Читать книгу The Shadow - Mary White Ovington - Страница 12

Table of Contents

John Merryvale was growing old, people were beginning to say; and then would add that the world, when he should pass away, would miss an old-time gentleman. He was a tall, thin man, long of limb and deliberate of speech. The impatient northern guest who tried to hurry him with the mail could fidget to her fill without decreasing by a moment the time he chose to spend upon his task. He could not be hurried but he could easily be duped, and many of the acres that Lee Merryvale coveted, but saw in other hands, had slipped from his father's by reason of over-confidence in some speculator or old acquaintance. But, no matter how often he was imposed upon, he never lost his equanimity. The man who took advantage of him was not to be condemned; it was not his fault if he had not been born a gentleman; the overreaching tradesman was to be pitied. That he, John Merryvale, was to be pitied did not even enter his thoughts.

The Negroes of the place loved and looked up to him, and he on his part treated them as beloved children. When they were ill he doctored them; when they quarreled, he acted as judge, and, without the cost of a lawsuit, gave them more rational judgment than they would have obtained in a court. While bearing a large part of the expense of the Episcopal church under the live-oaks at the water's edge, he helped to keep open the Methodist meeting among the pines where his black children went on Sunday mornings. He looked askance at first at Ellen; and while he never grew to like her ways, believing that she put false notions of equality into the children's heads, he was just and admitted that she had improved the morals of the place. For himself, he should always look upon the Negro as the white man's charge and make every allowance for his wrong-doing. What would be a sin in a white man, in a Negro would be only the misdemeanor of a child. Once, when one of his Negro tenants murdered a black neighbor in a drunken fight, he urged the judge to show clemency, to make the sentence lenient. "Remember," he admonished, "this man is black, and it is not one-tenth as bad for a black man to do a deed like this as for a white one." This attitude did not prevent his treating with respect the Negroes, men and women, whom he knew both at his own place and up and down the river, and they in their turn loved to drop a word with him, and looked with affectionate regard upon the tall figure in its well-worn cutaway coat, its straw hat with the black ribbon, its big, comfortable collar. One might see him of a Sunday walking among the pines, inquiring for Lucindy or Rose or Ebenezer, as the case might be.

On this Sunday afternoon, while Hertha sat with her mother on the steps, John Merryvale was walking with his son in the orange grove. They had been examining the trees when two colored lads, dressed in their Sunday best, bowed in crossing their path. Lee nodded carelessly to the young men, but his father raised his hat. The son noticed it, and spoke, half jestingly, of this act of courtesy.

"There isn't another man in the state would do that, Father. A nigger's a nigger to the folk I know about here."

"I remember," his father answered, "the retort Jefferson Davis gave when questioned for returning the bow of a black man. 'I can't afford,' he said, 'to be less of a gentleman than he.'"

Young Merryvale was silent, wondering whether the day had passed of both the old-time white and colored gentleman.

"This is a beautiful tree," his father said, stopping to look with pride at a plant filled with fast ripening fruit. "It's bearing well this season."

"Yes."

"I cannot tell you, Son, how happy I am that you are redeeming these old acres."

"So you're converted," Lee said, with a bright smile.

"Yes, entirely. And the best of it is the realization that you are busy in your old home and do not stay in it merely for Patty and me."

"Oh, I couldn't keep away! This place grips me. It's well enough to go to New York for a month to study the market, but this is the land of my choice, darkies and all. I wish they could do a good day's work; but, then, I don't pay them for a day's work, white man's reckoning."

A few steps further brought them to the tree where he and Hertha had first played together.

The older man stopped again. "Why, here's a blossom at the end of a bough," he said.

"Yes, but don't pick it!" Lee seized his father's arm. "I've a fancy to keep it there—for good luck," he added, somewhat lamely.

Over the blossom, the previous morning, Hertha had bent like a happy child, blowing upon the petals and calling on them to open.

"Lee!" The young man started at his father's voice; there was in it a note of admonition, almost of severity. But there was nothing of severity in the words that followed:

"I wish I could express to you my happiness that this old home that my father and my father's father loved and strove to make beautiful will now be guarded by you. And you will do better with it than we did."

"Oh, I don't know about that," Lee said.

"Yes, this is a mere fragment that comes into your hands."

"A pretty good fragment, I think."

"Only a fragment. The acres stretching back through the pines should be yours, and other acres by the river's edge. I did not know how to use the place aright, but you will be wiser than I."

"Well, if I am wiser about such things," Lee admitted, "it's because the world is wiser to-day than when you took over the place. People have learned a heap of science since then."

John Merryvale did not heed this remark, but, turning his gaze from his son, looked away down the river. "I could not give you the heritage in land which should be yours," he said gravely, "but I hope I have given you a heritage of kindly relationship to those about you, of friendliness and honorable dealing."

"Indeed," Lee answered, "I know how you are loved and honored."

"And you, too, shall be honored by all on this old estate down to the humblest colored child. It is a great consolation to me," he went on, still looking away from his son and out over the water, "that the rights of the poorest black girl have been respected from my father's father's day through my own. There are no white faces among these cabins to tell of our passion and our shame. I think of this sometimes when I see that young servant of your aunt's. In her beautiful countenance is the sin and the disgrace of the Southern gentleman."

"Don't you believe," Lee answered sharply, "that her mother thought she was honored?"

"That's as it may be, but she was not honored, and her child was left to the chance care of a black woman."

"He was a beast who did that!"

The father turned at this heated speech to see his son, face flushed, anger in his eyes.

"If he took a responsibility, he had no right later to dodge it."

Lee spoke with vehemence. He had told Hertha that he had ceased to think, but in reality he was thinking, every hour of the day, of the thing that he was doing.

"Whoever started the damned business going," he went on, with an attempt at a laugh, "got America into a frightful mess. But some one did start it, and here they are, women—well, women such as you speak of, with all the instincts and the beauty of the white race. Don't you believe a woman like that would be happier under the protection of a white man who loved her than if she took up with some coarse fellow as black as her shoes?"

"No," John Merry vale answered, "the life of such a woman is the loneliest life in the world. She may not enter the white world and the black world casts her off."

"Aren't you mistaken?" The question came quickly, with an undertone of anxiety. "It seems to me that the black race must understand that there's nothing for it but to get whiter."

"There's nothing for it but to get blacker, Son. All, black and white, are learning to know this. Within its own circle it may build up a civilization that shall be a humble imitation of the civilization of the white race, a race that has had a start of thousands of years. We must be patient, helping when we can, not hindering."

Lee scanned his father's face, but could see nothing to show that he was thinking of any present issue; rather he was striving to express his belief on a vexed question that would trouble this country long after he was gone. Nor did he glance at his listener, but stood, a tall, thin figure in his long black coat, kindly, serious.

"It is a great problem, that of the two races," he continued musingly, "a problem that the South alone can solve, since we know the black man, his virtues and his limitations. He has come to us in his trouble and we have helped and advised him. That is as it should be, but increasingly he will have to live without our surveillance. For after all, no man is fit to be the master of another; and not even the gentlemen of the South were wise enough to be entrusted with the lives of other men. My father fought to perpetuate the peculiar institution of slavery, and as a boy I put a gun on my shoulder and went out in the last year of the war. We thought that we were right, but we know now that we were mistaken."

"Yes."

"Sometimes I am afraid that as the country develops, as industry increases, the friendly relations between the whites and the blacks will wholly cease, and each will go his way, regardless of the other. But that will never happen while you are here, I feel sure."

"Oh, no," Lee answered cheerfully, glad of the turn the conversation had taken, "I like the darkies all right."

"That is not enough." John Merryvale turned and for the first time looked straight into his son's face. "Men have stolen my acres from me, but I have stolen from no man. I have tried to do no one an injustice, honoring the least of His children. I have little to give you in money and in acres; but I can give you this: the assurance that I have wittingly wronged no man or woman. And I shall believe that when you stand here, your hair gray, moving with slow feet, you will be able to say to your son, 'I have wittingly wronged no man or woman.'

"It's getting late," he concluded, turning to leave. "I'll go to the house to see if your aunt is needing me."

Lee stood alone for some minutes under the orange tree. He ran his hand caressingly along the trunk as though he were touching something dear and precious. Then, with sober face, as slowly as his father, he walked through the twilight to the great house.