed suddenly to be more old women in mourning, fewer girls in bright colours, for the visiting débutantes were packing for homeward journeys, and local belles were fluttering away on visits to more gala and less godly metropolises.

Saint was in the city for Sunday, but he did not attend church with his mother and sister. He had two engagements that morning. Mr. Raymond had made an appointment to talk with him at his home at eleven o’clock, and, after that, he had to tell Valerie good-bye before she caught a northbound train at two. Two such different engagements, each with its train of associations, had made the boy of two minds during a sleepless night and a preoccupied early morning. He was like a spirit that is trying to inhabit two separate planes of existence, and the way that his thoughts soared when Valerie brushed across them made it terribly hard to hold his feet down to the solid substance of the proposition that he was going to make to his employer.

It was almost three months since Valerie’s call at the mines, when he had listened to her solemn warning. That event, and the visit of Mr. Raymond coming on top of it, had opened up a new phase of existence for him. Books, music, fossils, even painting had been forgotten for the time. He had plunged with the thrill of a fresh adventure into the problem of making the commissary a paying proposition. Once his interest had been aroused and he had looked over the records, he was amazed to see what had come to pass even without conscious effort. He had known that he enjoyed the confidence of the negroes, and that gradually they had started to bring their friends to shop at his commissary. But his mind had been absorbed with other matters, and he had not realised that, from zero, he had built up a very considerable cash business among non-employés of the mines.

Then had come the impulse that prompted him to ask for Davy as a helper. Immediately sales had boomed. At his own suggestion the boy had taken the slack hours in the afternoon to go out on advertising excursions among his friends, and the result had been that both Saint and himself were kept going at top speed during the hours when the negroes came to do their purchasing.

Saint was amazed at the ease with which results were accomplished. Always before business success had seemed to him a thing separate from life--a feat of legerdemain requiring a certain sort of person for its accomplishment. Now he saw it for the first time as the outgrowth of personality--a by-product of the man himself. He had discovered too that it brought a thrilling satisfaction entirely aside from the money that it yielded. It was a game to be played. His imagination was as busy as ever, only instead of being what he now considered a vague and demoralising agency, it was wedded to actuality and was building high dreams over the shabby little commissary.

Some of these dreams he had talked over with Davy, who knew exactly what the negroes wanted and what they could afford to pay for it. Finally he had mapped out concrete plans and had asked Mr. Raymond for this interview, immediately after which he would have to go and tell Valerie good-bye.

Since the afternoon of Valerie’s visit to the mines he had seen her as often as possible. At first they had spent their Sunday afternoons at the museum or art gallery. The pictures were not on exhibition on Sundays, but Saint had gained admission through the secretary, and he and the girl had the big echoing room with all of its splendours to themselves. They would look at the pictures for a while, then sit on a settee and let their talk drift where it would. Valerie told him about her father. “The sweetest, the gentlest man alive. Everything to make an artist but the little essential spark.” Once she said passionately: “Only geniuses should be allowed to create. It’s cruel to let others try and fail. You see the pitiful thing is that Father knows good work. He’s his own judge. And the things that he has to do to keep alive! He will never go back to see them after they are done, and he won’t let us go to see them. He has a creed, and he must break it to live.”

Sometimes, in brighter moods, Valerie would tell of the other side of their life: the casual comings and goings of people who could sing, paint, act--New York, and the terrible splendour of its nights. Then Saint would momentarily revert to his old gods and exclaim: “I want that life, Val, I want it terribly,” or, “That’s the real thing. Can’t you just feel that, Val?” and she would reassure him with, “But, don’t you see, you can have all of that and more when you have succeeded at what you are doing. That’s what I want for you, freedom--then beauty.”

Then Mamba had taken a hand in their affairs. Employing her old tactics, she had insinuated herself into the good graces of Valerie and had attached herself to her as personal maid. Then one night, when Saint was telling Valerie good-night, she stumbled into them at the front door and asked them with the excessive innocence of manner that always masked some deep design if they would like to accompany her to a special midnight service at her church. Saint recognised the manner immediately and turned a knowing grin upon her. “Old Machiavelli,” he thought, “she has something up. I wonder whether she is really doing it for love of us or starting to run up an account against the next difficulty of one of her precious daughters.” He finally credited her with the double motive. Valerie was thrilled at the prospect of the adventure.

Mamba led the way through an alley so narrow that both walls could be touched at the same moment with the extended hands, and on into the labyrinth of back-yard passageways of lower East Bay, then suddenly through a side door into a darkened corner of the large room that served as a meeting house. This was no ordinary service subject to the occasional invasion of a white visitor in search of local colour. It was a section of Africa transplanted to new soil and, with the lapse of a century, still black with jungle mystery, crimson with jungle passion. Mamba, seizing a moment when the faculties of the swaying crowd were locked fast in the grip of a chant, got them unobserved into a dark corner near the door. Over them, like the crash of breakers, swept the terrific, cumulative intensity of the worship, now throbbing with an old terror of jungle gods, again lifting suddenly into rapt adoration of the new Christ. This, and the pounding rhythms of the spirituals, the amazing emotional release wrought by the music, so fascinated and yet frightened the white girl that she sat huddled against Saint, clinging to his hand with tense fingers, her head pressed against his shoulder. While between them and the nearest group of worshippers Mamba sat on guard with her rare and cryptic Mona Lisa smile playing incongruously about her grim mouth and baring the formidable teeth in a thin up-curving line.

It was in the art gallery on the following afternoon that the avowal had come. A silence had grown between them. The high, windowless walls muted the occasional street noises and surrounded them with a barrier of beauty against the importunate realities that waited for them out in the winter afternoon. The young lovers sat so quietly that a casual observer would have thought the room unoccupied, and in that deep silence there grew up between them so complete a communion that the final word seemed almost superfluous. Saint raised his eyes at last and found the girl’s fixed upon him with their intent, reading look. He took her hands and said very softly, “I love you, Valerie.” In the suddenly awakened silence, the words seemed to hover in the air about the girl, then she answered on a note that was almost one of sadness, “And I love you, Saint.” They leaned forward then, like two children, and kissed, and presently took their way home through the darkening street, carrying their miraculous secret so carefully past the street windows of their friends that they scarcely spoke again until they said good-bye.

But gradually, as the weeks passed, they began to substitute long walks in the country for the hours spent in the art gallery. Saint began to see his old enthusiasms for his guitar and his pictures as just a little absurd. It was the store and its possibilities now, and Saint did most of the talking. The old flair was still there, making him forget himself in an idea, but the idea now concerned itself with a bigger store, more stock, perhaps a second store some day. Sometimes, for nearly an hour, Valerie would have scarcely a word to say, and she did not always follow the soaring flights of his reapplied imagination.

* * * * *

And now, on this momentous morning, Saint stood upon the doorstep of Mr. Raymond’s colonial dwelling on lower Meeting Street, and listened to St. Michael’s measured announcement that the hour for his first interview had arrived. A step sounded beyond the closed door. He executed a tremendous effort of will, banished Valerie from his thoughts, and commenced to run over in his mind the things that he wanted from his employer: “more space--a line of fertilisers, and seed--new large piazza where visiting negroes could congregate--break all connection with Goodlow and do his own purchasing.” At that point the door was opened by a maid.

“Yes, sir,” she said in answer to his inquiry, “Mr. Raymond is expecting you in the library.”

He passed in and the door closed softly behind him.

Half an hour later he was again on the doorstep, with the big form of his employer filling the opening behind him. Mr. Raymond placed a large firm hand on his shoulder.

“Well, you have what you want, haven’t you?” he asked.

“I should say I have, sir.”

“Good luck to you, then. I must confess that I am surprised as well as pleased with your results. But blood will tell. It will be fine working directly with you in future. My congratulations, and warm regards to your good mother, please.”

Had he got what he wanted! Saint had to smile. A new wing for agricultural implements, fertilisers, and seed, a big piazza that would attract the negroes to idle and feel at home, authorisation to do his own buying and to be answerable to Mr. Raymond alone. Then, right on top of it all--right smack out of the blue--a salary raise to twenty-five dollars a week. The boy felt just a little intoxicated as he turned away from the big Meeting Street mansion.

When he arrived at Atkinsons’ Mamba admitted him; then, as nobody was looking, she gave him a proprietary pat on the back, accompanied by a leer that was distinctly a throw-back to the East Bay epoch of her life.

“Ain’t no use to hang back, Mr. Saint. Ah sho knows it when Ah sees it. She’s in de parlour now waitin’ for you, an’ she’s done all broke out wid it.”

“You’re a suspicious old devil,” he told her with a grin, “and if I didn’t have such a deep respect for the law I’d tell you to your teeth what I really think of you.”

Yes, Valerie was waiting for him. The street windows were closed, as is the custom in the old city, and the light in the room was dim and chill. An open fire strove valiantly but only half-successfully to bring it to life.

The girl came toward him and gave him both of her hands, glancing up into his face with a new shyness in her own. But Saint, usually so quick to feel the mood of another, was bursting with his triumph. His eyes were shining with excitement, and his colour was high under the tan of his skin. He did not linger over her hands, but gave them a short, vehement grip and released them.

“I have come for your congratulations, Valerie,” he exclaimed. “I have just been talking to Mr. Raymond, and he has given me everything I want. You can’t guess how exciting it all really is.”

“Oh,” she said on a short indrawn breath, “you’re happy to-day, aren’t you? I am very glad. Sit down and tell me all about it.”