The Call of the South

by Robert Lee Durham

Mr. Phillips was very slow in coming to his feet. The speech that he had purposed to make was gone—all gone. The chairman's last words like a chemical reagent, had turned his every though to vitriol, and he was all afire with the impulse to pour it burning and blistering down their open throats.

He stood impassive with tight-shut lips while they cheered and cheered and cheered. In the fires that scorched his spirit, personal and political ambition shrivelled into a cinder and was entirely consumed. A second term—the honour, the approval, the country's weal—might sink into the Pit rather than that he would blacken his soul even by tacit assent to such a monstrous, awful lie! Given Helen freely to a negro's arms!—he would blast that lie with—

But Helen! in the tumult he thought of her. And the tenderness of his love for her made him to tremble. In a moment a war was on within him, and the struggle between his pride and his love shook him as with an ague.

But he knew the end from the beginning. As the cheering died away Helen dominated his thoughts as she dominated his heart,—and he did make a speech to the convention. It was not a forcible speech nor a very long speech, for a man cannot think about one thing and discourse very effectively about another. It was on the order of a prayer-meeting talk, consisting mainly of platitudes and good advice. When it was finished he went directly home and lay down on a couch to rest, for he was tired, mortally tired.

From that day forth Mr. Phillips was in terror of his negro allies. He made no other addresses to them. But he could not escape them. The negro papers called on the race to rally to the Phillips standard. This the joyful blacks construed to mean that they must form themselves in squads and go over to Washington and tell Mr. Phillips about it personally. Many were the delegations from political clubs and orders and associations of all black sorts that called to pay their respects and assure the President of their loyal support and good wishes; and despite all his forehandedness and precautions it was a very dull day when he was not openly hailed as a brother to the race by virtue of the affinity in Helen's choice of a mate. He was not permitted to forget Helen's plight for an hour,—if he had chosen to forget.

Indeed, however, he had lost the zest of thinking about anything else. True, he fought his political battle with energy to the finish, and gave it the best thought his brain could furnish—but that was because he was a born fighter and knew not how to be a laggard: the burden of his voluntary, uncompelled thinking was of Helen, and it grew larger and larger upon his mind. And the more he thought of her, the more he would think of her: and the tragedy of her mating loomed more darkly hopeless and appalling before his face, until his days became one long prayer for a miracle of deliverance.

In his meditations he suffered the tortures of a lost soul. He was too brave a man to shirk his accountability for Helen's undoing. In moments of solitude when he was most racked with remorse and wildly despairing he would cry out against the fatal interpretation she had put upon his words and his deeds—"I did not mean that, I did not mean that, oh my daughter, my little girl, my little girl!"—but these moments of self-excusing were only the wild cries of unbearable agony. In composed self-confession he accused himself—with a bitterness that had in it the bitterness of death—and in the genuineness of his penitence he might have proclaimed his error and put his countrymen on guard: if only Helen must not know!

* * * * *

Summer was come and the convention was less than two weeks away when Mr. Phillips' first political lieutenant came back from a trip to New York with the very definite news for his chief that even if at that late day he would promise to be more considerate of the business interests of the country the nomination might yet be his. Mr. Phillips promptly sent his answer to the railroad president who had presumed to speak for Business that he "would see the business interests damned before he would make any such promise." ...

Three days before the convention met, Mr. Phillips received a letter written in pencil in a weak and uncertain handwriting.