After two weeks I called upon the superintendent again, although he had not written, as he promised to do, after hearing from the men I had referred him to.
He was a hard man of business, that superintendent, but he spoke to me kindly, regretfully, almost shamefacedly. The testimonials to my character and life were, he said, very flattering to me. No one had said anything but good of me. But it would never do, he explained, for me to be set to work on the road. The men would be sure to find out the truth about me, sooner or later, and then the officials of the road would be blamed. There was sure to be trouble. Personally, the superintendent had, he said, no "race prejudices," but he could not answer for the feelings of others less free from the influence of tradition and natural aversion.
I stood silent while the man of my own race calmly, even tenderly, waved me back into the ranks of a people of whose blood a few drops only run in my veins. So another gate was closed. So I was once more forced into the narrow bounds of an invisible prison.
My mother had one-sixteenth of negro blood in her veins and was a slave. Now what explains my most unfortunate condition? Is it because this ancestor had this trace of the blood of another race, and that I have one thirty-second part of the same blood, though I chance to be whiter than most Caucasians? Well, God made the races. Is it because this ancestor was a slave? So were the Britons slaves of the Romans. My father was a descendant of some slave. He is not responsible for the chase of his mother in ancient woods and for her capture by some fierce avaricious Roman legionary who knew the value of a breeder of sturdy Teutonic brawn in making Roman highways. It was through no fault of mine that the Arab trader chased my great-great-great-grandmother or grandfather down in the jungle and sold her to the sallow-faced slave dealer who brought her to America. The blood of my father's ancestors became intermixed with that of the captors. My father's race became free. So has mine. The difference is but in time. Why is it, then, that I am as I am? I do not want to become a barber, nor a porter, nor an attendant in a Turkish bath, nor to serve other men. I do not want to work upon the streets, though I am not afraid of manual labor nor do I count it dishonorable. But I am a cultivated man, a man skilled in a profession where intelligence and training are required, a man of moral character and refined tastes. I am starving for the companionship of my own kind. Brain and heart, I am starving. What am I to do?
Pity me, good people, Oh, pity me!
CHAPTER XII
THE PURPLE STOCKING
There was unaccustomed silence for a time after the Porter finished speaking. He left the car at once, perturbed, it may be, by his own disclosure of his condition and emotions. Those who had listened to him, whatever may have been their views concerning one of the great problems of the age, could not but feel a certain sympathy for the man condemned to be thus isolated—the man without a race. That his case might be somewhat exceptional detracted in no way from its curious pathos. It was recognized as one of the tragedies of human life as it is, and the recital had induced a thoughtful mood among the Porter's audience. What should be the attitude of the ordinary man or woman in a case like this? And, seeking honestly in their own minds, those pondering could not answer the question satisfactorily, either to judgment or to conscience. By what law should they be guided?
The Colonel was among the thinkers, but he rose superior, as usual. That gilded optimist wanted not even reflection among the snowbound. Had his company been of males exclusively he might even have been tempted to introduce the flowing bowl, but for his knowledge of the inevitable depressing aftermath. He wanted but carelessness and distraction and forgetfulness until the time of pale monotony should end. Now he was tempted to an act most ruthless and unconjugal.