The Clansman (1905)/Book 3/Chapter 3
PHIL early found the home of the Camerons the most charming spot in town. As he sat in the old-fashioned parlour beside Margaret, his brain seethed with plans for building a hotel on a large scale on the other side of the Square and restoring her home intact.
The Cameron homestead was a large brick building with an ample porch, looking out directly on the Court House Square, standing in the middle of a lawn full of trees, flowers, shrubbery, and a wilderness of evergreen boxwood planted fifty years before. It was located on the farm from which it had always derived its support. The farm extended up into the village itself, with the great barn easily seen from the street.
Phil was charmed with the doctor's genial personality. He often found the father a decidedly easier person to get along with than his handsome daughter. The Rev. Hugh McAlpin was a daily caller, and Margaret had a tantalising way of showing her deference to his opinions.
Phil hated this preacher from the moment he laid eyes on him. His pugnacious piety he might have endured but for the fact that he was good-looking and eloquent. When he rose in the pulpit in all his sacred dignity, fixed his eyes on Margaret, and began in tenderly modulated voice to tell about the love of God, Phil clinched his fist. He didn't care to join the Presbyterian church, but he quietly made up his mind that, if it came to the worst and she asked him, he would join anything. What made him furious was the air of assurance with which the young divine carried himself about Margaret, as if he had but to say the word and it would be fixed as by a decree issued from before the foundations of the world.
He was pleased and surprised to find that his being a Yankee made no difference in his standing or welcome. The people seemed unconscious of the part his father played at Washington. Stoneman's Confiscation Bill had not yet been discussed in Congress, and the promise of land to the negroes was universally regarded as a hoax of the League to win their followers. The old Commoner was not an orator. Hence his name was scarcely known in the South. The Southern people could not conceive of a great leader except one who expressed his power through the megaphone of oratory. They held Charles Sumner chiefly responsible for Reconstruction.
The fact that Phil was a Yankee who had no axe to grind in the South caused the people to appeal to him in a pathetic way that touched his heart. He had not been in town two weeks before he was on good terms with every youngster, had the entree to every home, and Ben had taken him, protesting vehemently, to see every pretty girl there. He found that, in spite of war and poverty, troubles present, and troubles to come, the young Southern woman was the divinity that claimed and received the chief worship of man.
The tremendous earnestness with which these youngsters pursued the work of courting, all of them so poor they scarcely had enough to eat, amazed and alarmed him beyond measure. He found in several cases as many as four making a dead set for one girl, as if heaven and earth depended on the outcome, while the girl seemed to receive it all as a matter of course—her just tribute.
Every instinct of his quiet reserved nature revolted at any such attempt to rush his cause with Margaret, and yet it made the cold chills run down his spine to see that Presbyterian preacher drive his buggy up to the hotel, take her to ride, and stay three hours. He knew where they had gone—to Lover's Leap and along the beautiful road which led to the North Carolina line. He knew the way—Margaret had showed him. This road was the Way of Romance. Every farm-house, cabin, and shady nook along its beaten track could tell its tale of lovers fleeing from the North to find happiness in the haven of matrimony across the line in South Carolina. Everything seemed to favour marriage in this climate. The State required no license. A legal marriage could be celebrated, anywhere, at any time, by a minister in the presence of two witnesses, with or without the consent of parent or guardian. Marriage was the easiest thing in the state—divorce the one thing impossible. Death alone could grant divorce.
He was now past all reason in love. He followed the movement of Margaret's queenly figure with pathetic abandonment. Beneath her beautiful manners he swore with a shiver that she was laughing at him. Now and then he caught a funny expression about her eyes, as if she were consumed with a sly sense of humour in her love-affairs.
What he felt to be his manliest traits, his reserve, dignity, and moral earnestness, she must think cold and slow beside the dash, fire, and assurance of these Southerners. He could tell by the way she encouraged the preacher before his eyes that she was criticising and daring him to let go for once. Instead of doing it, he sank back appalled at the prospect and let the preacher carry her off again.
He sought solace in Dr. Cameron, who was utterly oblivious of his daughter's love-affairs.
Phil was constantly amazed at the variety of his knowledge, the genuineness of his culture, his modesty, and the note of youth and cheer with which he still pursued the study of medicine.
His company was refreshing for its own sake. The slender graceful figure, ruddy face, with piercing, dark-brown eyes in startling contrast to his snow-white hair and beard, had for Phil a perpetual charm. He never tired listening to his talk, and noting the peculiar grace and dignity with which he carried himself, unconscious of the commanding look of his brilliant eyes.
"I hear that you have used Hypnotism in your practice, Doctor," Phil said to him one day, as he watched with fascination the changing play of his mobile features.
"Oh, yes! used it for years. Southern doctors have always been pioneers in the science of medicine. Dr. Crawford Long, of Georgia, you know, was the first practitioner in America to apply anesthesia to surgery."
"But where did you run up against Hypnotism? I thought this a new thing under the sun?"
The doctor laughed.
"It's not a home industry, exactly. I became interested in it in Edinburgh while a medical student, and pursued it with increased interest in Paris."
"Did you study medicine abroad?" Phil asked in surprise.
"Yes; I was poor, but I managed to raise and to borrow enough to take three years on the other side. I put all I had and all my credit in it. I've never regretted the sacrifice. The more I saw of the great world, the better I liked my own world. I've given these farmers and their families the best God gave to me."
"Do you find much use for your powers of hypnosis?" Phil asked.
"Only in an experimental way. Naturally I am endowed with this gift—especially over certain classes who are easily the subjects of extreme fear. I owned a rascally slave named Gus whom I used to watch stealing. Suddenly confronting him, I've thrown him into unconsciousness with a steady gaze of the eye, until he would drop on his face, trembling like a leaf, unable to speak until I allowed him."
"How do you account for such powers?"
"I don't account for them at all. They belong to the world of spiritual phenomena of which we know so little and yet which touch our material lives at a thousand points every day. How do we account for sleep and dreams, or second sight, or the day-dreams which we call visions?"
Phil was silent, and the doctor went on dreamily:
"The day my boy Richard was killed at Gettysburg, I saw him lying dead in a field near a house. I saw some soldiers bury him in the corner of that field, and then an old man go to the grave, dig up his body, cart it away into the woods, and throw it into a ditch. I saw it before I heard of the battle or knew that he was in it. He was reported killed, and his body has never been found. It is the one unspeakable horror of the war to me. I'll never get over it."
"How very strange!" exclaimed Phil.
"And yet the war was nothing, my boy, to the horrors I feel clutching the throat of the South to-day. I'm glad you and your father are down here. Your disinterested view of things may help us at Washington when we need it most. The South seems to have no friend at Court."
"Your younger men, I find, are hopeful, Doctor," said Phil.
"Yes, the young never see danger until it's time to die. I'm not a pessimist, but I was happier in jail. Scores of my old friends have given up in despair and died. Delicate and cultured women are living on cowpeas, corn bread and molasses—and of such quality they would not have fed it to a slave. Children go to bed hungry. Droves of brutal negroes roam at large, stealing, murdering, and threatening blacker crimes. We are under the heel of petty military tyrants, few of whom ever smelled gunpowder in a battle. At the approaching election, not a decent white man in this county can take the infamous test-oath. I am disfranchised because I gave a cup of water to the lips of one of my dying boys on the battle-field. My slaves are all voters. There will be a negro majority of more than one hundred thousand in this state. Desperadoes are here teaching these negroes insolence and crime in their secret societies. The future is a nightmare."
"You have my sympathy, sir," said Phil, warmly extending his hand. "These Reconstruction Acts, conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity, can bring only shame and disgrace until the last trace of them is wiped from our laws. I hope it will not be necessary to do it in blood."
The doctor was deeply touched. He could not be mistaken in the genuineness of any man's feeling. He never dreamed this earnest straightforward Yankee youngster was in love with Margaret, and it would have made no difference in the accuracy of his judgment.
"Your sentiments do you honour, sir," he said, with grave courtesy. "And you honour us and our town with your presence and friendship."
As Phil hurried home in a warm glow of sympathy for the people whose hospitality had made him their friend and champion, he encountered a negro trooper standing on the corner, watching the Cameron house with furtive glance.
Instinctively he stopped, surveyed the man from head to foot and asked:
"What's the trouble?"
"None er yo' business," the negro answered, slouching across to the opposite side of the street.
Phil watched him with disgust. He had the short, heavy-set neck of the lower order of animals. His skin was coal black, his lips so thick they curled both ways up and down with crooked blood-marks across them. His nose was flat, and its enormous nostrils seemed in perpetual dilation. The sinister bead eyes, with brown splotches in their whites, were set wide apart and gleamed ape-like under his scant brows. His enormous cheekbones and jaws seemed to protrude beyond the ears and almost hide them.
"That we should send such soldiers here to flaunt our uniform in the faces of these people!" he exclaimed, with bitterness.
He met Ben hurrying home from a visit to Elsie. The two young soldiers whose prejudices had melted in the white-heat of battle had become fast friends.
Phil laughed and winked:
"I'll meet you to-night around the family altar!"
When he reached home, Ben saw, slouching in front of the house, walking back and forth and glancing furtively behind him, the negro trooper whom his friend had passed.
He walked quickly in front of him, and, blinking his eyes rapidly, said:
"Didn't I tell you, Gus, not to let me catch you hanging around this house again?"
The negro drew himself up, pulling his blue uniform into position as his body stretched out of its habitual slouch, and answered:
"My name ain't 'Gus.'"
Ben gave a quick little chuckle and leaned back against the palings, his hand resting on one that was loose. He glanced at the negro carelessly and said:
"Well, Augustus Caesar, I give your majesty thirty seconds to move off the block."
Gus' first impulse was to run, but remembering himself he threw back his shoulders and said:
"I reckon de streets is free"
"Yes, and so is kindling-wood!"
Quick as a flash of lightning the paling suddenly left the fence and broke three times in such bewildering rapidity on the negro's head he forgot everything he ever knew or thought he knew save one thing—the way to run. He didn't fly, but he made remarkable use of the facilities with which he had been endowed.
Ben watched him disappear toward the camp.
He picked up the pieces of paling, pulled a strand of black wool from a splinter, looked at it curiously and said:
"A sprig of his majesty's hair—I'll doubtless remember him without it!"