The Romance of a Plain Man Read online

  CHAPTER VIII

  IN WHICH MY EDUCATION BEGINS

  There was no lingering at kitchen doorways with scolding white-turbanedcooks next morning, for as soon as I had delivered the marketing, Ireturned the basket to John Chitling, and set out down Twenty-fifthStreet in the direction of the river. As I went on, a dry, pungent odourseemed to escape from the pavement beneath and invade the air. The earthwas drenched with it, the crumbling bricks, the negro hovels, the fewsickly ailantus trees, exuded the sharp scent, and even the wind broughtstray wafts, as from a giant's pipe, when it blew in gusts up from theriver-bottom. Overhead the sky appeared to hang flat and low as if seenthrough a thin brown veil, and the ancient warehouses, sloping towardthe river, rose like sombre prisons out of the murky air. It was stillbefore the introduction of modern machinery into the factories, and as Iapproached the rotting wooden steps which led into the largest building,loose leaves of tobacco, scattered in the unloading, rustled with asharp, crackling noise under my feet.

  Inside, a clerk on a high stool, with a massive ledger before him,looked up at my entrance, and stuck his pen behind his ear with a sighof relief.

  "A gentleman told me you might want a boy, sir," I began.

  He got down from his stool, and sauntering across the room, took a longdrink from a bucket of water that stood by the door.

  "What gentleman?" he enquired, as he flirted a few drops on the stepsoutside, and returned the tin dipper to the rusty nail over the bucket.

  I drew out the card, which I had kept carefully wrapped in a piece ofbrown paper in my trousers' pocket. When I handed it to him, he lookedat it with a low whistle and stood twirling it in his fingers.

  "The gentleman owns about nine-tenths of the business," he remarked formy information. Then turning his head he called over his shoulder tosome one hidden behind the massive ledgers on the desk. "I say, Bob,here's a boy the General's sent along. What'll you do with him?"

  Bob, a big, blowzy man, who appeared to be upon terms of intimacy withevery clerk in the office, came leisurely out into the room, and lookedme over with what I felt to be a shrewd and yet not unkindly glance."It's the second he's sent down in two weeks," he observed, "but thisone seems sprightly enough. What's your name, boy?"

  "Ben Starr."

  "Well, Ben, what're you good for?"

  "'Most anything, sir."

  "'Most anything, eh? Well, come along, and I'll put you at 'mostanything."

  He spoke in a pleasant, jovial tone, which made me adore him on thespot; and as he led me across a dark hall and up a sagging flight ofsteps, he enquired good-humouredly how I had met General Bolingbroke andwhy he had given me his card.

  "He's a great man, is the General!" he exclaimed with enthusiasm. "Whenyou met him, my boy, you met the biggest man in the South to-day."

  Immediately the crimson face, the white-trousered legs, the roundstomach, and even the gouty toe, were surrounded in my imagination witha romantic halo. "What's he done to make him so big?" I asked.

  "Done? Why, he's done everything. He's opened the South, he's restoredtrade, he's made an honest fortune out of the carpet-baggers. It'ssomething to own nine-tenths of the Old Dominion Tobacco Works, and tobe vice-president of the Bonfield Trust Company, but it's a long sightbetter to be president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad.If you happen to know of a bigger job than that, I wish you'd point itout."

  I couldn't point it out, and so I told him, at which he gave a friendlyguffaw and led the way in silence up the sagging staircase. At thatmoment all that had been mere formless ambition in my mind wasconcentrated into a single burning desire; and I swore to myself, as Ifollowed Bob, the manager, up the dark staircase to the leaf department,that I, too, would become before I died the biggest man in the South andthe president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. The ideawhich was to possess me utterly for thirty years dropped into my brainand took root on that morning in the heavy atmosphere of the OldDominion Tobacco Works. From that hour I walked not aimlessly, buttoward a definite end. I might start in life, I told myself, with amarket basket, but I would start also with the resolution that out ofthe market basket the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad shouldarise. The vow was still on my lips when the large sliding door on thelanding swung open, and we entered an immense barnlike room, in whichthree or four hundred negroes were at work stemming tobacco.

  At first the stagnant fumes of the dry leaf mingling with the odours ofso many tightly packed bodies, caused me to turn suddenly dizzy, and therows of shining black faces swam before my eyes in a blur with thebrilliantly dyed turbans of the women. Then I gritted my teeth fiercely,the mist cleared, and I listened undisturbed to the melancholy chantwhich accompanied the rhythmic movements of the lithe brown fingers.

  At either end of the room, which covered the entire length and breadthof the building, the windows were shut fast, and on the outside, closeagainst the greenish panes, innumerable flies swarmed like a blackcurtain. Before the long troughs stretching waist high from wall towall, hundreds of negroes stood ceaselessly stripping the dry leavesfrom the stems; and above the soft golden brown piles of tobacco, theblur of colour separated into distinct and vivid splashes of red, blue,and orange. Back and forth in the obscurity these brilliantly colouredturbans nodded like savage flowers amid a crowd of black faces, in whichthe eyes alone, very large, wide open, and with gleaming white circlesaround the pupils, appeared to me to be really alive and human. Theywere singing as we entered, and the sound did not stop while the managercrossed the floor and paused for an instant beside the nearest worker, abrawny, coal-black negro, with a red shirt open at his throat, on whichI saw a strange, jagged scar, running from ear to chest, like theenigmatical symbol of some savage rite I could not understand. Withoutturning his head at the manager's approach, he picked up a great leafand stripped it from the stem at a single stroke, while his tremendousbass voice rolled like the music of an organ over the deep piles oftobacco before which he stood. Above this rich volume of sound flutedthe piercing thin sopranos of the women, piping higher, higher, untilthe ancient hymn resolved itself into something that was neither humannor animal, but so elemental, so primeval, that it was like a voiceimprisoned in the soil--a dumb and inarticulate music, rooted deep, andwithout consciousness, in the passionate earth. Over the mass of darkfaces, as they rocked back and forth, I saw light shadows tremble, asfaint and swift as the shadows of passing clouds, while here and there abright red or yellow head-dress rose slightly higher than itsneighbours, and floated above the rippling mass like a flower on astream. And it seemed to me as I stood there, half terrified by theclose, hot smells and the savage colours, that something within mestirred and awakened like a secret that I had carried shut up in myselfsince birth. The music grew louder in my ears, as if I, too, were a partof it, and for the first time I heard clearly the words:--

  "Christ totes de young lambs in his bosom, bosom, Christ totes de young lambs in his bosom, bosom, Christ totes de young lambs in his bosom, bosom, Fa-ther, de ye-ar-ur Ju-bi-le-e!"

  Bob, the manager, picked up a leaf from the nearest trough, examined itcarefully, and tossed it aside. The great black negro turned his headslowly toward him, the jagged scar standing out like a cord above theopen collar of his red shirt.

  "Christ leads de ole sheep by still watah, watah, Christ leads de ole sheep by still watah, watah, Christ leads de ole sheep by still watah, watah, Fa-ther, de ye-ar-ur Ju-bi-le-e!"

  "If I were to leave you here an hour what would you do, Ben?" asked themanager suddenly, speaking close to my ear.

  I thought for a moment. "Learn to stem tobacco quick'en they do," Ireplied at last.

  "What have you found out since you came in?"

  "That you must strip the leaf off clean and throw it into the big troughthat slides it downstairs somewhere."

  A smile crossed his face. "If I give you a job it won't be much morethan running up and down stairs with messages," he said; "that's what ani
gger can't do." He hesitated an instant; "but that's the way I began,"he added kindly, "under General Bolingbroke."

  I looked up quickly, "And was it the way _he_ began?"

  "Oh, well, hardly. He belongs to one of the old families, you know. Hisfather was a great planter and he started on top."

  My crestfallen look must have moved his pity, I think, for he said as heturned away and we walked down the long room, "It ain't the start thatmakes the man, youngster, but the man that makes the start."

  The doors swung together behind us, and we descended the dark staircase,with the piercing soprano voices fluting in our ears.

  "Christ leads de ole sheep by still watah, watah, Christ leads de ole sheep by still watah, watah."

  * * * * *

  That afternoon I went home, full of hope, to my attic in the Old Marketquarter. Then as the weeks went on, and I took my place gradually as asmall laborious worker in the buzzing hive of human industry, whateverromance had attached itself to the tobacco factory, scattered andvanished in the hard, dry atmosphere of the reality. My part was to runerrands up and down the dark staircase for the manager of the leafdepartment, or to stand for hours on hot days in the stagnant air, amidthe reeking smells of the big room, where the army of "stemmers" rockedceaselessly back and forth to the sound of their savage music. In allthose weary weeks I had passed General Bolingbroke but once, and by theblank look on his great perspiring face, I saw that my hero hadforgotten utterly the incident of my existence. Yet as I turned on thecurbing and looked after him, while he ploughed, wiping his forehead, upthe long hill, under the leaves of mulberry and catalpa trees, I feltinstinctively that my future triumphs would be in a measure theoverthrow of the things for which he and his generation had stood. Themanager's casual phrase "the old families," had bred in me a secretresentment, for I knew in my heart that the genial aristocracy,represented by the president of the Great South Midland and AtlanticRailroad, was in reality the enemy, and not the friend, of such as I.

  The long, hot summer unfolded slowly while I trudged to the factory inthe blinding mornings and back again to the Old Market at thesuffocating hour of sunset. Over the doors of the negro hovels luxuriantgourd vines hung in festoons of large fan-shaped leaves, and above thehigh plank fences at the back, gaudy sunflowers nodded their heads to meas I went wearily by. The richer quarter of the city had blossomed intoa fragrant bower, but I saw only the squalid surroundings of the OldMarket, with its covered wagons, its overripe melons, its prowling dogshunting in refuse heaps, and beyond this the crooked street, which ledto the tobacco factory and then sagged slowly down to the river-bottom.Sometimes I would lean from my little window at night into the stiflingatmosphere, where the humming of a mosquito, or the whirring of a moth,made the only noise, and think of the enchanted garden lying desolateand lovely under the soft shining of the stars. Were the ghosts movingup and down the terraces in the mazes of scented box, I wondered? Thenthe garden would fade far away from me into a cool, still distance,while I knelt with my head in my hands, panting for breath in themotionless air. Outside the shadow of the Old Market lay over all,stretching sombre and black to where I crouched, a lonely, half-nakedchild at my attic window. And so at last, bathed in sweat, I would fallasleep, to awaken at dawn when the covered wagons passed through thestreets below, and the cry of "Wa-ter-mil-lion! Wa-ter-mil-lion!" rangin the silence. Then the sun would rise slowly, the day begin, and Mrs.Chitling's cheerful bustle would start anew. Tired, sleepless,despairing, I would set off to work at last, while the Great SouthMidland Railroad receded farther and farther into the dim province ofinaccessible things.

  After a long August day, when the factory had shut down while it was yetafternoon, I crept up to Church Hill, and looked again over the spikedwall into the enchanted garden. It was deserted and seemed very sad, Ithought, for its only tenants appeared to be the swallows that flew,with short cries, in and out of the white columns. On the front door alarge sign hung, reading "For Sale"; and turning away with a sinkingheart, I went on to Mrs. Cudlip's in the hope of catching a glimpse ofbaby Jessy, whom I had not seen since I ran away. She was playing on thesidewalk, a pretty, golden-haired little girl, with the melting blueeyes of my father; and when she caught sight of me, she gave a gurglingcry and ran straight to me out of the arms of President, who, I saw tomy surprise, was standing in the doorway of our old home. He was tallerthan my father now, with the same kind, sheepish face, and the awkwardmovements as of an overgrown boy.

  "Wall, if it ain't Benjy!" he exclaimed, his slow wits paralysed by myunexpected appearance. "If it ain't Benjy!"

  Turning aside he spat a wad of tobacco into the gutter, and then comingtoward me, seized both my hands and wrung them in his big fists with agrip that hurt.

  "You're comin' along now, ain't you, Benjy?" he inquired proudly.

  "Tith my Pethedent," lisped baby Jessy at his knees, and he stooped fromhis great height and lifted her in his arms with the gentleness of awoman.

  "What about an eddication, Benjy boy?" he asked over the golden curls.

  "I can't get an education and work, too," I answered, "and I've got towork. How's pa?"

  "He's taken an awful fondness to the bottle," replied President, with asly wink, "an' if thar's a thing on earth that can fill a man's thoughtstill it crowds out everything else in it, it's the bottle. But speakin'of an eddication, you see I never had one either, an' I tell you, whenyou don't have it, you miss it every blessed minute of yo' life.Whenever I see a man step on ahead of me in the race, I say to myself,'Thar goes an eddication. It's the eddication in him that's a-movin' an'not the man.' You mark my words, Benjy, I've stood stock still an' seen'em stridin' on that didn't have one bloomin' thing inside of 'em exceptan eddication."

  "But how am I to get it, President?" I asked dolefully. "I've got towork."

  "Get it out of books, Benjy. It's in 'em if you only have the patienceto stick at 'em till you get it out. I never had on o'count of my eyesand my slowness, but you're young an' peart an' you don't get confusedby the printed letters."

  Diving into his bulging pockets, he took out a big leather purse, fromwhich he extracted a dollar and handed it to me. "Let that go toward aneddication," he said, adding: "If you can get it out of books I'll sendyou a dollar toward it every week I live. That's a kind of starter,anyway, ain't it?"

  I replied that I thought it was, and carefully twisted the money intothe torn lining of my pocket.

  "I'm goin' back to West Virginy to-night," he resumed. "Arter I've seenyou an' the little sister thar ain't any use my hangin' on out of work."

  "Have you got a good place, President?"

  "As good as can be expected for a plain man without an eddication," heresponded sadly, and a half hour later, when I said good-by to him, witha sob, he came to the brow of the hill, with little Jessy clinging tohis hand, and called after me solemnly, "Remember, Benjy boy, what youwant is an eddication!"

  So impressed was I by the earnestness of this advice, that as I wentback down the dreary hill, with its musty second-hand clothes' shops,its noisy barrooms, and its general aspect of decay and poverty, I feltthat my surroundings smothered me because I lacked the peculiar virtuewhich enabled a man to overcome the adverse circumstances in which hewas born. The hot August day was drawing to its end, and the stagnantair in which I moved seemed burdened with sweat until it had become atangible thing. The gourd vines were hanging limp now over the negrohovels, as if the weight of the yellow globes dragged them to the earth;and in the small square yards at the back, the wilted sunflowers seemedtrying to hide their scorched faces from the last gaze of a too ardentlover. Whole families had swarmed out into the streets, and from time totime I stepped over a negro urchin, who lay flat on his stomach,drinking the juice of an overripe watermelon out of the rind. Above thedirt and squalor the street cries still rang out from covered wagonswhich crawled ceaslessly back and forth from the country to the OldMarket. "Wa-ter-mil-lion. Wa-ter-mil-l-i-o-n! Hyer's y
o' Wa-ter-mil-lionfresh f'om de vi-ne!" And as I shut my eyes against the dirt, and mynostrils against the odours, I saw always in my imagination theenchanted garden, with its cool sweet magnolias and laburnums, and itsgreat white columns from which the swallows flew, with short cries,toward the sunset.

  A white shopkeeper and a mulatto woman had got into a quarrel on thepavement, and turning away to avoid them, I stumbled by accident intothe open door of a second-hand shop, where the proprietor sat on an oldcooking-stove drinking a glass of beer. As I started back my frightenedglance lit on a heap of dusty volumes in one corner, and in reply to aquestion, which I put the next instant in a trembling voice, I wasinformed that I might have the whole pile for fifty cents, provided I'dclear them out on the spot. The bargain was no sooner clinched than Igathered the books in my arms and staggered under their weight in thedirection of Mrs. Chitling's. Even for a grown man they would have madea big armful, and when at last I toiled up to my attic, and dropped onmy knees by the open window, I was shaking from head to foot withexhaustion. The dust was thick on my hands and arms, and as I turnedthem over eagerly by the red light of the sunset, the worm-eatenbindings left queer greenish stains on my fingers. Among a number ofloose magazines called _The Farmer's Friend_, I found an illustrated,rather handsome copy of "Pilgrim's Progress," presented, as aninscription on the flyleaf testified, to one Jeremiah Wakefield as areward for deportment; the entire eight volumes of "Sir CharlesGrandison"; a complete Johnson's Dictionary, with the binding missing;and Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" in faded crimson morocco. When Ihad dusted them carefully on an old shirt, and arranged them on thethree-cornered shelf at the head of my cot, I felt, with a glow ofsatisfaction, that the foundations of that education to which Presidenthad contributed were already laid in my brain. If the secret of thefuture had been imprisoned in those mouldy books, I could hardly haveattacked them with greater earnestness; and there was probably noaccident in my life which directed so powerfully my fortunes as the onethat sent me stumbling into that second-hand shop on that afternoon inmid-August. I can imagine what I should have been if I had never had thehelp of a friend in my career, but when I try to think of myself asunaided by Johnson's Dictionary, or by "Sir Charles Grandison," whoseprosiest speeches I committed joyfully to memory, my fancy stumbles invain in the attempt. For five drudging years those books were myconstant companions, my one resource, and to conceive of myself withoutthem is to conceive of another and an entirely different man. If therewas harm in any of them, which I doubt, it was clothed to appeal to anolder and a less ignorant imagination than mine; and from the elaboratetreatises on love melancholy in Burton's "Anatomy," I extracted merelythe fine aromatic flavour of his quotations.