“Well, you’ve got to judge the negro race by the exceptions,” said the surgeon. “Why? Because it’s only the exceptional negro who’s had the same chance as the average white man. You wouldn’t compare a man whose grandfather had been a slave and his father practically a peon on a plantation, a man without any schooling, with a man whose ancestors had been freemen and who had enjoyed education for at least a few generations. If the average negro had the same chance as the average white, the comparison would be fair.
“But we’re drifting off into something that lies beyond reason and argument and I just dropped in for a friendly chat. I think you’ll be out in a week.”
While Levin was the scientist of the three, McCall was the poet and the champion of human rights. While Levin weighed and analysed, McCall rhapsodised.
McCall was enthusiastic about each claim for national independence as it arose at the peace conference and was recorded in the newspapers. He waxed eloquent not only over the wrongs of Ireland, but of the Jews, and was more of a Zionist than Levin, who sometimes doubted the practicability of rehabilitating Palestine—building a country out of a desert, investing millions of dollars, raising the hopes of millions of human beings for the sake of an idea.
McCall was a poet in practise, as well as by inclination, although he had allowed only a few of his most intimate friends to set eyes upon his poems. He had several manuscripts of plays and short stories tucked away somewhere in a trunk at home, which he meant to publish to the world some day.
Physically, McCall was not unlike Levin. McCall was perhaps an inch taller and held himself straighter. But there was the same boyishness of figure, and McCall had dark hair and blue eyes as well.
Often when the conversation drifted to anthropology, Levin would slyly compare the color of his eyes with those of Hamilton and McCall. Hamilton had brown eyes. His hair too was dark, although not so black as either Levin’s or McCall’s, and he was cast in a larger mold, physically—within an inch of six feet in height and broad of shoulder.
“You see what happens to your pure types,” laughed Levin. “Here’s the descendant of the blue-eyed, fair-haired Saxon with brown eyes and the descendant of the dark-skinned Semite with blue eyes. You see all this pride in race is after all based on a very slim physical foundation. All modern peoples are mixtures of many different tribes and races. Even the Jew and the Chinese, who usually boast of their racial purity. As for the Englishman—England has been the melting pot, for centuries, of northern Europe. Here you have the original Celts, the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Danes, the Normans, probably some Jews and any number of modern European strains. And the Americans who boast of their pure English ancestry might as well boast of being descended from Adam.”
McCall applauded these sentiments, but Hamilton staunchly upheld the supremacy of the Nordic.
The day before Hamilton left the hospital, he had a chance to thank Williams for rescuing him. Williams was just regaining consciousness from a series of operations that had riveted together bits of shattered bone in both arms, a shin and one thigh. Only the thickness of his skull and his powerful constitution had pulled him through, according to Dr. Levin. He was lying flat on his back, looking up at the ceiling when Hamilton leaned over him. His arms and legs were still in casts and he was too weak to observe closely Hamilton’s expression. The white man extended his hand absent-mindedly, then suddenly realized that the negro could not use his own. The latter smiled.