CHAPTER II—THE VOICE OF THE TEMPTER

McLEOD was waiting with some impatience in his room at the hotel.

“Walk in Gaston, you’re a little late. However, better late than never.” McLeod plunged directly into the purpose of his visit.

“Gaston you’re a man of brains, and oratorical genius. I heard your speech in the last Democratic convention in Raleigh, and I don’t say it to flatter you, that was the greatest speech made in any assembly in this state since the war.”

“Thanks!” said Gaston with a wave of his arm.

“I mean it. You know too much to be in sympathy with the old moss-backs who are now running this state. For fourteen years, the South has marched to the polls and struck blindly at the Republican party, and three times it struck to kill. The Southern people have nothing in common with these Northern Democrats who make your platforms and nominate your candidate. You don’t ask anything about the platform or the man. You would vote for the devil if the Democrats nominated him, and ask no questions; and what infuriates me is you vote to enforce platforms that mean economic ruin to the South.”

“Man shall not live by bread alone, McLeod.”

“Sure, but he can’t live on dead men’s bones. You vote in solid mass on the Negro question, which you settled by the power of Anglo-Saxon insolence when you destroyed the Reconstruction governments at a blow. Why should you keep on voting against every interest of the South, merely because you hate the name Republican?”

“Why? Simply because so long as the Negro is here with a ballot in his hands he is a menace to civilisation. The Republican party placed him here. The name Republican will stink in the South for a century, not because they beat us in war, but because two years after the war, in profound peace, they inaugurated a second war on the unarmed people of the South, butchering the starving, the wounded, the women and children. God in heaven, will I ever forget that day they murdered my mother! Their attempt to establish with the bayonet an African barbarism on the ruins of Southern society was a conspiracy against human progress. It was the blackest crime of the nineteenth century.”

“You are talking in a dead language. We are living in a new world.”

“But principles are eternal.”

“Principles? I’m not talking about principles. I’m talking about practical politics. The people down here haven’t voted on a principle in years. They’ve been voting on old Simon Legree. He left the state nearly a quarter of a century ago.”

“Yes, McLeod, but his soul has gone marching on. The Republican party fought the South because such men as Legree lived in it, and abused the negroes, and the moment they won, turn and make Legree and his breed their pets. Simon Legree is more than a mere man who stole five millions of dollars, alienated the races, and covered the South with the desolation of anarchy. He is an idea. He represents everything that the soul of the South loathes, and that the Republican party has tried to ram down our throats, Negro supremacy in politics, and Negro equality in society.”

“You are talking about the dead past, Gaston. I’m surprised at a man of your brain living under such a delusion. How can there be Negro supremacy when they are in a minority?”

“Supremacy under a party system is always held by a minority. The dominant faction of a party rules the party, and the successful party rules the state. If the Negro only numbered one-fifth the population and they all belonged to one party, they could dictate the policy of that party.”

“You know that a few white brains really rule that black mob.”

“Yes, but the black mob defines the limits within which you live and have your being.”

“Gaston, the time has come to shake off this nightmare, and face the issues of our day and generation. We are going to win in this campaign, but I want you. I like you. You are the kind of man we need now to take the field and lead in this campaign.”

“How are you going to win?”

“We are going to form a contract with the Farmer’s Alliance and break the backbone of the Bourbon Democracy of the South. The farmers have now a compact body of 50,000 voters, thoroughly organised, and combined with the negro vote we can hold this state until Gabriel blows his trumpet.”

“That’s a pretty scheme. Our farmers are crazy now with all sorts of fool ideas,” said Gaston thoughtfully.

“Exactly, my boy, and we’ve got them by the nose.”

“If you can carry through that programme, you’ve got us in a hole.”

“In a hole? I should say we’ve got you in the bottomless pit with the lid bolted down. You ’ll not even rise at the day of judgment. It won’t be necessary!” laughed McLeod, and as he laughed changed his tone in the midst of his laughter.

“And what is the great proposition you have to make to me?” asked Gaston.

“Join with us in this new coalition, and stump the state for us. Your fortune will be made, win or lose. I ’ll see that the National Republican Committee pays you a thousand dollars a week for your speeches, at least five a week, two hundred dollars apiece. If we lose, you will make ten thousand dollars in the canvass, and stand in line for a good office under the National Administration. If we win, I ’ll put you in the Governor’s Palace for four years. There’s a tide in the affairs of men, you know. It’s at the flood at this moment for you.”

Gaston was silent a moment and looked thoughtfully out of the window. The offer was a tremendous temptation. A group of old fogies had dominated the Democratic party for ten years, and had kept the younger men down with their war cries and old soldier candidates, until he had been more than once disgusted. He felt as sure of McLeod’s success as if he already saw it. It was precisely the movement he had warned the old pudding-head set against in the preceding campaign in which they had deliberately alienated the Farmer’s Alliance. They had pooh poohed his warning and blundered on to their ruin.

It was the dream of his life to have money enough to buy back his mother’s old home, beautify it, and live there in comfort with a great library of books he would gather. The possibility of a career at the state Capital and then at Washington for so young a man was one of dazzling splendour to his youthful mind. For the moment it seemed almost impossible to say no.

McLeod saw his hesitation and already smiled with the certainty of triumph. A cloud overspread his face when Gaston at length said, “I ’ll give you my answer to-morrow.”

“All right, you’re a gentleman. I can trust you. Our conversation is of course only between you and me.”

“Certainly, I understand that.”

All that day and night he was alone fighting out the battle in his soul. It was an easy solution of life that opened before him. The attainment of his proudest ambitions lay within his grasp almost without a struggle. Such a campaign, with his name on the lips of surging thousands around those speaker’s stands, was an idea that fascinated him with a serpent charm.

All that he had to do was to give up his prejudices on the Negro question. His own party stood for no principle except the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon. On the issue of the party platforms, he was in accord with the modern Republican utterances at almost every issue, and so were his associates in the Southern Democracy. The Negro was the point. What was the use now of persisting in the stupid reiteration of the old slogan of white supremacy? The Negro had the ballot. He was still the ward of the nation, and likely to be for all time, so far as he could see. The Negro was the one pet superstition of the millions who lived where no negro dwelt. His person and his ballot were held more peculiarly sacred and inviolate in the South than that of any white man elsewhere.

The possibility of a reunion in friendly understanding and sympathy between the masses of the North and the masses of the South seemed remote and impossible in his day and generation.

He asked himself the question, could such a revolution toward universal suffrage ever go backward, no matter how base the motive which gave it birth? Why not give up impracticable dreams, accept things as they are, and succeed?

He did not confer with the Rev. John Durham on this question, because he knew what his answer would be without asking. A thousand times he had said to him, with the emphasis he could give to words, “My boy, the future American must be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto! We are now deciding which it shall be. The future of the world depends on the future of this Republic. This Republic can have no future if racial lines are broken, and its proud citizenship sinks to the level of a mongrel breed of Mulattoes. The South must tight this battle to a finish. Two thousand years look down upon the struggle, and Two thousand years of the future bend low to catch the message of life or death!”

He could see now his drawn face with its deep lines and his eyes flashing with passion as he said this. These words haunted Gaston now with strange power as he walked along the silent streets.

He walked down past his old home, stopped and leaned on the gate, and looked at it long and lovingly. What a flood of tender and sorrowful memories swept his soul! He lived over again the days of despair when his mother was an invalid. He recalled their awful poverty, and then the last terrible day with that mob of negroes trampling over the lawn and overrunning the house. He saw the white face of his mother whose memory he loved as he loved life. And now he recalled a sentence from her dying lips. He had all but lost its meaning.

“You will grow to be a brave strong man. You will fight this battle out, and win back our home, and bring your own bride here in the far away days of sunshine and success I see for you.”

You will fight this battle out—he had almost lost that sentence in his hunger for that which followed. It came to his soul now ringing like a trumpet call to honour and duty.

He turned on his heel and walked rapidly home. He looked at his watch. It was two o’clock in the morning.

“We will fight it out on the old lines,” he said to McLeod next day.

“You will find me a pretty good fighter.”

“Unto death, let it be,” answered Gaston firmly setting his lips.

“I admire your pluck, but I’m sorry for your judgment. You know you’re beaten before you begin.”

“Defeat that’s seen has lost its bitterness before it comes.”

“Then get ready the flowers for the funeral. I hoped you would have better sense. You are one of the men now I ’ll have to crush first, thoroughly, and for all time. I’m not afraid of the old fools. I ’ll be fair enough to tell you this,” said McLeod.

“Not since Legree’s day has the Republican party had so dangerous a man at its head,” said Gaston thoughtfully to himself as McLeod strode away across the square. “He has ten times the brains of his older master, and none of his superstitions. He will give me a hard fight.”