The Call of the South

by Robert Lee Durham

The convention took a recess for ten days, and, upon reassembling after Mr. Phillips' burial, passed by a unanimous vote a set of resolutions that lifted him to the stars and gave him place among the gods. Then it set out upon a long round of balloting; and without being altogether conscious of the reasons and causes impelling, it finally nominated a "safe" man for President.

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Helen could not attend her father's funeral. Pitifully weakened by the awful shock of his sudden passing, she cried out with all her remaining strength to be carried in to look upon his face in death. Her physician's consent after long refusal was due to his kindliness of heart, and the result vindicated his professional judgment, in that it came frightfully near to taking her life.

In utter desolation of spirit was she left when they had taken the great man out of the house upon his stately procession to Washington and the grave. Her husband was unfailing in devoted and anxious attendance, but she was listless to his tenderest efforts to console her. Elise's letters, coming now every day from the bedside of the prostrated mother, Helen read faithfully to the last word, and really tried to take comfort and courage from them, but they could not get down, it seemed, to touch and dissolve the cold mists of desolation in the deeps of her heart. Her father, the stay and fixative of her life, was gone: and there was nothing now to give her footing upon the earth. No one to interpret life, to give meaning to life, to give purpose to life, to give value to life. The days might as well move backward as forward. They appeared not to be moving at all. There was no one to give them direction. He toward whom or from whom or about whom the days had always turned as a sort of first cause or incarnation of the reason and sense of things, was gone: and she was in chaos.

With her weakness of body, her mental processes were weak, and her mind did not take vigorous hold of things: but, confidently as it had followed her father's sentimental speeches about the negro race and loyally as she would defend and abide his words and the consequences of them, she could not control her thinking, even in its weakness, and put down the thoughts which her every look upon her baby brought to disturb her. Very slowly the natural spring and rebound of youth brought her out of her physical relapse, and yet more slowly out of her mental depression. But, even as strength of body and mind returned, there came more insistently the questioning that could not be answered.

In her heart she had always glorified mother-love. In the days and weeks before the baby's coming she had revelled in the dreams of motherhood, and her heart had been overcharged with love and visions of it.

But this little fellow was not the baby of her dreams. Never in all the hundred varied pictures her heart had painted had there been a child like him. He was not of her mind, surely; and vaguely uneasy and distressed was she that he was not of her kind. Nervously she swung between the moments when pent-up mother-love swept away all questions and poured itself out upon her little son in fullness of tenderness, and the other moments of revulsion when she could not coerce her rebellious spirit.

Feverishly in the doubting moments would she repeat over and over her father's brief words of assurance. Hungrily had she awaited them before he had come to look upon the boy, greedily had she seized upon them when he had pronounced a favourable judgment, and longingly she wished now that he could come back to reinforce them and reassure her faint confidence that all was well. Not finding a sufficient volume of testimony in the few words he had spoken in that last interview, she supplemented them with all she could recall of everything she had ever heard him say about the excellence of the negro race, and added to that all the nurse had to say of the proverbial uncomeliness and possibilities of phenomenal "come out" in very young babies: and for days her pitiful daily mental task was to lie with closed eyes and interminably to construct and reconstruct of these things an argument to prop up her ever-wavering faith.

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Hayward Graham was a man of too much intelligence not to see the uncertainty of his wife's attitude toward the boy. He was of too much white blood in his own veins not to have suffered measurably the same torments because of the baby's recession in type. What Mr. Phillips had said of it, he did not know, and dared not ask Helen. In all kindliness of purpose he encouraged her to believe The Yellow's theory that her father's heart had broken under defeat. He did not know that she was agonizingly fearful of having contributed to that defeat.