TAR AND FEATHERS

TAR AND FEATHERS

An Entrancing Post-War Romance
in which the

KU KLUX KLAN

Its Principles and Activities
Figure Prominently

Based on Fact

By VICTOR RUBIN

THIRD EDITION

1924
UNIVERSAL PRESS
409, 163 Washington Street
Chicago, Ill.

COPYRIGHT 1923 BY VICTOR RUBIN

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Craftsmen Printers, Chicago

FOREWORD

Let us reason together. What proof have we that the people of one race are better or to be considered with favor above those of another?

It is true there was a time when the word “stranger” or its equivalent in other languages than the English had the same meaning as enemy. Each savage tribe, the early ancestors of all civilized peoples, for want of knowledge and experience, considered all other tribes enemies, and even as civilization grew and boundaries began to be established an imaginary line made enemies of those dwelling on opposite sides of rivers and channels. With more reason, seas came to be recognized as territorial limitations, and it has required centuries to break down notions of enmity and antagonism between dwellers of different localities. Indeed, it can hardly be contended that this spirit of enmity and antagonism has been overcome, when we see not only peoples of different countries, but those of a common citizenship harboring animosities sometimes approaching the malignant, and giving expression both in speech and action to their hatred for those who differ from them in race or color or creed.

Victor Rubin in the following pages deals with this question of racial and religious antagonism in a fascinating but most effective manner. Perhaps no one will be able to speak more impressively of Mr. Rubin’s book “Tar and Feathers” and at the same time give an intimation of its contents than has the great scholar and traveler, Israel Zangwill:

“Mr. Victor Rubin, with the courage of youth, faces in his first novel the full blast of the actual. What Mr. C. E. Montague’s fine book, Disenchantment, expresses for the British soldier, Mr. Rubin’s Tar and Feathers expresses for the American. All America—of all creeds and races—went to the great war as one man, as depicted in Tar and Feathers. The young Southerner, Hamilton, has actually been dragged from death on the battlefield by a negro and brought back to life and health by a Jewish surgeon. Yet the cannon have scarcely cooled before the old racial and religious prejudices reassert themselves. They resurge even in Hamilton, who cannot bear to touch the colored hand of his saviour. It is his struggle with them, and his final mastery over them, that constitutes the theme of Mr. Rubin’s novel. When Hamilton goes back to his narrow Southern home, he even under the pressure of the milieu becomes a paid agent of the Ku Klux Klan with its crusade against Catholics, Jews and Negroes.” (Mr. Rubin prudently calls it the “Trick, Track Tribe.”)

That the book possesses a broad appeal is indicated by many other commendations of able readers as expressed in scores of periodicals, a few of which we quote:

“A cogent, common-sense appeal for liberality of view, for a realization that all humanity is intrinsically similar, that the great teachers of mankind all breathed love and unity ... a book which any man concerned with the interesting presentment of truth would do well to read.”—William R. Langfeld in the Philadelphia Sunday Record.

“Mr. Rubin has succeeded in analyzing the psychological effects of the war upon those who participated in it as few writers have done. He has depicted the ethical and moral metamorphosis with commendable accuracy and understanding.”—Boston Transcript.

“Tar and Feathers is noteworthy in that it protests vigorously against prejudice of every variety and exposes the narrowness and the danger of organizations making for racial antagonism. The author writes with sincerity and conviction and is worth heeding if only for the vehemence with which he attacks the forces of snobbery and prejudice.”—New York Evening Post.

“While the armistice bells are ringing and a war-ridden people all over the world are shaking themselves loose from the habits of four long years, the novel opens in a crowded ward of the American hospital, Rue de Saint Jacques, Paris. Robert Hamilton, a rich and cultured American from Georgia; McCall from Chicago, in civilian life a reporter on the Times (incidentally of the Catholic faith); Dr. Levin, the great American surgeon, and Williams, a negro graduate of Harvard, are here introduced. Of course, there is also Meadows, the nurse—Dorothy Meadows, who played around with the social service crowd at Madison, and graduated there some time “before the war.” Back in Georgia is Margaret, a typical “home girl” in Corinth. These are the leading characters out of whose reactions Mr. Rubin has evolved a presentable story upon which to drape his theories.

“The scene shifts back to Corinth, where young Hamilton, is at once entangled in the affairs of the Ku Klux Klan, tho he doesn’t know in the least what it’s all about. Sent on a mission of propaganda to Chicago, Hamilton renews his friendship with McCall and Levin. The story of the part they play is a sermon to be hugged to the hearts of all 100 per cent Americans. Then, of course, there is Dorothy ... while back in Corinth is Margaret ... staying at home.

“Mr. Rubin makes adroit use of the Chicago race riots of 1919 and otherwise molds his men and his times into a tale which moves with rapidity and vigor.”—Margaret Evans in the Chicago Evening Post.

For ourselves, we have read nothing on the perennial subject of intolerance so much to the point and so well calculated to allay prejudice and make for good citizenship as “Tar and Feathers.”

THE PUBLISHERS.

Tar and Feathers

I

Monday, November 11, 1918, in Paris. A world suddenly gone mad. Shouting and dancing in the streets. Blaring of bands in the public squares. Booming of cannon along the Seine. Ringing of bells. Swirling masses of human beings along the boulevards and bridges and upon the steps of public buildings. Color. Autumn trees aflame with gold. Men and women blown about like autumn leaves. A sea of people, tossing sprays of color—red caps of officers, sky-blue uniforms, yellow hair of dancing women, ribbons, waving flags and banners. Spots of black—women in mourning, laughing and crying at once, singing through tears. Shouts of vive la France! Singing of the Marseillaise. Incoherent laughter and singing and cries, forming a rhythmic pattern like the pulsing of sea waves.

Peace at last. The world made safe for democracy—for France, for England, for Italy, for Belgium, for America—for the smallest nations of the earth—for white men, for yellow men, for black men.

At the Chamber of Deputies, Premier Clemenceau, faultlessly attired and gloved, tells the French people that the greatest war of all time has come to an end—Clemenceau, who nearly fifty years before as a member of this same assembly, voted against surrender to Germany. As his proud, clear voice rings out, the guns of victory roar a distant accompaniment. Wild applause greets his reading of the terms of the armistice, especially marked at those paragraphs dealing with the return of the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, the abandonment of submarine warfare, the occupation of the left bank of the Rhine.

For once there are no political factions in the Chamber. For once lefts, rights and centers applaud and cheer as one. Even the Socialists are among those to surround the Premier as he leaves the platform, and congratulate him. Some one begins the Marseillaise. Immediately applause, laughter and cheering are hushed. The Deputies stand erect and sing in unison the hymn of the French Republic. The vast crowd which has been thronging the galleries and corridors takes it up. It is carried to the hundreds massed on the stairs and perched on the railings. From group to group, as far as one can see, the song is carried along the current of exultant humanity. Men and women fox-trotting in the public squares and dancing in circles pause to sing. Then back to their dancing. Another circle farther on takes up the hymn. And so it goes, from the House of Deputies to the boulevards, and along the boulevards to the bridges. From the Bastille to the Madeleine, down Rue Royale to the great corral of captured German guns in the Place de la Concorde, up the Champs Elysées, on and on and on. It is Paris triumphant.

Other nations take up the Marseillaise, sing it and their national anthems—the Star-Spangled Banner, God Save the King.

British soldiers on leave begin a procession and go shouting and singing down the boulevard. Columns of Americans, French and Belgians follow their example. Women throw themselves into the arms of the marching soldiers, kiss them and are off again. At the Elysée Palace the procession halts just long enough to sing the national anthems of the allied nations, in succession, and marches on.

Crowded motor busses and other vehicles find every highway blocked, and the passengers dismount and join the throngs. Men and women who have never met before join hands, embrace, kiss, dance and sing. Every public square, the street before every outdoor café, the great hall of St. Lazarre station—yesterday the receiving station of the wounded—become dance halls.

On the steps of L’Opera a Scotch band is blaring. It is one of a hundred bands playing simultaneously.

There is a deluge of wine. Countless bottles are uncorked or impatiently cracked open at the cafés. Men and women dart down the streets brandishing bottles and sharing their contents with others. American soldiers forget the regulation against liquor.

They forget another regulation—General Order 40, forbidding colored men to talk to French women. The French have not learned to draw the color line. French midinettes and society women join hands with the colored men who have saved France, as freely as with the whites. An aristocratic Parisienne embraces an Alabama negro, while the latter grins good-naturedly, and the celebrators form a circle about the two.

“They’d sure lynch him for that,” sneers another Alabama soldier, white, with a scowl, as he leans tipsily against the railing of La Madeleine. It is the one note of discord in the otherwise perfect harmony of the moment.

“I say,” his voice rises petulantly, “they’d lynch him—” But the men in uniform about him are English, French, Italian. Can’t explain a thing like that to Tommies, Frog-eaters or Wops. Probably wouldn’t know what lynching meant anyway. And they treated niggers like white people.

But he forgets his resentment when a girl with dancing black eyes grasps his hand and that of one of his French colleagues and begins dancing down the street with them.

Out of the gathering twilight, stars of light suddenly flare—electric lights, search-lights, gas lights, lanterns. Paris, which has lived in darkness for four years, suddenly bursts into an orgy of colored lights—glitters like an enchanted city.

Into the city of lights and shadows, the sea of exultant humanity, they drift. They are part of the city, of the world suddenly grown mad with joy. Throughout France other men and women are celebrating like this. In England, in America, in Italy, in Belgium. Peace. Victory. The end of Tyranny. Freedom for all!

II

Of all this, Robert Hamilton, first lieutenant of infantry, was unaware.

In a crowded ward of the American hospital, on Rue de Saint Jacques, he was just emerging from ether. High explosive had shattered one of his ribs and had come within an ace of sending the jagged bone into his heart. A skilful surgeon had cut away bits of bone, substituted a plate of silver and stitched the skin back again. Of this also, Hamilton, of course, knew nothing. His last memory was of leading a wave toward a trench. Running ahead of the wave, running at a dog trot, with a rifle held at high port across his body, running through mud and shell holes, running into a grotesquely lighted night, with lights and rockets that screamed overhead and exaggerated every irregularity of the ground, that sent ghastly shadows staggering across the field and outlined the opposing trenches. Running, still running.

In the back of Hamilton’s brain something burned—a light, a flame, a pain, an idea. It was all that lived of that complex being—Hamilton. It was all that lived of his hopes and fears, his loves and prejudices, his habits and thoughts. A childhood in Corinth, a youth at prep school, four years of training at Harvard, generations of culture, all lay concentrated in a little feeble flame that was flickering, flickering.

The flame grew outward and shattered into other flames. The light expanded, throbbing. The pain grew sharper. Hamilton was beginning to think. Before he had simply been conscious of his existence.

Now he was running forward again through the grotesquely lighted field of battle. Running, running, with rockets and Verey lights and flames forming a pattern in his brain.

Then sounds throbbing through his consciousness—forming another pattern. Cries, shouts, the booming of cannon, the whirring of shells and unseen wings, singing.

Then his brain reeling around.

Flames searing his breast.

Hamilton’s eyes fluttered open to a white ceiling. He became aware of a sickeningly sweetish odor of ether. His eyes closed. He was back in the gray world, with its weird, screaming lights. Running, running. He was falling, with bayonets flashing out of the shadows and tearing at his chest.

“Get ’em! Get ’em! God! They got me. Sergeant!”

His eyes fluttered open again. Eyes were resting on his bewilderingly.

“What? Where am I?”

Soft hands were patting him.

“Where are you, sergeant? All right, bombers! Get ’em! Get ’em! Damn!”

Hamilton was conscious. The pain had concentrated in a single place in his chest. He saw a surgeon and a nurse in white bending over him. He knew that he was in a hospital. He heard the nurse’s low voice consoling him:

“You’re all right, now. A few days and you’ll be sitting up.”

The surgeon was giving her instructions. Then he was moving away to the next bed. Hamilton was noticing the long room, crowded with white beds and the orderlies hurrying about. Through the long row of tall windows the bright autumn sun was shining.

“What’s the noise?”

“The armistice’s been signed.”

“What?”

“The war’s over!” The nurse was patting his forehead.

“What? The war—over?” He was struggling vainly to get up, his will sending the blood into his emaciated muscles and tensing them. For a moment his eyes, glancing through the window to the world outside—saw the sea of frenzied men and women, dancing, singing, laughing, weeping, shouting. Then he sank back again to his pillow, suddenly white, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“War’s over! War’s over!” he repeated in a choked voice.

His brain whirled with emotions. Joy that the war was over, that danger and hardships were at an end, that he would be able to return home—home and Margaret. Somewhere was a faint shadow of regret that the war had not lasted long enough for him to have won his captaincy. His grandfather had been a captain in the Confederate army. Two ancestors had been captains in Washington’s army. Hamilton had been brought up in the fighting tradition and in the officer tradition. And he had been recommended for promotion by his battalion commander.

Hamilton’s eyes swept the room. Several of the other patients were standing at the windows, looking down upon the crowded streets. Others were sitting up in bed or in armchairs. The rest were lying back, like himself, evidently too ill to sit up. He turned his head and watched the faces. On the next bed lay a bundle of bandages. It was moving slowly. Hamilton watched fascinatedly. He caught a glimpse of his face, and turned even paler. Then his face flushed angrily.

“Nurse, nurse!” His voice rose shrilly. “There’s a skunk in here.”

“What?”

“A skunk! Look over there! In that next bed.”

With strength borne of rage, Hamilton half sat up and pointed a gaunt finger at the bandaged figure in the next bed.

“What’s that damn nigger doing here?”

Miss Meadows’ lips smiled, but there was an angry flash in her brown eyes.

“The negro ward was filled and—”

“Why didn’t you put him in the hall, in the basement, anywhere?”

The lips still smiled.

“And we thought you wouldn’t mind if we put him next to you because—”

Hamilton was silent with rage.

“Because he was the man who saved your life.”

III

When Dr. Levin returned later that day to change the dressing, he found Hamilton still asleep. He was also asleep the next day; but the third time, Dr. Levin found him awake, his dark eyes fluttering restlessly about the ward, like caged birds.

Hamilton, Dr. Levin decided, might be twenty-five or twenty-six, an athlete and a person of social position—analyzing people who came under his observation was one of the surgeon’s hobbies. Weeks of unconsciousness had left Hamilton pale and weak, but there was an appearance of strength in his restless eyes and firm, ambitious lips. His nose was slightly arched and the bridge at the highest point a trifle thick as though it had once been broken; his jaws broad, but tapering to a pointed cynical chin; his brow high and narrow; his eyebrows thick without being shaggy—one of them was scarred. A compromise between the intellectual and the physical, Levin thought. He might have made the Harvard football team or Phi Beta Kappa, depending on his inclinations.

As a matter of fact, Hamilton had not made Phi Beta Kappa, although he had come comfortably near it, and had made the football team—trying out for it only on the insistence of a physical training instructor after he had watched Hamilton for a few minutes on the wrestling mat.

Hamilton believed thoroughly in the old Greek ideal of a sound mind in a sound body, but he held no exaggerated idea of the importance of his ability to tuck a leather ball under his arm and hammer his way through a line of opposing men. He burned no incense at the altar of his egoism as he had seen so many other football heroes do and he expected no tribute. He enjoyed the game for its own sake—the nervous expectation, the united purpose to win, the quick strategy, the unexpected opposition, the physical clash, the tug and strain of muscles, the smell of keen autumn air and of blood and leather. But football was only a game—only part of his carefully planned scheme of education. It helped provide the sound body.

His studies were the studies that a gentleman of leisure of the old school might select for his son, with a few allowances for modern standards. He had pursued the study of Greek, for instance, only through Homer and of Latin through Horace. He had taken the minimum science requirement, a single year of physics, and had then gone in for contemporary literature and history. He had chosen French for his foreign language. These studies he had sprinkled with a few courses here and there in fine arts, psychology and philosophy. Some were admittedly cinch courses. He applied himself to these with reasonable zeal, without, at the same time, endangering his social position by being mistaken for a grind. He was giving himself a foundation not so much for the establishment of a career, but for the enjoyment of life.

As the son and heir of Robert E. Hamilton, owner of extensive cotton plantations, cotton mills and hardwood forests in Georgia, Robert, jr., had no particular need to establish a career, and, although literature attracted him, he preferred to enjoy rather than to try to produce it.

“There are too many writers already,” Hamilton would say. “What we need are more persons who can distinguish between good and bad writing. We need a larger dilettante class, for the sake of the writers themselves, and as I have no real inspiration I might as well belong to the dilettantes.”

This might have been either a streak of laziness or of candor. Or again it might have been only the result of his peculiar conception of aristocracy.

Hamilton was aristocratic as only a thorough Democrat can be—that is a Southern Democrat. And his ideas came by heredity. He believed, first, in the absolute supremacy of the white race, as distinguished from the colored races; second, of the Anglo-Saxon as distinguished from the rest of the Caucasian race; third, of the residents south of the Mason and Dixon line, as distinguished from the rest of the Anglo-Saxons; and fourth, of the Hamiltons. Although he no longer attended church regularly, he was a firm believer in God—a deity not unlike the oil paintings of the ancestral Hamilton, who had received the grant from Oglethorpe—only infinitely more powerful and grand. Hamilton’s God was a god of the cotton plantations and the mills, although Hamilton himself would have been the first person to deny it. His voice was heard in the thunder and His rain made the cotton plants to grow. His hand could be seen ruling the waters and turning the wheels of the cotton mills. His anger flashed in the lightning and was seen in the uprisings of white men to stamp out transgressions of His law.

Yet it was a just God and a beneficent one; for though it had been God who had created the different races and classes and who had destined some to rule and others to be ruled, He gave to all alike the beauty of sunsets and sunrises, of misty mountain peaks, of majestic expanses of ocean, of flowers and forests. And He allowed the rain to fall alike on the highest white man in His caste, and upon the lowliest black.

At college Hamilton’s conceptions had broadened sufficiently for him to admit that all of God’s people were not concentrated south of the Mason-Dixon line—though they might be more thickly settled there.

His first contact with theories of evolution advanced fifty years ago, but new to him, for a time threatened to shake his belief in the god of the clan, but eventually he absorbed the new teachings and catalogued them as part of the inscrutable plan, the mysterious ways in which God moved His wonders to perform.

All this sounds very ponderous for a young man at the threshold of life. As a matter of fact, these concepts played but a small part in his actual life. He was fond of outdoor sports, tennis and golf, had gone on several fishing trips in northern Maine with a Harvard chum, and was a fair horseman. He had belonged to an exclusive club at Harvard and held a membership in the best club in Corinth. He attended all the dances in his set, sometimes led a cotillion, flirted lightly with the belles, took them motoring, was the life of house-parties and had a reputation as one of the keenest hands at poker in Georgia.

He drank like a gentleman and had an utter contempt for anyone who couldn’t. Women liked him naturally, because he was tall and athletic, conversed interestingly and could make love—of the mock variety—delightfully. But he had never carried his mild philanderings to the dangerous stage—far less violated the code that holds a woman’s honor inviolate—in his own set.

Robert was preparing to succeed his father in the control of the Hamilton interests gradually. But neither father nor son had any illusions about the inherent value or nobility of learning the business from the bottom. Father and son planned that when the time came for the younger man to step into control that a competent staff should continue to attend to all the details of the Hamilton enterprises, leaving to the son only the outlining of broad policies. This arrangement would leave Hamilton free to live his own life, according to his own theories and untrammeled by business cares.

Hamilton was living in a New York apartment, learning the details of the distribution of cotton from the New York office, and incidentally learning how to pick a Follies girl from the first row, when the United States entered the World War. He immediately applied for a commission in the army and was accepted as an officer candidate at Plattsburg. Here his ideas of inherent aristocracy received a jolt. In the bunks adjoining his were a Jew who had worked his way through the College of the City of New York and had just entered the practice of law, and an Italian-American who had formerly been a mounted policeman in Pennsylvania. He found neither particularly greasy, as he might have expected. Near him were men of German, French, Norwegian and Southern European descent. Best of all, however, he liked William McCall, New York correspondent for a Chicago newspaper, a clever, whimsical sort of fellow of Robert’s own age—a dreamer and a holder of startling, but interesting, theories of art, poetry and life. He was a brother dilettante, with an added knack of doing things—besides.

McCall and Hamilton received second lieutenancies and were assigned to the same company in the New York division of the national army (the draft army). Here Hamilton’s ideas received another jolt, for men and officers represented every nation and creed. And here for the first time the idea of such phrases as “the melting pot” and “the army of democracy” began to sink into his consciousness.

His engagement to Margaret Forsyth had come quite suddenly and logically. Since childhood they had frequented the same circles. They had attended the same dances and receptions. They had played, as children, in each other’s homes, and made faces at each other across the same table. When Robert was eight and riding through the streets of Corinth on a white pony that caused all the children in sight to shout envious “ohs” and “ahs,” he formed the plan of eloping with Margaret. She agreed with alacrity. When they had reached the outskirts of the city, however, and Margaret discovered that it wasn’t a make-believe elopement, she began screaming so loudly that Robert was obliged to turn back. From that time on he pretended to have a supreme disdain for the opposite sex. In his fifteenth year, however, while home on a vacation from “prep” school, he had once more succumbed to feminine wiles—and intermittently thereafter.

The imminent departure of the troops for France, and to what perils no one could say, stimulated the dormant sentimentalism in Hamilton and, like half the young lieutenants in the division, he woke up one day to find himself engaged to Margaret, after she had come to camp with her mother to visit him.

Now, as his eyes moved restlessly about the room, as if looking for a means of escape, little incidents of his past life came popping out from unexpected hiding places in his brain. His mind had a trick of confusing two events—present and past—and he felt vaguely he had been in this ward before. Then he remembered the operation on his nose, after it had been broken in the Princeton game. It made him suddenly homesick.

“You’re looking fit to fight,” said Dr. Levin cheerfully, leaning over the bed and preparing to slip back the jacket of Hamilton’s pajamas so that he could get at the wound. “Just move your arm back a little—that’s the way. I suppose you know it’s all over now?”

Hamilton nodded.

“You don’t know what a close call you had, I’ll bet.” The surgeon deftly removed little strips of adhesive plaster.

“No,” Hamilton’s eyes were turned on the doctor. “Only this infernal wound hurts like the devil. Nurse said that—that nigger over there saved me.”

Dr. Levin turned around. The negro was asleep.

“Yes, he and a white officer picked you up near Chartreux Woods.”

“Chartreux Woods? How’d I get there? That wasn’t our objective, and anyway there weren’t any nigger troops around. Last thing I remember I was heading across no man’s land. Then something hit me.”

Hamilton scowled and noticed the quick skill with which Dr. Levin was tearing bits of porous plaster and sticking them on the edge of the bed, where they would be handy.

“I don’t know a thing about that,” said the surgeon, intent upon his work. “Now just a minute while I wash this. It won’t hurt. Did it? There now.” The dressing was complete.

“If your chest hurts too much have Meadows call me, but I think it will be all right.”

“Who’s Meadows?”

“That’s the little dark-haired nurse. They call each other by their last names and sometimes we do too.”

“I’ve noticed her,” Hamilton’s eyes suddenly wandered off into space. “Looks a lot like a girl I know back home.”

Dr. Levin smiled and patted Hamilton’s shoulder.

“You’ll be with that girl back home sooner than you think. Here, take this cigarette. A little smoking won’t hurt you.”

“I’m dying for a smoke,” said Hamilton, thrusting out a trembling hand. “It’s my first smoke in—What is the date?”

Dr. Levin told him.

“In six weeks! Six weeks! God!”

The surgeon was off to visit his other patients and, after a few puffs, Hamilton extinguished his cigarette and was ready to sink back into sleep.

IV

It was from Miss Meadows principally that Hamilton learned the details of his rescue. It was from her that he learned, for instance, that it was McCall who had helped the negro, Williams, to save his life. Where was McCall? Meadows would not tell, although she hinted that it was near-by. He guessed that it was in an adjoining ward and that she was afraid that if she told him how close, he would attempt to visit him before his full strength had returned. Meadows had heard part of the story from McCall himself and part she remembered from a newspaper account, although names of places and persons had been carefully deleted. There were other details that Dr. Levin supplied.

Apparently Hamilton had proceeded beyond his objective and fallen wounded at the edge of Chartreux Woods just before the enemy began to lay down a box barrage upon it. Hamilton wondered how he had got there. His last memory had been of advancing upon a line of trenches. Chartreux Woods lay beyond and to the left.

“Probably out of your head,” explained Dr. Levin. “You know there was a slight wound on your scalp. Probably a machine-gun bullet.”

“Must have been that,” agreed Hamilton. “Only an idiot would have done it otherwise.”

At any rate, it seemed, Hamilton had reached the last line of trenches assigned as his objective and, while his men were still mopping up, had blundered on. At the edge of the forest, weak from loss of blood, he had fallen.

It was there that McCall, whose company was lying entrenched opposite the wood, ready to advance when the signal should come, saw him the next morning, through the first gray of a drizzling dawn—the body of an American soldier lying in the open a few feet from the first row of trees and a hundred yards away. He did not know that it was Hamilton, only that it was a wounded American. How should he guess that it was Hamilton, who was supposed to be holding a position to the right and rear of his own?

And now McCall had let himself lightly over the top and was running swiftly through the mud toward his goal. Suddenly the barrage upon the forest broke and McCall flung himself to the ground. In a general way he knew that the lowness of the ground would probably shield him from observation, but to expose himself needlessly would be folly. He began to crawl forward slowly. He would continue this way for a few feet, then dive into a shell hole or behind a stump.

Across the narrow field high explosive shells were shattering the trees with thunderous roars. Projectiles screamed and whined overhead. Somewhere a machine gun chattered. A light drizzle was falling and all these sounds seemed like a thousand angry thunders following a thousand devastating lightnings. Once McCall threw himself into a puddle a second before a high explosive shell struck the earth a hundred yards away with a terrible crash that shook the earth and spattered rock, earth and metal as from a volcano’s mouth. McCall noticed with relief that Hamilton lay protected by the sweep of the terrain.

McCall doggedly kept on. As he reached his goal, he saw for the first time whom he was saving. Hamilton, his buddy! McCall quickly tied his emergency bandage around the wound in Hamilton’s chest, slid the prostrate form over his shoulder and started back. A trickle of blood which blinded his right eye told him that he had been wounded. But it was no time to quit and painfully, his wound throbbing with every step, he managed to stagger into a shell hole. Then everything turned black.

In the meantime Williams, in command of a detachment of pioneer troops assigned to McCall’s company, had been watching breathlessly from a fire step in the front-line trench. Now, when he saw McCall stagger into the shell hole, he was over the parapet in a flash and wriggling across the muddy, shell-torn ground like a snake. Half way across, a spent fragment of shell struck his head and dazed him. But he kept on, as in a trance, and reached the two white officers before his head cleared. McCall was recovering consciousness and Williams bound his wound. To his own wound he paid no attention. Then the two began their return to the American line, dragging and pushing the body of Hamilton between them.

Within the trenches all was excitement, and it was all that the lieutenant in charge of the company could do to keep every man in the front-line trench from swarming over the top.

“They’ll bring him back!” he shouted. “There’s no use any one else risking his life. Get down from the fire step and stay down if you value your lives!”

The lieutenant swore and prayed in turn. The men recklessly stuck their heads above the parapet and shouted words of encouragement, although they knew that their voices were no match for the thunder of the artillery.

“Come on now! Stick it out! Just a little longer! Come on!” Their voices pleaded.

Inch by inch, foot by foot, they were creeping. They had come within a few yards of the trench and the men were shouting themselves hoarse.

“Come on! You’re almost there! Stick it out!”

Suddenly there was a terrific explosion that sent showers of rock and mud into the trench and both Williams and McCall rolled over, the blood gushing from many wounds. Hamilton, between them, had been completely protected. This time there was no holding them. A half dozen whites and blacks were over the parapet and back again, bearing the three wounded officers.

“You’ll get court-martialed sure as hell for this!” yelled the lieutenant. Tears were in his eyes—“Or you’ll all get cited for bravery.”

He was right. The next morning they heard from the old man (the colonel). Every one of them, including McCall and Williams, had been cited for conspicuous bravery on the field of battle, over and above their line of duty, in rescuing the wounded.

V

Hamilton was sitting up in a wheelchair, watching Miss Meadows flutter about from one patient to another—raising or lowering a bed, adjusting a pillow, injecting morphine, sponging a patient’s back, bringing water—doing a hundred and one things. Hamilton admired her swift skill—the sureness with which she did everything, the expertness with which her capable fingers patted the bedclothes into position, the gentle strength of her finely molded arm when she lifted a man in bed or helped him to his chair, the dexterity with which she snipped off gauze and linen and converted them into dressing pads and bandages. Above all, her cheerfulness.

At six each morning she would come into the ward—in her familiar white sweater coat on the cooler days—and take temperatures. She carried scores of thermometers in a glass, it seemed, and as she moved from bed to bed she would shake them down with a dexterous twist of her wrist. Sometimes, on especially cold days, when her fingers were numb, a thermometer would slip from her grasp and shatter on the floor. But in spite of cold, and no matter how little she had slept the night before, she invariably smiled.

Meadows had a word and a nickname for everyone. Hamilton was a “Colonel,” because of his first outburst against having a negro in his ward, his Southern accent and his rather aristocratic cast of features.

“In a few more days, you’ll have a regular goatee, and then you will look like a colonel,” she used to tease him when he was still lying on his back, unable to shave.

The patients were all her boys and she mothered them in a delightfully impartial manner.

One of the men she maternally called “Sleepyhead,” because he was always asleep when time came for taking temperatures. Another was “Caruso,” because he snored (she called it singing) in his sleep.

“That was a most beautiful aria you rendered last night,” teased Meadows, “it sounded like the Awakening of the Lion from Hagenbeck.”

Then, as every one in the ward laughed, and before Caruso could reply, she thrust a thermometer between his lips. Caruso pretended to be in a great rage and in pantomime drew a knife and threatened her with it.

“How’s the Great Lover?” she asked another, who had come out of the ether revealing certain startling chapters of his amatory experiences. “The Hearst papers have got a reporter planted under your bed, so you had better be careful of what you say in your sleep. They’re running the first chapter of your memoirs, An Ethereal Affinity, tonight.”

“You know I have only one love,” mocked back the Great Lover, stretching out his arms.

“I wonder who that can be,” said Meadows and popped a thermometer into his mouth.

“Great Scott, nurse, I’m burning up!” cried a patient. Meadows snatched the thermometer from his hand to find the mercury near the top of the column. It was an old trick, however. The patient had held the end of a cigarette to the bulb.

“My, oh my!” Meadows shook her head, so that the brown curls straggled out from beneath her cap. “We’ll have to cut out the nicotine. No more cigarettes from now on, and you’ll see how soon your temperature goes back to normal!”

“Not one cigarette, nursey?” pleaded the practical joker.

“Not a chocolate cigarette—unless you share it with me!”

For each there was some bit of badinage that made the dreary days of convalescence pass all the more quickly. Even with the more serious cases, the officers whose jaws had been replaced with pieces of metal strung together by wire, the officers who had been blinded, the amputations—Meadows joked.

Hamilton was making comparisons. He wondered whether the girl to whom he had become engaged just before he left for France could have stood the gaff as well. Physically they were remarkably alike. They could easily pass for cousins, even sisters. They were both little women and both had a girlish animation. Both were dark, with wavy brown hair and large brown eyes. Eyes of a wild doe, Hamilton used to say of Margaret. Meadows might have been an inch taller and correspondingly heavier. But the same domed forehead, refined nose, bowed lips.

Hamilton wondered whether Margaret, so graceful on the dance floor, so competent in the drawing room, or at the dinner table, would be equally at home in a hospital ward. Could she have rubbed a man’s back with alcohol, or placed a drain in a gaping wound as successfully as she poured tea—do all these things with a smile? He wondered.

Meadows was approaching Hamilton’s wheelchair with a cup of steaming chocolate, and for a moment Hamilton had an acute longing to be back in the States, nearer Margaret.

“What’s the matter, Colonel, hasn’t she written?” the nurse smiled down upon him. “I’m quite sure I saw a letter for you in the office. Orderly’ll be up in a few minutes. Drink this chocolate. I made it myself.”

Hamilton took the cup and admitted that he was woefully homesick.

“Some day,” he gulped and blinked hard. “Jimminy, this stuff is hot!—some day I’d like to have you meet some one in Georgia—Corinth. A girl I know—my—some one I know real well. She looks a great deal like you, too. Same complexion and same way of smiling. Might be sisters.”

“No,” laughed Miss Meadows, shaking her head, “I haven’t a relative south of South Bend, Indiana. It’s just a stage of convalescence. When they reach it, all my boys,” she gave an expressive wave of her white arm, “tell me I remind them of some one. So you’d better look out or you’ll be mistaking me for her and telling me things meant only for her shell-like ears. Oh, such things have happened before!”

Meadows shook her forefinger saucily at the colonel and whisked away. Hamilton swallowed a burning gulp of chocolate and felt more homesick than ever.

Meadows was right. There was a letter for Hamilton—a letter which sent his heart thumping. It came in a square envelope, lined with colored tissue, addressed in large, round characters, in green ink and smelling faintly of musk. A dozen postmarks and forwarding addresses showed the course it had travelled. Hamilton had written Margaret that he would spend his leave in Paris, the last week in September, and she had addressed the letter in care of the American Club. When Hamilton failed to claim the missive, it had evidently been sent to headquarters. From there it had been forwarded to his regiment. The letter had followed the regiment from post to post, had finally caught up with it and been sent on to the field hospital. From there it had been sent to the American hospital on Rue de St. Jacques, Paris. Evidently Margaret was unaware that Hamilton had been wounded and had lain hovering between life and death for two months. Hamilton tore open the letter.

“Dearest Bobby boy,” it ran. “I know that some horrid censor will be snooping through this, so I can’t tell you how much I love you!

“I suppose you are in Paris now, enjoying your leave. Oh, how jealous I am of those notorious French beauties! I hear that they bob their hair, wear skirts up to their knees and smoke cigarettes. How shocking! But you’ll always be true to your little Margaret, won’t you?

“You don’t know how much we at home suffer! I don’t mean by going without wheat or meat or heat on certain days or without lights at night; nor even our untiring work on drives and committees and meetings. I mean the gap you have made in our lives that nothing can fill!

“Every one of us at home would give anything he could to join you on the firing line. I know I would, if I were a man. In the meantime I am ‘doing my bit’ by knitting Red Cross sweaters and preparing gauze. I am attending a class in hospitalization, so that I can help out in our local hospitals in case all the trained nurses are accepted for overseas duty.

“Papa is very proud of you. When he learned that you had been recommended for a captaincy, he said that he just knew that you had it in you, because you came from one of the best Southern families. Father has so much responsibility now, keeping the niggers at work. He says that his overseers are working day and night to keep up the production of cotton. Cotton is used in the soldiers’ uniforms and in making gun-cotton, so father really feels as though he’s doing his bit in fighting the Hun.

“Cousin George says he wishes he were in your shoes, but the local draft board has ruled that his services in editing a newspaper are indispensable, and of more value to the country than shouldering a rifle.

“Howard Pinkney—the man you were so jealous of—foolish boy!—still comes around and proposes regularly. But there’s no chance, is there, against my soldier boy? I hate these war profiteers, but papa says Howard is becoming a splendid business man and doing a real service to the nation by supplying the arsenals with walnut for rifle stocks. It seems that walnut is the best wood for that purpose, and at the beginning of the war Howard very thoughtfully managed to collect most of it in the South. He said that he would have liked to follow your example, but I suppose he is doing more by ‘carrying on’ right at home, seeing that the boys over there are supplied with rifle stocks.

“You see, everybody’s ‘doing his bit,’ one way or another. I think it is splendid! It’s the only way that our Anglo-Saxon supremacy can be maintained. Even at our dances and receptions the note is patriotic. We invite all the officers from the camps near-by and do our best to make them feel as if they had not been forgotten. We always end up with the Star-Spangled Banner and everyone stands up so straight and sings right from the heart!

“A few foreigners and radicals have given us some trouble by not subscribing their full quota of Liberty Bonds, and the committee of twenty-one has daubed their houses yellow. Some have even asked for higher wages, because the war has made prices go up so high. But they don’t realize their sacred duty to their country. There is talk about the negroes revolting. Some agitators have been at work amongst them. They’re demanding accountings and cash, or rather hinting at it. They wouldn’t dare demand it. It sounds like Bolshevism to dad! A Socialist came here to speak—but the committee rode him out of town on a rail before he could get a meeting and spread disregard for Americanism and the Constitution.

“Dad and George and Howard say that the old Ku Klux Klan ought to be revived to teach the negroes their place and keep the agitators and other carpetbaggers from invading the South.

“But I mustn’t bore you any more with this. I simply wanted to let you know how the war was affecting the South. Perhaps by this time the war will be over. I just know when the Americans get upon the field of battle they will show the rest of the Allies a thing or two about fighting.”

Hamilton turned from his reading and looked out of the window. The trees had turned gaunt and bare, heralds of the approaching winter. People were hurrying to and fro. Carriages carrying notables were dashing down the boulevards. Officers in brilliant uniforms were moving about the streets. Paris, following its first intoxication of victory, was going about the complicated business of determining the conditions of peace. Wilson’s fourteen points were being adroitly broken. New conceptions of international relations, the League of Nations, the autonomy of Montenegro—bizarre and pathetic national points of view—were being molded to suit the nations of the world. Pompous international tailors were cutting up the economic fabric of Europe, woven in the loom of the centuries, and trying to form coats to clothe a confusion of political and sentimental ideas of nationalism. Experts were laying out the patterns. No two agreed exactly.

Hamilton resumed his perusal of the activities of Corinth during the last phase of the war, the town gossip, the state of health of numerous individuals. He crushed the letter and leaned back against his pillow. Thoughtless, chattering, charming Margaret! If he could only crush her alluring girlishness to him, and be aware of her pretty babbling, without listening to it; simply nodding from time to time and putting in a few words!

His chest was hurting him a little. He was growing weak. It was the first time he had sat up for more than half an hour. Meadows noticed him sink back in his chair, quickly summoned two orderlies and had him lifted back in bed, her capable hands patting the pillow into a comfortable shape, and tucking in the blankets in a twinkling.

“Don’t swallow this, like Little Nemo over there,” she said. “He eats everything I give him—soup, thermometers, roast turkey, shaving soap—everything—a regular ostrich. Now let’s take your hand. Something exciting in that letter? What’s the matter with your pulse, colonel? Don’t worry, I’ll get you back to her in ten days, good as new—if I have to write my own prescriptions. Oh, it’s not so high for a man in love. Temperature normal.”

Meadows made a notation on his chart at the foot of the bed and then passed on to the next bed, and Hamilton had a sudden desire to seize her white hand and hold it.

VI

Hamilton was sitting at the window, his favorite position, watching the stream of people on the street below. He had walked up and down the room for perhaps five minutes—the first time in months—and was now resting. Little pains, like needles, were running up his limbs. His wound had entirely healed, leaving only a long, livid scar. Hamilton called the wound his barometer. He could foretell any change in the weather accurately by the twinges it gave him. At present it indicated “clear weather.”

Hamilton had begun to doze away in the warm sunshine, when he heard a thumping of crutches down the corridor. He turned around.

“If it isn’t old Ham himself!” cried the man on crutches.

“Bill McCall!” Hamilton was on his feet. “Where’d you come from?”

The next moment they were shaking hands and looking into each other’s eyes. Hamilton retained his grasp.

“I want to thank you, Bill, I want to tell you how grateful I am for what you’ve done,” Hamilton began, his throat choking. “I don’t know what to say; but I’ll always feel indebted to you for my—life.”

“Oh, stow it,” cut in McCall. “It was no more than any one else would have done under the circumstances.” McCall slid into a chair, one leg held gingerly out and deposited the crutches on the floor. Hamilton resumed his seat. “As a matter of fact, the men you really owe your life to are Williams—”

“The nigger? Yes, I suppose so.”

“And Dr. Levin.”

“Dr. Levin? Who’s he?”

“He’s your surgeon. Don’t you know him? Black-haired fellow, blue eyes, little stoop-shouldered. Comes here every day. Got a lot of other wards, too. Isn’t he still handling your case?”

“Oh, the doctor, sure. I didn’t know his name, though. Levin? Jewish name, isn’t it?”

“Must be. Anyway it was Dr. Levin who really saved your life. Williams and I simply brought your body back. But you were hanging by a hair. It was Dr. Levin who pulled you through.

“Don’t you remember reading about Dr. Levin joining the service—giving up his big practice and all that—about the time we left for training camp. I remember it because I wrote it.”

“It isn’t that Dr. Levin, is it?”

“Yes, the big surgeon.”

“But he looks so confoundedly young and unassuming.”

“Well, he is young. Just a little over the draft age. I remember covering the story at the time. Bob, you don’t know what fine medical care we’re getting in this man’s army. This specialist has made you a nice new rib out of silver and spliced the pieces of bone together to the plate, or bar, or something, so that the bone would form over it again. What’s the matter, old man, you’re trembling. Here, take this pill. I’ve got plenty.

“Now you’ve got a tin rib to match my aluminum shin and my nickel-plated skull.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at this leg.”

McCall pulled up the leg of his pajama and revealed a narrow, almost imperceptible scar.

“Feel it. Oh, it won’t bite you. A neat job. Now run your finger over my skull here. That’s some more of Levin’s work.”

“But it’s right next to the eye, that dent there.”

“Sure.”

“But you couldn’t have been hit there without losing your sight. The shell would have cut your optic nerve.”

“Well?”

Hamilton stared at McCall. “Well? You don’t mean to tell me, Bill—not your eye.”

McCall shrugged his shoulders.

“Oh, one eye’s enough, anyway. I can see everything as well—Here, nurse, orderly!” His voice rang out. “He’s fainted.”

But Meadows had already seen Bob’s head fall forward against McCall’s knee, and the next minute Hamilton was back in bed.

“Just a slight relapse,” smiled Meadows. “They get that way when they’re not used to walking. Come in again when he’s a little stronger.”

VII

McCall, whose bed was in an adjoining ward, called frequently. There was a possibility that his eyesight might still be restored, but the operation was extremely hazardous. It involved fastening together the two ends of the optic nerve, close to the brain. As time went on the nerve tissue would shrivel and recede, so that if McCall waited too long the ends of the nerve would no longer meet. If an operation was to be performed, it would have to be done as quickly as possible. McCall could see perfectly out of his right eye. A successful operation would restore sight to the left eye as well. On the other hand, failure might prove fatal.

Dr. Levin had laid the problem squarely before McCall and the latter was pondering it seriously.

“I’ve a good mind, Bob, to give him a shot at it,” said McCall one day, as they sat side by side on Hamilton’s cot.

“But supposing he fails?”

“Well, there’ll be one less newspaper man in the world. I suppose The Times will have to find a new star reporter. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Dr. Levin is like fate. In his hands is the knife that will kill or restore my sight. I think it’s worth the gamble. You have your eyes, so you don’t realize what sight means. I know. When I first came to they had a bandage over my eyes and I thought I was totally blind. And believe me, I cried like a kid. When they told me that one eye would probably be all right and perhaps the other, I didn’t believe it.

“I thought of all the beautiful things I had seen—sunrises and sunsets, mountain peaks, the ocean, Lake Michigan in the morning, you know how it is, with the sun dripping red and gold. There were things I had forgotten—paintings and statues, and faces. They all came back to me. I saw my mother, my dad, members of the family, old friends. And colors. Did you ever see Paris on Bastile day? An impressionistic painting after Monet, with daubs of color all over it—brilliant reds and blues and yellows and greens. Or a wood in Illinois in autumn. And shadows. Foggy, drizzling nights with everything in shadow, but the reflection from the pavement, and friendly stabs of color from windows and street lamps. And moonlit nights on river banks. And—but what’s the use.”

They were silent for a moment.

“But I thought you could see just as well with one eye,” ventured Hamilton.

“Almost. Well, I’ve gotten used to it and I could get along as well with one eye if—if I knew I could always have that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, as the tissue forming the nerve running to my left eye shrivels up, it may—it might affect the other eye. Those things happen. It might take two years, it might take ten years, but sometime in the future there is always that possibility, that chance of going blind altogether.

“I’m a gambler. I’d risk everything to keep my sight. You don’t know. It’s worth everything!”

As the two friends discussed the advisability of the operation, Dr. Levin loomed in their minds like a personification of fate. The surgeon remembered McCall as a feature writer for The Times and took a particular interest in him. He would come to the two friends, as they sat together, and join their conversation. They talked pleasantly of art, literature, the effects of the war, the terms of the treaty and women. At other times all three played cards.

Dr. Levin was a man of medium height, and with a straight nose and blue eyes that belied his race. People were continually telling him that he did not look like a Jew—a fact which invariably nettled him. It was as if people were saying that, whatever he might be on the inside, outwardly he could pass for a man. In college he had even been invited to join a Greek letter fraternity by some well-meaning Christian colleague, not up on the art of trailing one’s ancestry by one’s name.

When Dr. Levin spoke it was with nervous force. He was forever anticipating other persons’ questions and usually correctly. His mind ran nimbly from subject to subject, and he was equally at home in a discussion on anthropology and art. Persons who knew him casually called him an “intellectual.” And there were subjects in addition, that is, to his chosen field, surgery, in which he did display scholarship. Psychology was one of these.

When Hamilton had thanked him for saving his life, Dr. Levin had dismissed the matter by saying that it was only a case, like any other of a thousand cases.

“From your viewpoint it may be a wonderful service that I am doing, but from my viewpoint it is a remarkable opportunity for study,” Dr. Levin had explained. “Well, I’ll admit that patriotism had something to do with my coming here.” His eyes twinkled. “But think of the wonderful clinic I have before me. Hundreds of cases that the average surgeon runs across once in a lifetime. Hundreds of variations of injury that one would not find in a thousand years in the largest hospital in the world. Each fresh case a problem—an interesting problem to be solved. A challenge to my skill and ingenuity. We surgeons evolve new systems of treatment, new techniques, new theories, as we go along.

“That is the best part of my work,” the surgeon went on enthusiastically, “it gives one a chance to serve his community and to express his own individuality at the same time.”

“Don’t you feel any difference in your attitude when you treat a case like—like that one?” asked Hamilton.

“Certainly not,” replied Levin. “There’s your snobbishness creeping out. You’re probably a Southerner, aren’t you? I thought so. The antipathy to the negro is interesting as a phenomenon. It’s a problem in mob psychology. But a surgeon cuts down under the skin of man—literally. You’ve never seen a class in anatomy. Well, to the surgeon, to the scientist, there isn’t such overwhelming proof of the white man’s superiority. No, I don’t mean just physically. You remember how the Teutonic barbarians swept over Rome. And the white men whipping the Indians. It all seemed part of some divine scheme to keep the inferior races subdued. The Nordic, including the Teuton, you know, always has boasted of his physical superiority. But now, when his physical superiority is not so well established over the black, he argues that it is not important.

“But mentally—The weight of the average negro’s brain I’ll grant is slightly less than the weight of the average white man’s. Yet the brains are almost identical. The stuff in Williams’ brain is in all probability the same as in your brain, Hamilton. It may be a little finer quality, or a little poorer. There may be more of it or less of it, even though you are a Hamilton of Virginia, or wherever it is, and Williams, the grandson of a negro slave. As a matter of fact, Williams is probably as well educated as any of us. We’re all college graduates—McCall, you and I. Well, Williams is a Harvard graduate. It doesn’t mean much, if you or I are college men. Probably couldn’t help it. Our parents mapped out our educational program for us, but do you realize what it means to win a college education, with the whole white world sneering at you and offering obstacles to your path? And, of course, there’s poverty. But that’s only a minor difficulty.”

“Oh, there are some smart niggers, I’ll admit,” said Hamilton frowning, “but they’re the exceptions. Booker T. Washington, this poet, Dunbar, I guess his name is. And I’ve read some of DuBois in college, sociology class. But the mass—Ugh!”

Hamilton made a wry face.

“Well, you’ve got to judge the negro race by the exceptions,” said the surgeon. “Why? Because it’s only the exceptional negro who’s had the same chance as the average white man. You wouldn’t compare a man whose grandfather had been a slave and his father practically a peon on a plantation, a man without any schooling, with a man whose ancestors had been freemen and who had enjoyed education for at least a few generations. If the average negro had the same chance as the average white, the comparison would be fair.

“But we’re drifting off into something that lies beyond reason and argument and I just dropped in for a friendly chat. I think you’ll be out in a week.”

While Levin was the scientist of the three, McCall was the poet and the champion of human rights. While Levin weighed and analysed, McCall rhapsodised.

McCall was enthusiastic about each claim for national independence as it arose at the peace conference and was recorded in the newspapers. He waxed eloquent not only over the wrongs of Ireland, but of the Jews, and was more of a Zionist than Levin, who sometimes doubted the practicability of rehabilitating Palestine—building a country out of a desert, investing millions of dollars, raising the hopes of millions of human beings for the sake of an idea.

McCall was a poet in practise, as well as by inclination, although he had allowed only a few of his most intimate friends to set eyes upon his poems. He had several manuscripts of plays and short stories tucked away somewhere in a trunk at home, which he meant to publish to the world some day.

Physically, McCall was not unlike Levin. McCall was perhaps an inch taller and held himself straighter. But there was the same boyishness of figure, and McCall had dark hair and blue eyes as well.

Often when the conversation drifted to anthropology, Levin would slyly compare the color of his eyes with those of Hamilton and McCall. Hamilton had brown eyes. His hair too was dark, although not so black as either Levin’s or McCall’s, and he was cast in a larger mold, physically—within an inch of six feet in height and broad of shoulder.

“You see what happens to your pure types,” laughed Levin. “Here’s the descendant of the blue-eyed, fair-haired Saxon with brown eyes and the descendant of the dark-skinned Semite with blue eyes. You see all this pride in race is after all based on a very slim physical foundation. All modern peoples are mixtures of many different tribes and races. Even the Jew and the Chinese, who usually boast of their racial purity. As for the Englishman—England has been the melting pot, for centuries, of northern Europe. Here you have the original Celts, the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Danes, the Normans, probably some Jews and any number of modern European strains. And the Americans who boast of their pure English ancestry might as well boast of being descended from Adam.”

McCall applauded these sentiments, but Hamilton staunchly upheld the supremacy of the Nordic.

The day before Hamilton left the hospital, he had a chance to thank Williams for rescuing him. Williams was just regaining consciousness from a series of operations that had riveted together bits of shattered bone in both arms, a shin and one thigh. Only the thickness of his skull and his powerful constitution had pulled him through, according to Dr. Levin. He was lying flat on his back, looking up at the ceiling when Hamilton leaned over him. His arms and legs were still in casts and he was too weak to observe closely Hamilton’s expression. The white man extended his hand absent-mindedly, then suddenly realized that the negro could not use his own. The latter smiled.

“That’s all right,” said he. “It is slightly discommoding.”

Hamilton flushed and stumbled about to find the right words. Condescension, patronage, a sense of his own awkwardness, genuine thankfulness appeared in his voice. But the man who had saved his life grinned good-naturedly and nodded. He was used to this air of patronage on the part of white men. He understood.

VIII

Both Hamilton and McCall obtained sick leaves and spent them in savoring Paris and Parisian life. There were days of strolling down the boulevards, McCall limping at Hamilton’s side, and “drinking in” the life of which they had been deprived for so many months. “Drinking in” was McCall’s own phrase, and it described better than anything else the eagerness with which each new sight, each fresh impression, was seized. There were wonderful afternoons in the art galleries, with Hamilton absorbing his fill of the old masters and McCall revelling in the modernists. There were tramps through the public gardens, and visits to the places of historical interest—the Bastile, the palaces at Versailles, the public buildings. There were nights at the music-halls and cabarets, where pleasure-seeking men and women, casting convention to the winds, sought to crowd into a few hours of drinking and dancing, all that they had missed since the beginning of the war. Hamilton and McCall were in a mad world, a world of jazz-crazed mockers at morality, of civilized men and women suddenly reverting to barbaric pleasures. The American craze was at its height and in deference to it, negro musicians, dressed in brilliant red and yellow, blared and sobbed weird melodies to wild African rhythms. Prostitutes, with thin veils to hide their nakedness, quivered and undulated to the minor strains. Men and women danced in pantomimic obscenities and suggested perversions.

“Let’s get out of this,” exclaimed Hamilton, “I’m no tin angel, but, thank God, they don’t do this in America.”

“The funny thing about these frogs is that they think they’re being American,” said McCall. “That’s all put on for our benefit. Didn’t you notice how sweet everybody has been to us here?”

Whenever Levin accompanied the two, he would point to the jazz music and dancing as an example of the moral reaction that follows every war.

“It’s a sort of relapse, following a major operation,” he explained. “We’ve cut out the Kaiser and perhaps Kaiserism, although you can’t tell, the roots sometimes spread all over the body, like a cancer. No, all the Kaiserism is not in Germany. It’s here. It’s in England. It’s in America, just trying to get a start. But whether the disease has been definitely checked or not, we are going to pass through a relapse. This is the social phase of it.”

There was a visit to a theatre, where a series of short plays were being acted. There was a hideous horror play, followed by the conventional adultery farce and then a silhouette novelty—nude women dancing behind a sheet so that their figures were projected by bright lights upon it.

Hamilton was disgusted. Dr. Levin simply classified it as another symptom of relapse—he avoided the term “decadence”; but McCall was amused.

“It reminds me of school children twiddling their fingers at their teacher,” he laughed. “They’re so evidently produced to shock. A blush or shiver in every line! Do you remember when you learned your first naughty word, how you looked up the synonyms in the dictionary and then sprang them on your pals? With some it was more of an obsession than with others, of course. They would chalk up all the whoppers they could think on the sidewalks and sides of buildings. Well, that’s what the French playwrights are doing, and some of the poets and artists. Freud might explain it by showing that their normal impulses were checked in some way.

“I remember a Chicago newspaperman who got an overdose of Havelock Ellis and Freud and the decadents, I suppose. The result was a book with all the conventionally naughty things trotted in, like the chalk marks of an impudent schoolboy who hasn’t got enough outdoor exercise. And when the book was suppressed, he enjoyed all the sensations of the bad boy sitting on the stool with a dunce cap on his head, wriggling his fingers at authority.”

The ateliers, into which McCall’s newspaper friends got the three friends entrée, were more to their liking. Although here, too, Bill often found finger-wriggling at authority for its own sake. Here, at least, the delusion was honest. But in the drawing rooms they saw Paris in deeper perspective.

Here were men of all countries and representing all causes. Men in conventional black and white, sometimes relieved by a ribbon across an immaculate shirt front or a jeweled decoration; men in uniforms and in picturesque native costumes. There were red men, yellow men, black men and white men—men of all shades between. An Arab sheik, in turban and flowing robe, come to sue for the autonomy of a stretch of desert, conversed with the representative from Albania, in Paris on a similar mission. There were brilliant young Irish leaders and dreamers of the national independence of Bohemia. Fighters for Palestine, Polish nationalists, Hindu revolters, Persian revolutionists. One could not move without bumping into the holder of some claim of national autonomy.

“The trouble with them is that they’re all right, and, therefore, all wrong,” said Dr. Levin. “One of them could be right, or two, but here you run into twenty claims that contradict each other. Every land believes its natural boundaries to be the widest boundaries it can get—the boundaries when Peter the Magnificent or Oswald the Resplendent (some national hero that nobody else has ever heard about) reigned. And, of course, the domains of Peter overlap those of Oswald, who ruled a hundred years later. Each country is right, that is as right as any other country. But in this case, too many rights make everything all wrong.”

McCall sympathized with every national aspiration, and when delegates learned that in civilian life he was a writer on one of the great American newspapers they poured their woes and hopes into his ear. Hamilton, as an orthodox Democrat and admirer of President Wilson, listened eagerly.

There were Russian emigrés galore, whose downfall caused McCall to chuckle, although it was harder to delight in the fate of the mysterious Russian noblewoman—tall, slim, straight-shouldered, with brown hair, high cheek bones and great onyx-colored eyes—who hovered about.

There were other beautiful women—tall, fair English-women; animated, little Parisienne brunettes; a few majestic Americans. It was interesting to guess their nationality.

“There’s something about this I’m getting to like,” said Hamilton. “This cosmopolitan atmosphere. I’ve always been with Americans, of a certain class. Here one meets people from all parts of the world. And it’s not just a matter of having money, like in Chicago or New York. Some of the most interesting chaps here have been the painters and writers, fellows just struggling to get a hold on things.

“During the war, when I was quartered in little villages, I got an idea that the French were robbers, who tried to stick the Americans for every cent they could. I got a contempt for them because they didn’t have shower baths and modern plumbing, and apple pie in the restaurants. I see now, sanitary plumbing and all that is only one phase of civilization.”

But though Hamilton was beginning to admire the intellectual democracy of Paris, there was one aspect of it he could not understand. He could accept the presence of Chinamen and Japs and Hindus in the drawing room—but the blacks! Sometimes a Senegalese war hero or even an American negro would become the center of admiring men and women.

Hamilton tried to explain the American viewpoint to his French associates, but they generally shook their heads.

“White supremacy must be maintained at all costs,” Hamilton was arguing with a young French colonel one day.

“Well, what of it?”

“Don’t you see, if we allow them social equality, our white race will disappear.”

“Not if it is naturally superior, how can it?”

“No, I don’t mean it will actually disappear,” went on Hamilton, “but it will become something different. It will become—mulatto. If we allowed the negroes equality, we would become a nation of mulattoes.”

“Mon Dieu!” the Frenchman raised his arms in mock horror. “You tell me your American women would all choose black mates, if you allowed them to? Ha, Ha!”

Before Hamilton could think of a reply, McCall was descending upon him with a vision in black taffeta.

He jumped quickly to his feet. For a moment he had the illusion that he was back in a ballroom in Corinth. Then he remembered who she was. The gown clung softly to her so that it delicately suggested the wearer’s figure. It was distinctly old-fashioned—like a gown Jenny Lind might have worn, and there was a vestee of some fluffy blue material and sprigs of blue forget-me-nots embroidered here and there.

“Meadows! Miss Meadows!”

Meadows extended her hand and smiled.

“We’ve been looking for you, Colonel,” she said.

Hamilton presented Colonel Charbonneau and the latter glanced in surprise at the single bar on Hamilton’s shoulder. Meadows read his astonishment.

“‘Colonel’ is just an honorary title we’ve given him,” she explained. “Because he’s so dignified and old-fashioned.”

Col. Charbonneau threw back his head and laughed.

“Are all colonels supposed to be so dignified?”

“Oh, I was speaking only of our southern American colonels,” replied Meadows. “They’re a special variety.”

“But your young officer was very gallant in defending the American women,” his eyes twinkled mischievously.

“Oh, yes,” flashed back Meadows, “they’re always defending womankind, or the white race or Anglo-Saxon institutions or something. And I sort of like it at that.” She darted the flushed Hamilton a look out of her dancing brown eyes. “Women still live in an age of chivalry—at least some of us do.”

They chatted for a few minutes and then Col. Charbonneau excused himself, and walked away. McCall followed a few minutes later.

“Do you know I expect to rejoin my regiment in a week?” said Hamilton. “We’re going back together, McCall and I. You see both of us got our commissions at the same training camp and we’ve gone through the war together.”

“I suppose the war has bred pretty strong friendships, hasn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s something like the college fraternity spirit, only stronger. There’s McCall, for instance. I owe my life to him. We’ll always be friends. And lately I’ve taken a liking to Dr. Levin. I suppose I owe my life to him too. He’s rather hard to understand at first.”

“Hard to understand? He’s simply deeper, more thorough than the average person.”

“I suppose that’s it,” agreed Hamilton. “He criticises things, has so many theories. But when you get to know him he’s all right. You know I’ve never had much to do with Jews before. Not for any particular reason, but because I didn’t come in contact with ’em. But my experience with Levin simply shows that there are some good Jews. I’ve noticed that he’s more like the other men one meets here. I suppose ‘cosmopolitan’ is the word. I suppose you’ve made lots of friends, too.”

“With a woman,” mused Meadows, “it’s different. There’s a certain ‘camaraderie’ among the nurses, but it’s not the same thing as a man’s friendship. Women have no such thing as friendship, in fact. Oh, I suppose I should say seldom. Take man’s club life. Women may organize for a special purpose—to study, to sew, to give plays, to play auction bridge, to knit sweaters—but not for simple friendship. Women in the same set are always antagonistic to each other. They try to outdo each other in the matter of beauty, of dress, of personal charm. They are always competitors for the potential male.”

“But you have friends?”

Meadows laughed. “It’s like this. When the patients—my boys—are convalescent they become sentimental and romantic. Sometimes this friendship, or whatever it is, lasts after they’ve recovered. They come back and invite me out, or bring me candy or flowers.”

“And then what?”