Part 3

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.”