Mr. Forsythe shook his head vaguely. The elder Pinkney looked as though he had barely escaped swallowing his moustache. His son clenched his fists and puffed out his chest importantly.
“Really not,” exclaimed Margaret. “I hope you didn’t stay there.”
“No,” he replied, “I didn’t. I flew into a rage, said something that I’m afraid might have been misconstrued as rude and left.”
The Pinkneys uttered their approval and the others added their smaller voices.
“Splendid! That was exactly what I should have done!” declared Margaret, her brown eyes blazing. She looked like a reincarnation of Dixie aroused—lithe, beautiful, impassioned.
“But,” Hamilton gulped. He was aware that he was about to spoil the tableau. Of course he realised that he might explain that Williams had saved his life, which would make his feelings excusable. But why should he do that? The fact that a colored man had or had not rescued him really ought not to affect their attitude. He would not tell them. “But,” said Hamilton, “the queer thing about it was that later I felt ashamed of myself. Not right away, but a few days later. I felt ashamed that I, as an American, as an officer in an army which had gone over there with the avowed purpose of making the world safe for democracy, had held that attitude to another American, to a brother officer in the same army.” Hamilton watched Margaret’s face turn pale and then red and her eyes fall in embarrassment, but he went on. “I felt ashamed that of all the people there, representatives of every race and nation, that an American should have been the only one to express so un-American an attitude.”
He warmed to his subject as he noticed his hearers exchange uneasy glances. His mother, too, had come up to look for him, and he noticed her in a little fringe of guests who had been attracted by the discussion. She was listening.
“It isn’t as though I don’t think my race the finest on earth,” he went on. “But it seems that in some things we haven’t always been just—haven’t lived up to that high standard that we ought to maintain. To the outside world we have proclaimed our democratic ideals, our moral support of the different people of Europe in obtaining representative government. Have we been as just to our own citizens—to the Negro?”
Hamilton’s father looked surprised and tugged at his moustache.
“Robert doesn’t mean exactly what he—m’m, a—implies,” he offered a verbal straw at which his son might grasp. “Perhaps in some places the Negro isn’t accorded, what shall I say, kindness, or, perhaps better, human treatment. But not here in our city.”