"He's a great man, is the General!" he exclaimed with enthusiasm. "When you met him, my boy, you met the biggest man in the South to-day."
Immediately the crimson face, the white-trousered legs, the round stomach, and even the gouty toe, were surrounded in my imagination with a 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 restored trade, he's made an honest fortune out of the carpet-baggers. It's something to own nine-tenths of the Old Dominion Tobacco Works, and to be vice-president of the Bonfield Trust Company, but it's a long sight better 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 it out."
I couldn't point it out, and so I told him, at which he gave a friendly guffaw and led the way in silence up the sagging staircase. At that moment all that had been mere formless ambition in my mind was concentrated into a single burning desire; and I swore to myself, as I followed 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 and the president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. The idea which was to possess me utterly for thirty years dropped into my brain and took root on that morning in the heavy atmosphere of the Old Dominion Tobacco Works. From that hour I walked not aimlessly, but toward a definite end. I might start in life, I told myself, with a market basket, but I would start also with the resolution that out of the market basket the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad should arise. The vow was still on my lips when the large sliding door on the landing swung open, and we entered an immense barnlike room, in which three or four hundred negroes were at work stemming tobacco.
At first the stagnant fumes of the dry leaf mingling with the odours of so many tightly packed bodies, caused me to turn suddenly dizzy, and the rows of shining black faces swam before my eyes in a blur with the brilliantly dyed turbans of the women. Then I gritted my teeth fiercely, the mist cleared, and I listened undisturbed to the melancholy chant which accompanied the rhythmic movements of the lithe brown fingers.
At either end of the room, which covered the entire length and breadth of the building, the windows were shut fast, and on the outside, close against the greenish panes, innumerable flies swarmed like a black curtain. Before the long troughs stretching waist high from wall to wall, hundreds of negroes stood ceaselessly stripping the dry leaves from the stems; and above the soft golden brown piles of tobacco, the blur of colour separated into distinct and vivid splashes of red, blue, and orange. Back and forth in the obscurity these brilliantly coloured turbans nodded like savage flowers amid a crowd of black faces, in which the eyes alone, very large, wide open, and with gleaming white circles around the pupils, appeared to me to be really alive and human. They were singing as we entered, and the sound did not stop while the manager crossed the floor and paused for an instant beside the nearest worker, a brawny, coal-black negro, with a red shirt open at his throat, on which I saw a strange, jagged scar, running from ear to chest, like the enigmatical symbol of some savage rite I could not understand. Without turning his head at the manager's approach, he picked up a great leaf and stripped it from the stem at a single stroke, while his tremendous bass voice rolled like the music of an organ over the deep piles of tobacco before which he stood. Above this rich volume of sound fluted the piercing thin sopranos of the women, piping higher, higher, until the ancient hymn resolved itself into something that was neither human nor animal, but so elemental, so primeval, that it was like a voice imprisoned in the soil—a dumb and inarticulate music, rooted deep, and without consciousness, in the passionate earth. Over the mass of dark faces, as they rocked back and forth, I saw light shadows tremble, as faint and swift as the shadows of passing clouds, while here and there a bright red or yellow head-dress rose slightly higher than its neighbours, and floated above the rippling mass like a flower on a stream. And it seemed to me as I stood there, half terrified by the close, hot smells and the savage colours, that something within me stirred and awakened like a secret that I had carried shut up in myself since birth. The music grew louder in my ears, as if I, too, were a part of 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 it carefully, and tossed it aside. The great black negro turned his head slowly toward him, the jagged scar standing out like a cord above the open 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 the manager suddenly, speaking close to my ear.