Chapter XXVII: The Philosophy of Jack Towns

Boyd Westover had the excellent mental habit of attending carefully to more than one thing at a time.

Just now he had the election on his hands, and with it some problems of personal dignity and repute that required his closest attention. But he also had Wanalah plantation to look after, and in view of his long absence he felt that home affairs were pressing.

Accordingly he was up before the dawn, on the morning after his arrival, and for half an hour after dawn he waited, not at all patiently, for the coming of his overseer, to whom he had sent a summons over night to be with him "at the crack of day." Then instead of waiting longer, he mounted his horse and rode away on a tour of inspection.

It was well after sunrise when he returned to find the overseer hitching his horse to the rack.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Wilkinson," he said; "I had hoped to see you this morning."

"I'm sorry, sir, but Î was very tired last night."

"So was I. I had walked all through the night before. Never mind that now. I wanted to see you at dawn. The sun is now half an hour high. That means that you have wasted an hour and a half of my time, and my time is just now precious."

"I'm very sorry, sir--"

"Don't bother to apologize. I can't waste any further time listening to excuses. Why are you seeding the Gaston field in wheat? I directed otherwise, you know."

"Well, sir, the fall has given us good weather, and we can get in that two hundred acres as well as not."

"But how about harvesting it?"

"Oh, I'll manage that."

"Yes, by making the negroes work by moonlight, as you did last summer to the everlasting shame of Wanalah plantation, and just as you made too many hogsheads of tobacco and too many barrels of corn to the hand. I have told you before and I tell you now that I will not have the hands over-worked. Is the Gaston field seeded?"

"No, sir. We begin on that to-day."

"Don't seed it. Let it lie fallow."

"But my gracious, Mr. Westover,--"

"Never mind about your gracious. I tell you not to seed that field. And another thing: You planted seven hundred thousand hills of tobacco last year. I want you to write it up in your hat that four hundred thousand is Wanalah's limit. I want you to understand that this plantation is not run for money. If it supports itself, giving a decent living to the whites and blacks on it, I shall be satisfied. If it doesn't quite do that, I'll find a way in which to make up the deficiency. Now I want you to give all the negroes on the plantation a whole holiday to-morrow. I understand there's to be a big picnic with all-day preaching over at Mount Moriah church, and I want everybody on the plantation to attend it. By the way, Bob!" calling to a passing negro, "go at once and tell old Joe I want him to kill two sheep--good fat ones--three shoats and four turkeys this morning; tell him to hang 'em in the ice house as soon as they're dressed, and send them over to Mount Moriah early to-morrow morning. Do you hear?"

"Yassir!" responded Bob, his mouth already watering for the share he expected to eat of the good things thus promised.

"And, Bob, tell Uncle Joe to take them over there himself and say that Mas' Boyd Westover hopes the folks will have a good time and get as much religion as they need."

"But, Boyd," said Jack Towns, who had sleepily strolled into the porch, "don't you think--"

"No, decidedly not, Jack. You see Wanalah is the plantation nearest to Mount Moriah, and it's the natural base of supplies for a meeting there. If I don't furnish the provender they'll steal it out of my pasture, my pig pen and my turkey yard. I very much prefer that they should get the things honestly, and it costs me no more."

Then, returning to business, he said to the overseer:

"You understand the general spirit of my instructions, Mr. Wilkinson, and I beg you to bear it in mind. I'll give more specific orders from time to time, as they are needed."

"But what about me?" answered the overseer. "I've got a reputation for makin' more tobacco to the hand an' more wheat to the acre an' more corn on top o' that than any other man as oversees a plantation anywheres for forty mile around here."

"Well, what of it?"

"Well, it's this a ways. I ain't a-goin' to lose a reputation I prides myself on. Ef you don't want your niggers worked fer all they's worth, perhaps you'd better look out fer another overseer."

Westover flushed angrily, more at the tone than at the words, and answered instantly:

"Perhaps I had. At any rate I will. I shall not renew my contract with you for another year."

The Virginians were very tolerant of insolence on the part of a negro. Usually they treated it as badinage, quite harmlessly and humorously meant. But insolence on the part of an overseer was always taken seriously and instantly resented. The overseers constituted a pariah class, for whom there was tolerance only so long as they "minded their manners."

As the overseer lingered in hope of some modification of the sentence he had brought upon himself, Westover impatiently turned upon him, saying:

"I think I have nothing more to say to you, Mr. Wilkinson, and I wish to talk with Mr. Towns. You may go now."

As the man walked down the road that led to the outer gates, he muttered:

"I'll git back at him for that. He's a sneak-in' abolitionist. I'll be over at Fighting Creek to-morrow, seein's he's made it a holiday here."

"Now I want to talk with you, Jack," said Westover when the man was well out of earshot.

"So I understood you to say to Mr. Wilkinson; and you may go on and talk to me till the cows come home, if it amuses you to do so, but if you expect me to talk back in any rational way, you've simply got to wait till after breakfast. When I've had two cups of coffee, the best part of a roe herring, three or four slices of cold ham, a wedge or two of hot light bread, some beaten biscuit, and one of your belated cantaloupes, I shall begin to appreciate the fact that I have a brain. Till then I decline to consider myself a rational being. Go on and talk, if you want to."

"I will," answered Westover, passing into the house. To one of the dining-room servants he said:

"Serve a pot of coffee to Mr. Towns immediately, do you hear? Is it ready?"

Half a minute later Cilla appeared in the porch bearing a tray with coffee and its accessories daintily arranged upon a napkin. The servants at Wanalah had not yet lost their memory of the training they had received in youth.

"There," said Westover, "saturate your soul and stimulate your system with coffee. And by the way, there's a frost-bitten tomato sliced up to deceive your eyes and your appetite. How long before breakfast, Cilla?"

"It's a-bein' brung in now," answered the serving girl, "all but the hot buckwheat cakes, an' them'll come a little later."

It was the custom of the Virginians to talk freely at table, paying no heed whatever to the presence of their servitors. Accordingly, as soon as Jack Towns began to discover his brains again, under the influence of a breakfast that might have made a chatterer of the Sphinx itself, the two talked of plans.

"My first endeavor," said Westover, "will be to compel Colonel Conway to declare himself. To that end, as soon as breakfast is done, I shall send him a letter that will require a response of some sort. You see, Jack, his attitude is far more hurtful to me than the most aggressive antagonism on his part could be. Everybody knows that the Westovers and the Conways have been the most intimate friends possible throughout generations past. If he and I had had a quarrel, everybody would understand. But we have had no quarrel, and so nobody understands and everybody wonders. If he believes I was guilty down there in Richmond--"

"He can't think that, unless he's an idiot of extraordinary capacity for the lunatic misinterpretation of facts," interrupted Towns.

"Perhaps not. Still, I remember hearing a 'Pennsylvania Dutch' magistrate declare from the bench that 'Nodings is possible mit Gott,' and so it may be that, he believes that. If so he has a perfect right to express his belief. All I ask is that he shall say what it is he has against me."

"Stuff and nonsense! Rot and rubbish! Scammony and gamboge! Moonlight, music, love and flowers! Transcendentalism and green cheese!" exclaimed Jack Towns, multiplying words as a man of oratorical habit is apt to do. "You know perfectly well that he believes nothing of the sort. Recall our conversation of last night."

"I remember it perfectly, and that is why I'm going to write to Colonel Conway this morning. It may open the way to an explanation."

"It may, of course. But if I were in your place I'd write to Margaret instead."

"How can I? I have written to her again and again, and she has not answered. Self-respect forbids me--"

"I quite understand. It was self-respect that caused a cat to lose an eye in a scrimmage rather than explain to the other cat that the fence he was sitting on was the personal property of his own master. Never mind. If you won't write to Margaret, write to her father by all means. It may provoke a crisis of some sort, and that is the one thing to be desired just now."

But Boyd Westover was not destined to send that letter. He toiled over it half the day and more. He wrote it in forty different forms. He used up more letter paper than had been consumed at Wanalah during a year or more past, but he could not get the thing into a shape that would do. Finally he threw down his pen and turning to Jack Towns said:

"The trouble is, Jack, that when I try to formulate my complaint there isn't a thing to challenge or question. Colonel Conway has not been here to call upon me, but I cannot decently complain of that. He has refused to join with others in nominating me, but that too was his right and I cannot question it. The whole thing is so negative that really there isn't a point I can mention as a ground of complaint."

"Yes? Well--"

"Yes, well, what? Why don't you say something?"

"I will. I'll say that you're irritable to-day. You showed it your confab with your overseer, who is a very worthy man with an exaggerated notion of the work a field hand ought to do in a day. You showed it at breakfast, when you complained because the buckwheat cakes didn't make their appearance precisely on time. Is there anything else you'd like me to say?"

"Yes. What am I to do in this matter, by way of bringing about a tolerable situation?"

"Why, nothing, of course. I could have told you that this morning, but you wouldn't have believed it then. Now that you've exhausted your literary capacity and most of the Wanalah stationery in a futile effort to do the impossible, it may be worth my while to say to you that in a case of this kind there is nothing you can do except await events with due respect for your own dignity. Shut up your desk and send for some horses. Let's have a gallop before dinner time. And by the way, I'd like to ride that young iron gray mare you've got in your stables. She impresses me so favorably that I should buy her if she belonged to anybody who would sell."

"Why, when did you inspect her, Jack? I hadn't a thought--"

"I know you hadn't, but while you've been busy at your desk, trying to accomplish the impossible, I've been down to the stables and had the mare out for inspection. She's a beauty and, so far as I know the points of a horse, she has all of them that are worth while. She's a Red Eye of course?"

"Yes--Red Eye and Nina. She's Nina's own colt. I'll tell you what I'll do, Jack. If you'll stay with me, making Wanalah your home till this confounded election is over,--just to keep me sane, you know,--the mare shall be yours, as a souvenir of your safe return from the Rocky Mountains."

"Done!" exclaimed Jack. "But if I have to club you by way of keeping you sane, you won't too greatly mind, will you?"

"Not in the least. It's the clubbing I want. Really, Jack, I often think I haven't quite grown up and never shall. I have my full complement of inches, of course, and I can be dignified upon occasion, but when it comes to emotional things, somehow--"

"Somehow you're nothing but a romantic, sentimental boy. I've heard you quote Keats and Shelley when an arithmetic or a geography would have been much more to the purpose. I was born that way myself, and so you see I understand your malady and sympathize with you, but as for myself I've worked a complete cure."

"How did you manage it, Jack?" asked Westover in amused anticipation.

"Oh, easily enough. I have cultivated catholicity of taste in the matter of girls. You know all sentimentality in men has its ultimate origin in their attitude toward women. Now in sentiment, as in everything else, moderation is desirable and excess is destructive. Realizing that fact I have cultivated moderation, by falling madly in love with every pretty young woman I have met, and with some pretty old ones also. But as one encounters a rapid succession of pretty young women, the habit of falling in love with each of them is a securely protective agency. You see I never have time to become idiotically in love with one young woman before meeting another who knocks all that out of my head. To-day's girl rescues me from yesterday's. It's a case of one nail driving out another."

"You are the worst cynic I ever knew, Jack."

"Perhaps I am. But I see the boys are here with the horses. Let's be off and away, forgetting philosophy and girls and pessimism and moonlight and molasses candy for a time at least. Is that a quarter of shoat Cilla is toting from the ice-house? In verity it is, and a decent respect for its succulent attractiveness should prompt us to arm ourselves and meet it with an appetite. So here goes for a good hard gallop, with stiff fences by the way."