Part 36 (1/2)
”Well, they've got to hang when they commit hanging crimes,” replied Cyrus stubbornly. ”There's no way out of that. It's just, ain't it?”
”Yes, I suppose so,” admitted Gabriel, ”though, for my part, I've a feeling against capital punishment--except, of course, in cases of rape, where, I confess, my blood turns against me.”
”An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth--that's the law of G.o.d, ain't it?”
”The old law, yes--but why not quote the law of Christ instead?”
”It wouldn't do--not with the negroes,” returned Cyrus, who entertained for the Founder of Christianity something of the sentimental respect mingled with an innate distrust of His common-sense with which he regarded His disciple.
”We can't condemn it until we've tried it,” said Gabriel thoughtfully, and he went on after a moment:
”The terrible thing for us about the negroes is that they are so grave a responsibility--so grave a responsibility. Of course, we aren't to blame--we didn't bring them here; and yet I sometimes feel as if we had really done so.”
This was a point of view which Cyrus had never considered, and he felt an immediate suspicion of it. It looked, somehow, as if it were insidiously leading the way to an appeal for money.
”It's the best thing that could have happened to them,” he replied shortly. ”If they'd remained in Africa, they'd never have been civilized or--or Christianized.”
”Ah, that is just where the responsibility rests on us. We stand for civilization to them; we stand even--or at least we used to stand--for Christianity. They haven't learned yet to look above or beyond us, and the example we set them is one that they are condemned, for sheer lack of any finer vision, to follow. The majority of them are still hardly more than uneducated children, and that very fact makes an appeal to one's compa.s.sion which becomes at times almost unbearable.”
But this was more than Cyrus could stand even from the rector, whose conversation he usually tolerated because of the perverse, inexplicable liking he felt for the man. The charm that Gabriel exercised over him was almost feminine in its subtlety and in its utter defiance of any rational sanction. It may have been that his nature, incapable though it was of love, was not entirely devoid of the rarer capacity for friends.h.i.+p--or it may have been that, with the inscrutable irony which appears to control all human attractions, the caged brutality in his heart was soothed by the unconscious flattery of the other's belief in him. Now, however, he felt that Gabriel's highfaluting nonsense was carrying him away. It was well enough to go on like that in the pulpit; but on week days, when there was business to think of and every minute might mean the loss of a dollar, there was no use dragging in either religion or sentiment. Had he put his thoughts plainly, he would probably have said: ”That's not business, Gabriel. The trouble with you--and with most of you old-fas.h.i.+oned Virginians--is that you don't understand the first principles of business.” These words, indeed, were almost on his lips, when, catching the rector's innocent glance wandering round to him, he contented himself with remarking satirically:
”Well, you were always up in the clouds. It doesn't hurt you, I reckon, though I doubt if it does much toward keeping your pot boiling.”
”I must turn off here,” said Gabriel gently. ”It's the shortest way to Cross's Corner.”
”Do you think any good will come of your going?”
”Probably not--but I couldn't refuse.”
Much as he respected Cyrus, he was not sorry to part from him, for their walk together had left him feeling suddenly old and incompetent to battle with the problems of life. He knew that Cyrus, even though he liked him, considered him a bit of a fool, and with a humility which was unusual in him (for in his heart he was absolutely sure that his own convictions were right and that Cyrus's were wrong) he began to ask himself if, by any chance, the other's verdict could be secretly justified. Was he in reality the failure that Cyrus believed him to be?
Or was it merely that he had drifted into that ”depressing view” of existence against which he so earnestly warned his paris.h.i.+oners? Perhaps it wasn't Cyrus after all who had produced this effect. Perhaps the touch of indigestion he had felt after dinner had not entirely disappeared. Perhaps it meant that he was ”getting on”--sixty-five his last birthday. Perhaps--but already the March wind, fresh and bud-scented, was blowing away his despondency. Already he was beginning to feel again that fortifying conviction that whatever was unpleasant could not possibly be natural.
Ahead of him the straight ashen road flushed to pale red where it climbed a steep hillside, and when he gained the top, the country lay before him in all the magic loveliness of early spring. Out of the rosy earth innumerable points of tender green were visible in the sunlight and invisible again beneath the faintly rippling shadows that filled the hollows. From every bough, from every bush, from every creeper which clung trembling to the rail fences, this wave of green, bursting through the sombre covering of winter, quivered, as delicate as foam, in the brilliant suns.h.i.+ne. On either side labourers were working, and where the ploughs pierced the soil they left narrow channels of darkness.
In the soul of Gabriel, that essence of the spring, which is immortally young and restless, awakened and gave him back his youth, as it gave the new gra.s.s to the fields and the longing for joy to the hearts of the ploughmen. He forgot that he was ”getting on.” He forgot the unnatural depression which had made him imagine for a moment that the world was a more difficult place than he had permitted himself to believe--so difficult a place, indeed, that for some people there could be no solution of its injustice, its brutality, its dissonance, its inequalities. The rapture in the song of the bluebirds was sweeter than the voice of Cyrus to which he had listened. And in a meadow on the right, an old grey horse, scarred, dim-eyed, spavined, stood resting one crooked leg, while he gazed wistfully over the topmost rail of the fence into the vivid green of the distance--for into his aching old bones, also, there had pa.s.sed a little of that longing for joy which was born of the miraculous softness and freshness of the spring. To him, as well as to Gabriel and to the ploughmen and to the bluebirds flitting, like bits of fallen sky, along the ”snake fences,” Nature, the great healer, had brought her annual gift of the resurrection of hope.
”Cyrus means well,” thought Gabriel, with a return of that natural self-confidence without which no man can exist happily and make a living. ”He means well, but he takes a false view of life.” And he added after a minute: ”It's odd how the commercial spirit seems to suck a man dry when it once gets a hold on him.”
He walked on rapidly, leaving the old horse and the ploughmen behind him, and around his energetic little figure the grey dust, as fine as powder, spun in swirls and eddies before the driving wind, which had grown boisterous. As he moved there alone in the deserted road, with his long black coat flapping against his legs, he appeared so insignificant and so unheroic that an observer would hardly have suspected that the greatest belief on the earth--the belief in Life--in its universality in spite of its littleness, in its justification in spite of its cruelties--that this belief shone through his shrunken little body as a flame s.h.i.+nes through a vase.
At the end of the next mile, midway between Dinwiddie and Cross's Corner, stood the small log cabin of the former slave who had sent for him, and as he approached the narrow path that led, between oyster sh.e.l.ls, from the main road to the single flat brown rock before the doorstep, he noticed with pleasure how tranquil and happy the little rustic home appeared under the windy brightness of the March sky.
”People may say what they please, but there never were happier or more contented creatures than the darkeys,” he thought. ”I doubt if there's another peasantry in the world that is half so well off or half so picturesque.”
A large yellow rooster, pecking crumbs from the threshold, began to scold shrilly, and at the sound, the old servant, a decrepit negress in a blue gingham dress, hobbled out into the path and stood peering at him under her hollowed palm. Her forehead was ridged and furrowed beneath her white turban, and her bleared old eyes looked up at him with a blind and groping effort at recognition.
”I got your message, Aunt Mehitable. Don't you know me?”
”Is dat you, Ma.r.s.e Gabriel? I made sho' you wan' gwineter let nuttin'
stop you f'om comin'.”