Chapter III: Part 3

She did not complain; she never complained of anything her husband did; but it was plain to see that she thought it her obvious duty to protect her daughters from the consequences of their dear father’s ideas. The income from her dowry kept them at school and dressed them at home, and as the oldest began to approach the marriageable age Mme. Brodard cast about her with silent intensity for some possible means for stretching that dowry to enable Madeleine to make the right sort of match. She knew of course that this was an impossible undertaking; but all her married life had been an impossible undertaking carried through to success, and she did not despair, although there were times when she looked white and anxious.

But this was never when M. Brodard was at home. Indeed it was impossible for any one to be tense or distraught in the sunny gaiety of M. Brodard’s presence. His entrance into that neat, hushed, narrow, waxed, and polished interior was like the entrance of a military band playing a quick-step. He was always full of his latest crusade, fired with enthusiasms, hope, and certainty of success. He made you feel that he was the commanding officer of a devoted force, besieging an iniquitous old enemy, and every day advancing further toward victory. Yet another blast, down would tumble the flimsy walls of cowardly traditional injustice, and sunshine would stream into the dark places!

Full of faith in what he was doing, he was as light-hearted as a boy, electrifying the most stagnant air with the vibrant current of his conviction that life is highly worth the trouble it costs. Big girls as we were, he swept us off into hilarious games of hide-and-seek; and never in any later evenings of my life have I rocked in such gales of fun as on the evenings when we played charades. An impersonation of a fussy, clucking setting hen which he gave as part of the word, “ampoule” has remained with me as a high-water mark of sheer glorious foolery never surpassed by the highest-salaried clown. In the following charade we laughed so at his “creation” of a fateful Napoleon that we could not sit on our chairs; and after that, carried away by his own high spirits, he did the “strong man” at the village fair (he was a prodigiously powerful athlete) lifting a feather with a grotesque display of swelling muscles, clenched jaws, and widespread legs which all but finished me. The tears of mirth used to come to my eyes as I recalled that evening, and many a taut, high-strung moment of my adolescence in after years relaxed into healthy amusement at the remembered roar of M. Brodard’s laughter.

M. Brodard’s laughter ... alas!

And yet at the very time when his care-free, fearless laughter so filled my ears, he was standing out single-handed against the most poisonous hostility, to force an investigation of a framed-up law case, in which a workingman had been defrauded of his rights. Apparently there was always some such windmill against which he thought it necessary to charge. Apparently his zeal for forlorn hopes never diminished. We went back to school after that vacation leaving him the center of a pack of yelling vituperations from all the staid and solid citizens of the region ... “poor, dear Papa,” as the Brodard girls always said, imitating their mother’s accent.

To me, school and lessons in deportment seemed queerer than ever, after that great gust of stormy, ruffling wind, but the Brodard girls were used to such contrasts. They but plunged themselves deeper than ever, up to their very necks, into the atmosphere of gentility. They had caught more than their mother’s accent, they had caught her deep anxiety about their future, her passionate determination that the ideas of their father should not drag them into that impossible world of workingmen, radicals and badly dressed outcasts, which was the singular choice of their excellent poor dear Papa.

When Mme. Brodard came to Paris, in the well-cut tailored dress which I now knew to be the only one she possessed, she reported that Papa, by sheer capacity for shouting unpleasant truths at the top of his great voice, had obtained a re-trial and acquittal of that tiresome workingman, and was now off on a new tack, was antagonizing all the merchants of town by an exposé of their grinding meanness to their hapless employees. It seemed that libel-suits were thick in the air, and the influential members of society crossed to the other side of the street when they met M. Brodard. “But you know how poor dear Papa seems to thrive on all that!”

Well, _he_ might thrive on all that, but Madeleine, Lucie, and Clotilde knew very well that nothing they wanted would thrive on “all that.” Their only salvation was in escape from it. In the effort to prepare themselves for that escape, they smeared themselves, poor things, from head to foot with good breeding. They had nothing but themselves, Maman, and her little dowry to count on; but at least no one should be able to guess from their manners that their home life had not been conventional. Mme. Brodard went on, that day, to consult with her banker about re-investing some of her little fortune, so that it would mean more income. When Madeleine left school, they would need more, Heaven knew, to piece out the plain living furnished by the head of the house. What could they do to rise to that crisis? _When Madeleine left school_ ... an abyss before their feet! Could they perhaps go south, to a winter resort for a few months every year, where there were no Morvilliers people, where there might be eligible young men ... or even some not so young? They all looked anxious and stern, when they thought of it, for after Madeleine, there were Lucie and Clotilde!

I was sent home to America in June that year, before the end of the school-term. The good-bys were said at lunch-time, before my schoolmates went off to the lesson in deportment. The last I saw of the Brodards at the time, was through the door of the salon as I passed on my way to the street. They were learning how to handle a fan, how to open it--“not tearing it open with both hands like a peasant girl, but flirting it open with a sinuous bend of the wrist of one hand ... not so abrupt!... smooth, suave, with an aristocratic....” As I went down the hall, the voice of Professor Delacour died away on these words. I wondered what poor dear Papa was up to now.

Two years later when I was taken back to France and went to visit the Brodards, I found that he was still up to the same sort of thing. Just then he was making the echoes yell in the defense of a singularly unattractive, snuffy old man, who lived in a village six or seven kilometers away from Morvilliers. Old M. Duval, it seemed, had gone to South America in his youth, had accumulated some property there, and had lost his religion. Now, at sixty-nine, with so it was said, enough money to live on, he had come back to Fressy, had bought a comfortable little home there, and settled down to end his days in his birthplace. But Fressy, as it happened, had always been and still was noted for its piety and conservatism. The curé of the parish was a man of flaming zeal, and the Mayor was also a very devout ultramontane. Till then their influence had been unquestioned in the town. They had boasted that there was one loyal village left in France where none of the poisonous new ideas had come in to corrupt the working classes, and to wean them from their dutiful submission to the rule of their spiritual and secular betters. Apparently till then, M. Brodard had overlooked the existence of such a village near him.

His attention was now very much called to it by the persecution of old M. Duval. The persistent and ostentatious absence from Mass of the returned traveler was followed by a shower of stones which broke most of his windows. His easy-going advice given publicly in a café to some young workmen of the town to follow his example, to stand up for themselves, get higher wages or strike, was answered by the poisoning of his dog. The old fellow became indignant, and never dreaming of the heat of the feeling against him, walked straight up to M. le Curé one day in the street, and asked him--as if the priest had anything to do with what was happening!--whether the laws of France did or did not permit a man to live quietly in his own house, no matter what his opinions were! That night some anonymous defender of the status quo set fire to his chicken-house. It was at this time that M. Brodard began to be aware of the existence of Fressy.

Old M. Duval called on the police for protection. “The police.” That sounds very fine, but the police of Fressy meant a solitary old garde-champêtre whose wife was the most pious woman in town, and whose only daughter was the cook in the house of the fiercely legitimatist Mayor. It is not surprising that the next morning, the scoffing unbeliever from overseas found that somehow marauders had eluded “the police,” and laid waste his promising kitchen-garden. They intended (they proclaimed it openly) to drive out from their sanctified midst, the man who flaunted his prosperity as the result of a wicked and godless life.

But they had not counted on M. Brodard and on his unparalleled capacity for making a noise. He stormed out to Fressy to see the old man, thoroughly frightened by this time; heard his story, exploding at intervals into fiery rockets of indignation; clasped him in his arms, as though M. Duval had been his own kin; and swore that he would prove to him that justice and freedom existed in France to-day as always. The old man’s nerves were shaken by his troubled nights and his harried sense of invisible enemies all about him. Until that moment it had seemed to him that all the world was against him. His relief was immense. He returned M. Brodard’s embrace emotionally, his trembling old arms clasped hard about M. Brodard’s great neck, the tears in his scared old eyes.

Then M. Brodard hurried back to Morvilliers, tore the throttle open, and let her go ... to the great discomfort of Mme. Brodard and the girls, the two elder of whom were now very reluctantly preparing themselves to teach, for they had not been able to organize the longed-for escape. That was the situation when I visited them.

Of course in due time the intemperate publicity about the matter put an end to the attacks on M. Duval. The rattling crackle of M. Brodard’s quick-fire protests rose in the air, till they reached the ears of the Sous-Prefect, from whose exalted office orders to “see to that matter” were issued, and came with imperative urgence even to the royalist Mayor of Fressy. He very grudgingly issued certain unofficial orders, which meant quiet in old M. Duval’s life. There was even a victim sacrificed to shut M. Brodard’s too-articulate mouth. The garde-champêtre lost his position and his chance for a pension, which was very hard on an excellent, honest man whose only intention had been to do his duty as he saw it.

By the time that I was back in America in college, Clotilde wrote me that all that disturbance had died down, that M. Duval, horrid old thing, had come on his shaking old legs to make a visit to Papa, to thank him with deep emotion for the intense peace and comfort of his present life. I could read between the lines that Clotilde thought they might very well have a little more of those commodities in their own life.

After that I heard from some one else (for M. Brodard and his ideas were becoming famous) that the opposition had finally caught him in a legal technicality, something connected with his campaign for tearing down the miserable old disease-soaked medieval hovels where many poor people lived in Morvilliers. The proprietors of the threatened rookeries chipped in together, hired expensive expert legal advice, and finally, to their immense satisfaction, succeeded in getting a tiny sentence of imprisonment, for defamation of their characters, inflicted on M. Brodard. He was kept in jail for two weeks, I believe, which was a fortnight of pure glory. All his humble adherents, hundreds of them, came tramping in to see him from all the region round, bringing tribute. His “cell” was heaped with flowers, he fared on the finest game and fattest poultry, and ... what pleased him vastly more ... the fiery editorials which he sent out from his prison about the infamy of wretched lodgings for poor families were noticed and reprinted everywhere in France, where the circumstances of his grotesque imprisonment were known.

The condemnation which his opponents meant to be a crushing disgrace turned out an apotheosis. He enjoyed every moment of it and emerged from his two weeks vacation, ruddier, stronger, in higher spirits than ever, his name shining with the praise of generous-hearted men all over the country. He cocked his hat further over one ear than ever and strode off home. You could fairly see the sparks fly from beneath his feet.

* * * * * * *

The morning after his release from prison, news came from Fressy that old M. Duval had died of apoplexy.

Well, what of that? Ah, what of that ...?

He had willed his whole fortune to M. Brodard, and it seemed he was frightfully rich: it came to more than three million francs.

* * * * * * *

Oh, yes, he took it. Of course he did. You knew he would. What else would you have had him do? It’s all very well to have abstract ideas about the absurdity and iniquity of inheritance; but when your own daughters ... and your own wife ... expect so confidently....

Mme. Brodard, you see ... he was devoted to his wife who had so faithfully made the best of homes for him; and to his daughters whom he loved so dearly....

Can’t you see the astounded radiance of their faces at the news? And they’d already been sacrificed so many years for his ideas.... _Ideas!_

What do you suppose he could do but accept it?

* * * * * * *

I don’t know one thing about the inner history of this period when M. Brodard was bringing himself to a decision, and in the light of a glimpse, just one glimpse which I had later, I think the less I know about it the better for my peace of mind. The only information I had was contained in a very nice, conventional note from Mme. Brodard, giving me, in the pleasantly formal, well-turned phrases of French epistolatory style, the news of their great good fortune which, she said, was certainly sent by Providence to protect her dear husband from the suffering and hardship which would have been his without it; for M. Brodard was very ill, she wrote, oh, very ill indeed! He had gone through a phase of strange mental excitement; from that he had sunk into melancholia which had frightened them, and in the end had succumbed to a mysterious malady of the nervous system which made him half-blind and almost helpless. Helpless ... her wonderful, strong husband! What could she have done to care for him if it had not been for this financial windfall coming just when it was most needed?

You can imagine my stupefaction on reading this letter. It was caused as much by learning that M. Brodard was a hopeless invalid as by learning about that odd business of the fortune left them. How strange! M. Brodard with a nervous affection which left him in a wheel chair! It was incredible. I reread the beautifully written letter, trying hard to see if anything lay between the lines. But there was nothing more in it than I had already found. It was evidently written in the utmost good faith. Everything Mme. Brodard did was done with the utmost good faith.

Some years later I was in France again and found myself near the address on the Riviera where the Brodards had purchased an estate. I had not heard from them in some months, but on the chance that they might be there, I went over from Mentone on a slow way-train which, returning three hours later, would give me time to pay my call and get back the same afternoon. Everybody at the little white-stuccoed station knew where the Brodard villa was, and when he knew where I was going, the driver of the shabby cab tucked me into it with a respect for my destiny he had noticeably not shown to my very plain and rather dusty traveling-dress. We climbed a long hill-road to a high point, commanding a glorious view of the brilliant sea and yet more brilliant coast, and turned into a long manorial allée of fine cypress trees.

The house was as manorial and imposing as the avenue leading to it and I began to be uneasily aware of my plain garb. As I went up the steps to the great door I could feel the house thrilling rhythmically to excellent music, and to the delicate gliding of many finely-shod feet.

A servant led me to a small round salon hung with blue brocade, and in a moment Mme. Brodard came hurrying to meet me. She had bloomed herself luxuriantly open like a late rose, and from head to foot was a delight to the eye. Of course she was very much surprised to see me, but with never a glance at my garb she gave me the cordial welcome of an old friend. Her perfect good faith and good breeding still governed her life, it was plain to see. She was giving a _thé dansant_ for the younger girls, she told me, adding that Madeleine had been married two months before to a silk manufacturer of Lyons. She was evidently glad to see me, but naturally enough, just for the moment, a little puzzled what to do with me! I suggested to her relief that I make a visit to M. Brodard first of all and wait to see the others till their guests had gone.

“Yes, that’s the very thing,” she said, ringing for a servant to show me the way, “he’ll remember you, of course. He will be so glad to see you. He always liked you so much.”

As the servant came to the door, she added with a note of caution. “But you must expect to find him sadly changed. His health does not improve, although we have a resident physician for him, and _everything_ is done for him, poor dear Bernard!”

The servant in a quiet livery of the finest materials, led me upstairs over velvet carpets, and then upstairs again, to a superb room at the top of the house. It was all glass towards the miraculous living blue of the Mediterranean, and full of flowers, books, and harmoniously designed modern furniture. M. Brodard, clad in a picturesque, furred dressing-gown sat in a wheel chair, his bald head sunk on his breast, his eyes fixed and wide-open, lowered towards his great, wasted white hands lying empty on his knees. Until he raised his eyes to look at me, I could not believe that it was he ... no, it was not possible!

He remembered me, as Mme. Brodard had predicted, but the rest of her simple-hearted prophecy did not come true. He was not in the least glad to see me and made not the slightest pretense that he was. A look that was intolerable to see, had come into his eyes as he recognized me, and he had instantly turned his head as though he hated the sight of me.

I knew at once that I ought to get out of the room, no matter how; but I was so stricken with horror and pity that for a moment I could not collect myself, and stood there stupidly.

A faint distant sound of gay music hummed rhythmically in the silence. A professional-looking man who had been sitting with a book on the other side of the room got up now and, with the bored air of a man doing his duty, took hold of M. Brodard’s thin wrist to feel the pulse.

M. Brodard snatched away his hand and said to me over the doctor’s head, “Well, you see how it is with us now.” He corrected himself. “You see how it is with me.”

His accent, his aspect, his eyes added what he did not say. He had been trembling with impatience because I was there at all. Now he was trembling with impatience because I did not answer him! His terrible eyes dared me to answer.

I would have done better to hold my tongue altogether, but my agitation was so great that I lost my head. I felt that I was called upon to bring out something consoling, and heard myself murmuring in a foolish babble something or other about possible compensations for his illness, about his still being able to go on with his work, to write, to publish, in that way to propagate his ideas....

At that he burst into a laugh I would give anything in the world not to have heard.

“My ideas ... ha! ha! ha!” he cried.

Oh, I got myself out of the room then! I ran down the velvet carpets of the stairs, my hands over my ears.

As I hurried along to the outside door I passed the salon. I saw, across the bare, gleaming desert of its waxed floor, Clotilde standing with a well-dressed man. She had a fan in her hand, and, as I looked, she opened it deftly, with a sinuous bend of her flexible wrist ... “smoothly, suavely ... with an aristocratic ...”

FAIRFAX HUNTER

The erratic philanthropist of our family arrived from New York one spring day with a thin, sickly-looking, middle-aged, colored man, almost in rags. “This is Fairfax Hunter,” he announced with the professional cheeriness of the doer of good. “He’s pretty badly run down and needs country air. I thought maybe you could let him sleep in the barn, and work around enough for his board.”

There was nothing professionally or in any other way cheery about the colored man, who stood waiting indifferently for my decision, his knees sagging, his hollow chest sunken. As I glanced at him he raised his dark, blood-shot eyes and met my look. I decided hastily, on impulse, from something in the expression of his eyes, that we could not send him away.

I led him off to the barn and showed him the corner of the hay-mow where the children sometimes sleep when our tiny house overflows with guests. He sank down on it and closed his eyes. The lids were blue and livid as though bruised. He had nothing with him except the ragged clothes on his back.

When I returned to the house, the philanthropist explained that Fairfax was a Virginia negro--“You could tell that from his name, of course”--who had come to New York and fallen into bad ways, “drink, etc.... But there’s something about him....”

Yes, I agreed to that. There was something about him....

Fairfax lived with us after this for more than four years, the last years of his life. He was really very ill at first, the merest little flicker of life puffing uncertainly in and out of the bag of skin and bones which was his body. The doctor said that rest and food were the only medicines for him. He lay like a piece of sodden driftwood for long hours on the edge of the hay where the sun caught it.

The good-natured old Yankee woman who was cooking for me then, used to take him out big bowls of fresh milk, and slices of her home-baked bread, and stand chatting with him while he sat up listlessly and ate. At least, she being a great gossip, did the chattering, and Fairfax listened, once in a while murmuring the soft, slow, “Ye-e-s’m,” which came to be the speech he was known by, in our valley.

He seemed to have no interest in getting well, but little by little the sunshine, the quiet, the mountain air, and something else of which we did not dream till later, lifted him slowly up to health. He began to work a little in the garden, occasionally cut the grass around the house and, borrowing the carpentering tools, built himself a little room in the corner of the barn. One day I paid him a small sum for his services about the place, and my husband gave him some old clothes. The next afternoon he took his first walk to the village, and came back with a pipe and a bag of tobacco. That evening Nancy, our “help,” called me to the kitchen window and pointed out towards the barn. On a bench before the barn door sat Fairfax, smoking, his head tipped back, watching the moon sink behind the mountain. We agreed that it looked as though he were getting well.

Nancy had to go home to a sick sister that Fall, and Fairfax moved into the kitchen to occupy her place. It came out that he had once worked in a hotel kitchen in Virginia, so that thereafter our Vermont cookstove turned out Southern food, from hot biscuit to fried chicken.

There is very little caste feeling in our valley, and not a bit of color prejudice. Many of our people had never even seen a negro to speak to before they knew Fairfax, and they liked him very much.

He always was very thin, but he had filled out a little by this time; had gone to a dentist by my advice and had the blackened stumps of his teeth replaced by shining new ivories; had bought with his first wages a new suit of clothes, and was considered by our farmer families to be “quite a good-looking fellow.” He kept his curling gray hair cut short to his head, his thin cheeks scrupulously shaven, and was always presentable.

As a matter of course he was invited to all the country gatherings, like other people’s “hired help,” along with the rest of us. I remember the first of these invitations: some one telephoned from the village to announce a church supper, and I was urged, “Do bring down a good crowd. We’ve got a lot of food to dispose of.”

I stepped back into the kitchen and told Fairfax not to get supper that night, as we were all going to the village to a church supper.

“Yes’m,” said Fairfax.

“I want you to be ready to start at a quarter to six,” I added, glancing at the clock.

“Who, _me_?” said Fairfax, with a little start.

“Yes,” I answered, a little surprised. “Didn’t you hear me say I wanted us all to go?”

Fairfax looked at me searchingly, “Where’ll I get my supper?”

“Why, they usually have the church suppers out on the church green unless it rains, and then they go down to the basement rooms.”

Fairfax said apathetically, “No’m, they don’t want me.”

I saw now what was in his mind, and said, to set him right, “Oh, yes, they do. You know the people around here haven’t any of those notions. Come on.”

“No’m, they don’t want me,” he repeated.

I beckoned him to follow me, went back to the telephone and rang up the woman who was arranging for the supper. “Do you want me to bring Fairfax Hunter with us?” I asked her explicitly.

“Why, of course,” she said surprised. “I told you we want a crowd.”

After this Fairfax stood undecided, his sensitive face clouded and anxious. I had a glimpse then of the long years of brutal discrimination through which he had lived, and said, feeling very much ashamed of my civilization, “Now, Fairfax, don’t be so foolish. We _want_ you to go. Get on your best clothes, so’s to do honor to the Ladies Aid.”

He went back to the room in the corner of the barn, and half an hour later came out, fresh and neat in his new suit, closely shaven, his slim yellow hands clean, his gray hair smooth. He looked almost eager, with a light in his eyes that was like a distant reflection of gaiety. But when we cranked up the Ford to go he was not in sight. We called him, and he answered from the barn that he was not ready, and would walk in. I was vexed, and shouted back as we rolled down the hill, “Now don’t fail to come.”

It rained on the way in, and the supper was served in the basement, with all the neighbors spruced up and fresh, while the busy women of the Ladies Aid rushed back and forth bringing us salmon loaf, pickles, Boston brown bread, creamed potatoes, and coffee and ice-cream as from the beginning of time they always have; but though I kept a chair at our table empty for Fairfax, and sat where I could watch the door, he did not appear.

After the supper I went across the street to see my aunt, house-ridden with a hard cold. She told me that from her windows she had seen Fairfax come down to the village street, halt in front of the church, go on, turn back, halt again. She said he had paced back and forth in this way for half an hour, and finally had gone home.

When we reached the house we found Fairfax there, his good clothes put away, his cook’s white apron tied around him, eating bread and butter and cold meat.

I sat down to scold him for not doing as I had said. When I had finished Fairfax looked at me, hesitated, and said, “If it had been out of doors, maybe I’d have tried it.” There was an expression on his thin somber face, which made me get up and go away without venturing any more comment.

As his health increased, his spirits rose somewhat. My little son was born that winter, and Fairfax was very fond of the baby, who soon developed the most extravagant fondness for his company. When spring came on, and gardening arrived, Fairfax took over a part of that work, and had a long-running feud with the woodchucks who live in the edge of the woods beyond our garden patch. It was a quaint sight to see Fairfax in his white jacket and apron, sitting outside the kitchen door, peeling potatoes, a rifle across his knees, or to see him emerge in a stealthy run from the kitchen door, gun in hand, and dart across the road to get a better sight on the little brown garden thieves. It did me good to see him stirred up enough to care about anything.

He turned out to be a great reader and worked his way through most of our library. I know you will not believe me when I tell you who his favorite author was. But I am not concerned with seeming probable, only with telling the truth. It was Thomas Hardy, whose philosophy of life fitted in exactly with Fairfax’s views and experience. He was no talker and rarely said anything to me beyond the gentle “no’m” and “yes’m” with which he received orders. But once he remarked to my husband that Thomas Hardy certainly did know what life was like. He went straight through that entire set of novels, once he had found them on the shelves, and all that winter my life was tinged with the consciousness of Fairfax sitting in the kitchen after his work was done, deep in communion with Hardy. Our visiting friends used to find the sight so curious as to be amusing. I did not find it so.

The neighbors grew very used to him, and being sociable, friendly people, with a great deal of Yankee curiosity about the rest of the world, they often tried to get Fairfax to tell about life in the south. When he went out for a stroll in the evening, they would call to him, from where they were weeding a bed in the garden, or giving the pigs their last meal, “Hello, there, Fairfax, come on in for a minute.” If they were in the yard, or on the porch, Fairfax often accepted the invitation. As we went by in the car we used to see him leaning up against the porch-railing, talking, or helping some busy woman set out her cabbage plants. But he never went indoors.

Our corner of the valley is a very cheerful one with a number of lively children to keep us from “shucking over” into middle age too soon, and the school-house is often the place where we gather for good times. The school-benches are pushed back, the lamps lighted, the fiddler tunes up, and we all dance, young and old, children and grown-ups. Fairfax was invited as a matter of course to these informal affairs, and some of the children who were very fond of the kind, gentle, silent man, used to pull at his coat, and say, “Do come on in, Mr. Hunter! Dance with me!” But Fairfax only grinned uneasily and shook his head. He used to stand outside, smoking his pipe and looking in wistfully at the brightly lighted room. As we skipped back and forth in the lively old-fashioned dances, we could see him, a dim shape outside the window, the little red glow of his pipe reflected once in a while from his dark, liquid eyes. Sometimes when the window was open, he came and leaned his elbows on the sill, nodding his head with the music, and beating time lightly with his fingers, his eyes following us about as we stepped back and forth in the complicated figures.

When we were ready to serve the “refreshments,” some of us went out into the entry-way, and Fairfax came in to help us with the uncomfortable work of digging out the ice and salt from the top of the freezers, and opening the cans. I used to say at first, “Fairfax, why don’t you go in and dance, too? Anybody can see you know just how to.” But his invariable answer, “No’m, I guess I won’t,” had in it a quality which ended by silencing me.

The older people called him Fairfax, as we did, but because he was a grown man, and a middle-aged man, they thought it not good manners for the children to call him by his first name, and taught the boys and girls to call him Mr. Hunter. We thought this perfectly natural, and none of us, entirely ignorant of Southern ways, had the slightest idea of what this meant to him.

Once a year, Fairfax took a two weeks’ vacation, and all his earnings for the year. He went off to the city, clean, and strong, and well-dressed; and he always came back without a cent, sick, and coughing, and shabby, with a strong smell of whiskey all over him. Of course, we took him severely to task for this inexcusable behavior, getting out for his benefit all the accepted axioms of conduct, prudence, ambition, self-interest, and so on, showing him how he could save his money, and put it in the bank, and be prosperous.

He always answered with his invariable soft, “Yes’m,” except on one occasion, the last year of his life, when he said somberly, with his soft, Southern accent, “I’ve got no use for money. I can’t buy _what I want_. I’m a colored man.”

We learned more about him ... a little ... that he had a sister now married to a sober, hard-working carpenter, living in Buffalo, that he had lived at home with his mother till long after he was grown up, working in the hotel, and supporting them both with his wages. That was the only time I ever saw him show emotion. His thin face suddenly twisted like a child’s, and tears shone in his eyes. “She was an awful good woman, my mother was. She had a terrible time to get along when my sister and I were little. She never had a husband to help her. My father was a white man.”

“Fairfax, why don’t you think of marrying and having a home of your own?” I said impulsively.

“To bring up children to be Jim-Crowed?” he asked, shortly.

On another occasion, when I was commenting on the singular excellence of his writing and figuring, I heard about his school taught by a northern Negro, who had gone down south as a volunteer teacher after the war. It was from him that Fairfax had learned his correct speech, without a trace of what we call the Negro dialect.

When the war in Europe came, and we decided to take the children and go to France we were confronted with the question of what to do with Fairfax. He wanted to go with us, and asked for it with more insistence than he ever showed, and I often now regret that I did not try to take him. But it seemed impossible to add to the responsibility of little children in a war-ridden country, the heavier responsibility in a country flowing with alcohol, for a man with a weakness for drink. Besides, we could not afford the extra expense.

There was no place for him in our region, where few people keep help in the kitchen. In the hurry and confusion of our preparations for departure I simply could not think of anything satisfactory to do in the United States of America for a proud sensitive colored man. The best I could devise was to find him a place with a friend, unfortunately in a city where there were plenty of saloons and plenty of race prejudice. I can’t see now why I did not think of Canada. But we knew no one in Canada.

When we separated, he kissed the children good-by, seriously, and shook the hand which I held heartily out to him. After our last words, I said, making a great effort to break through the wall of dignified reserve which his silence built around him, “Fairfax, do keep straight, won’t you?”

He looked at me with that passive, neutral look of his, which had to my eye an ironical color, and made a little gesture with his shoulders and eyebrows that might mean anything.

* * * * * * *

He drank himself to death inside six months. I read the news in a letter from his sister, the first and only letter I ever had from her. I had hurried back to the apartment in Paris one evening to be with the children during an air-raid, found the American mail arrived, and read it to the accompaniment of that anti-aircraft bombardment which was so familiar a part of the war to make the world safe for democracy. My letter from the country of democracy informed me that Fairfax had died, alone, before his sister could reach him. “He had been drinking again, I am afraid, from what they told me. I always felt so bad about Fairfax drinking, but he wouldn’t stop--he was just plain discouraged of life. He never touched a drop as long as our mother was living. He was always so sorry for our mother, and so good to her, though she was only a poor ignorant woman, who couldn’t read or write, and Fairfax was so smart. The teacher in our school wanted Fairfax to study to be a minister or a doctor, but he never would. He said he thought the more colored people try to raise themselves, the worse they get treated. He felt so bad, always, about the way colored people were treated. He said white folks wanted them to be low-down, so he was going to be. I used to tell him how wrong this was, and how the good white people weren’t like that, but he didn’t have any patience. Colored people have got to have patience. Our mother was always patient. And my husband and I manage pretty well. But Fairfax was proud. And colored people can’t be proud. I don’t believe he ever let you-all know how he liked the way the folks up your way treated him. He said their folks taught the white children to call him mister just like a white man, and that the white people used to ask him to parties and dances. He tried to go, he said, but at the door, he’d remember all the times when white people made a scene and called him a nigger and got mad if he even stood near them on the street, and looked at him that way white people do ... if you were colored you’d know what I mean. And then he just didn’t dare risk it. When he was a boy and something like that happened, it used to make him down sick so he couldn’t eat for days. And when he got up to where you live, it was too late. My husband and I had Fairfax taken to our old home town in Virginia and buried there beside our mother.”

The air-raid was over when I finished that letter. The noisy bombardment of hate and revenge was quiet. The night was as still there in France as in the graveyard in Virginia. I was very thankful to know that Fairfax was sleeping beside his mother.

We are back in Vermont now, the curtain lowered over air-raids and barrages. Everything goes on as before.

The other evening we were all down at the school-house for an entertainment. The children spoke pieces, and then we had a dance. About eleven o’clock some of us went out to the entry-room and began to serve the ice-cream. One of my neighbors said, after a while, “Do you remember how Fairfax used to get all dressed up so nice, and then always stayed around outside to watch?”

“Yes,” I remembered.

“Sometimes,” said another one of the women, “sometimes when we’re out here like this, it seems to me when I look up quick and glance out there in the dark, as though I could almost see him there now.”

After a time, some one else said, “’Twas a pity he never would come in.”

PROFESSOR PAUL MEYER

“Master of the Word.” I never could remember where I had read that phrase--perhaps as a child in an old story-book about enchanters; but I knew whom it described when I first saw Professor Meyer speaking to his class in the École des Chartes. Not in any metaphorical sense, but in the plain literal meaning of the phrase, was he Master of the Word. He made the title “Philologist” put on purple and gold.

The sallow young seminarists in their scant black gowns, keen, pale, young students who had come from Russia, Italy, Roumania, and Finland, sat motionless and intent, their eyes fixed on him unwaveringly for the two long hours of these daily lectures. Words were the living creatures in that room. They were born before our eyes in the remote childhood of the race, and swept down through the ages till there they were in our own language, issuing every day from our own lips, an ironic reminder that all the days of our lives were no more than an hour in the existence of those disembodied and deathless sounds.

From his youth the vigorous old man had transferred all his life to the world of words--and had found it an enchanted kingdom, something sure and lasting in the quicksands of human existence. From inside the walls of his safe refuge he watched the world outside suffer and despair and cry out and die. And he marveled at its folly. He himself knew none of these fitful moods. He was always of a steady, kind, and humorous cheerfulness, and always the most compelling of talkers. No impassioned orator declaiming on an emotional theme could hold more breathlessly attentive his listeners than this tall, stooping, plain old Jew, when in his rapid conversational staccato he traced out the life of a word, told the Odyssey of its wanderings in the mouths of men, so much less able to withstand death and time than this mere breath from out their mouths. He did this not with the straining effort of the orator, but as naturally as he breathed or thought. His mind was constantly revolving such cycles, and when he spoke he was but thinking aloud, always with the same zest, day after day, always alert, with never a flagging of interest, with never a moment of treacherous wonder about the value of anything. I knew him when I was passing through one of those passions of doubt which mark one’s entry into adult life, and I never could be done with marveling at him. I was grateful to him, too, for he showed the most amused sympathetic kindliness to the foreign girl, groping her way forward.

I think he was sorry for me, for any one tempted to step into human and prosaic life. He stood at the door of his ordered, settled, established life, and called to me to construct one like it, to do as he had done, to turn away from the sordid comedy of personality, and step into the blessed country of impersonal intellectual activity. Many things turned me toward his path: the great weight of his mature personality (he was over seventy then and I was twenty), my immense admiration for his learning, my interest in his subject, my intuitive dread of the guessed-at strain of human emotions. You must not think that his world was austere or rarefied. He had found there, with no penalties to pay, all the amusement, the drama, the struggle, the rewards, the entertainment, which men find in the human world, and pay for so dearly. He never knew a bored or listless moment in his life, nor did any one in his company.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, after that two-hour lecture to the seminarists, there was a half hour intermission before the next class--eight or ten advanced students--met in his oak-paneled, half-basement office, rich with precious books, to discuss with him a curious Old-French manuscript which he had discovered in the library at Cassel.

I have never in my life known anything more sparkling and stimulating than those half-hour intermissions. The old man always clapped on his hat, talking incessantly as usual, and, stretching his long legs to a stride which kept me trotting like a little dog at his side, started up the Boulevard St. Michel towards the Odéon, to the pastry-shop which calls itself “of the Medicis.” As soon as his tall form showed in the distance, and the inimitable, high, never-to-be-forgotten squeak of his voice could be heard, one of the elegant young-lady waitresses bestirred herself--for the pastry-shop was proud of its famous patron. She always had _babas au rhum_ waiting for us, as this was the only pastry Professor Meyer considered worth eating. I do not like _babas au rhum_ myself, but who was I to set up my insignificant opinion against so great a man? So I ate the wet sop docilely, considering it a small price to pay for the stories that went with it, stories that blew the walls away from around us, and spread there the rich darkness of the Middle Ages. There were stories out of medieval manuscripts as yet unattributed and unedited, heaped in the upper rooms of the Ambrosiana at Milan, of the untold riches, unclassified and unarranged of the Bodleian, which Paul Meyer described with apostolic fervor; of priceless scripts discovered in impossible places, by incredible coincidences; of years of fruitless work on an obscure passage in the Grail-cycle, suddenly cleared up because a Greek priest in Siberia had discovered a manuscript bound in with an old Bible.

Or if he were in a playful mood, the mood the waitresses adored and hoped for, he would begin juggling with the names of things about us, the trim shoes on their feet, the brooches at their throats, the ribbon in their well-kept hair; and with a pyrotechnic display of laughing erudition, would hunt those words around and around through all the languages where they had tarried for a time, back through history--the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, Late Latin, the Empire--till they ended in the long-drawn sonorous Sanscrit chant of an early Aryan dialect, which Professor Meyer rendered with a total disregard of onlookers.

After one of these flights, we came to ourselves with a start, looking around with astonishment at our everyday dress and surroundings and bodies.

Or perhaps it was a story out of his life, his long, long life, of which not a day had been lost from his work. My favorites, I remember, were the Tarascon stories. Ages and ages ago, when Paul Meyer was a very young man, one of the brilliant pioneers in the study of Old French, the municipal authorities of Tarascon employed him to come and decipher the Town records, faithfully kept from the beginning of time, but in their strange medieval scripts, with the abbreviations, conventional signs, and handwritings of the past centuries, wholly unintelligible to the modern Tarasconians. The young savant spent a whole winter there, studying and copying out these manuscripts, a first experience of the intense, bright pleasure such work was to give him all his life long. The quick-hearted southerners in the town, loving change and novelty, delighted to see the young, new face among them, welcomed him with meridional hospitality, and filled his leisure hours with the noisy, boisterous fun of Provence. He made friends there whom he never forgot, and every year after that he made the long trip to Tarascon to have a reunion with those comrades of his youth. But he lived long, much longer than the quickly-consumed southerners, and one by one, the friends of Tarascon were absent from the annual reunion. They were fewer and fewer, older and older, those men used up by the fever of living, and they fell away from the side of the vigorous man who had chosen for his own the unchanging world of the intellect. “And finally, last year,” said Professor Meyer on one occasion, “when I went back, they were all gone. Every one! I had to go to the cemetery to have a visit with them.”

As I gazed at him, astounded by the unbroken matter-of-factness of his tone, no self-pity in it, he went on, his voice brightening into enthusiasm, “So I went and had another look at the town records. Such a glorious collection of scripts. Not one known style missing!”

He regretted deeply the death of the much-loved Gaston Paris, his great colleague at the Collège de France, whose name was always linked with his in the glory of the renaissance of Old-French studies, but his lamentations were over the work unfinished, the priceless manuscripts yet unedited. When the news came of the tragic family disgrace of one of the greatest of German editors of Old-French texts, Paul Meyer was moved almost to tears. They were not of sympathy with the sorrow of the other scholar, but of exasperation that any man, especially one filled with irreplaceable knowledge of his subject, could let so ephemeral a thing as human relations distract him from the rich fields to be tilled in the kingdom of words.

During the second trial of Dreyfus, Paul Meyer was called to testify as a handwriting expert and gave his testimony in favor of Dreyfus, the evidence, he said, being unmistakable. It was at the height of the Dreyfus re-trial, when all France was throbbing with hate and suspicion like an ulcer throbbing with fever. Professor Meyer was abominably treated by the opposition, attacked in the streets, insulted, boycotted, his classes filled with jeering young men who yelled him down when he tried to speak. His bearing through this trial is one of the momentous impressions of my life. He did not resent it, he made no effort to resist it, he struck no melodramatic attitude, as did many of the fine men then fighting for justice in France. He smothered the flame out, down to the last spark by his total disregard of it. What did he care for howling fanatics in one camp or another? Nothing! He had been asked to pass judgment on a piece of handwriting and he had done it. There was nothing more to be said.